Summer of Rockets was written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff and screened in the UK on BBC2 in May and June 2019.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Summer of Rockets, Stephen Poliakoff’s latest TV series, makes a question out of belonging.  What is it like to be English? How does ‘one’ become English and what are the costs – costs shown to be ethical and emotional, and damaging rather than advancing. Exploiting the formality and rigidity of its late 50s setting, Summer of Rockets starts off looking like a period drama until you realise that a good many of the institutions, occasions and character-types represented – private members’ clubs, country house parties, boarding schools, mad generals – are alive and far too well in contemporary Britain. In the opening scene, a family – mother, father, daughter and young son – arrive at a race meeting. Picked out by the camera individually, all but the father look somehow uncomfortable. Amongst the black and grey Bentleys and Roll Royces, their modest, bottle-green saloon stands out like a joke. A group of chauffeurs snigger, expensively dressed race-goers looked pained and disapproving. Who are these people? The family are the Petrukhins and we soon discover they are Jewish, but at this point the most visible sign of their otherness in this English upper-class microcosm is the blackness of their companion, Samuel’s friend and business partner, Courtney Johnson. Walking across the lush grass, the group is challenged at the entrance to the Royal enclosure, where all their names must be checked – as they are, Samuel explains, every year.

Yesterday and today

This boundary or border, where some are waved through because they are assumed to belong, and others, because of name, colour, religion or accent, are always asked for proof of identity, is one of many parallels between the late 50s and the late 2010s.  Others include anxieties about uncertain futures, the transformational possibilities of new communications technologies, the seductions of Britain’s imperial moment and, hostility to new and earlier immigrants. The drama begins in the summer of 1957 when Britain’s place in the world is beginning to look precarious – the US is the ascendant Western power, it is a year since Suez and Sputnik 1 will soon be launched. The young are stirring, not to speak of the colonies; post-war austerity may be coming to an end but planetary annihilation via nuclear war or accident feels very close indeed.  Samuel Petrukhin (Toby Stephens) is a middle-class inventor attracted to a particular form of upper-class English culture. When the series starts, his son, Sasha is about to be sent to boarding school and his daughter Hannah is set to embark on a London season. Neither of them is happy but as viewers, we don’t yet understand how thematically important this unwillingness is. Samuel’s story is partly based on Poliakoff’s own father. But it is also based on a very English, literary convention: the man who falls for an upper-class English family with a beautiful house and very dark secrets. The affair starts lightly enough. Richard Shaw is an MP and war hero, his wife Kathleen is beautiful and welcoming. They meet when Kathleen finds Sasha, who goes missing at the races. Samuel supplies Kathleen’s aunt with a small, modern hearing aid and the Petrukhins are invited to lunch. A kind of friendship is struck up and Samuel is enchanted. The Shaw’s house with its fishing lake and lush green views, summer house and pet donkeys is very different to the Petrukhins’ middle-class home – a comfortable house in a tree-lined suburban street, shot to appear dark and just a little cramped. Samuel has finally been welcomed to a world from which he’s always been either excluded or grudgingly tolerated.

The Shaws’ home appears bright and open to visitors, and Samuel is outraged when he is threatened by MI6 and tasked to spy on his new friends. He doesn’t want them to be anything other than the delightful, friendly people they seem to be. The charming Lord Wallington, (played by Timothy Spall with a dead voice that channels Voldemort) an almost permanent guest, and Richard’s closest friend, seems to like him too.  If anyone seems sinister it is the MI6 operative Field (Mark Bonnar), who has no first name and a dog who understands Russian. Nevertheless, it’s clear to Samuel, and both his children, that all is not right in the Shaws’ world. Invited to a fishing party, he takes photographs of military-looking men gathering in the woods to talk about more than fishing tactics. Kathleen (Keeley Hawes, brilliantly shifting between graceful hospitality, outbreaks of angry desperation and painful self-questioning) is literally physically stifled by the world she lives in. Her husband Richard has ‘funny’ turns – flashbacks to battle – and nearly abandons his speech to the local Conservative Association. Most seriously, their son, Anthony, vanished from their lives with no explanation at the age of twenty-one. Wanting to flee or flout this world of ease and power is at least as important as wanting to be a part of it and a recurring motif. In a less fatal parallel with Anthony, Sasha runs away from his exclusive school.  And although, Hannah is humiliated early on when she is barred from the stateroom and introduction to the Queen for being late, a couple of episodes later, she coolly sneaks her friend Esther into an exclusive party by lying about who she is.

A more modern world is working on everyone too. Hannah has an electrically glowing goldfish bowl in her bedroom, little Sasha listens to rock and roll radio on headphones while he writes letters home from his stultifying English prep school – until they’re confiscated. Most importantly, Samuel has invented a pager, he calls it a staff locator, with many potential uses. We see his first demonstration of it at a hospital where a group of nurses and doctors assemble to see if a doctor with a pager in his pocket can be summoned from a distance. He can. MI6 seem interested in adopting it but some of the important people Samuel meets at the Shaws’ parties don’t seem to understand its potential and dislike the idea of being summoned. Isn’t that something they do to servants?

Poliakoff as auteur

Summer of Rockets is pure Poliakoff in narrative and style.  There are lost boys; young women with secret powers; characters too preoccupied with their everyday routines or personal selfishness to stop and see, and listen. (Ideas of listening, listening better, or choosing not to listen play out in numerous ways throughout.)  As in Shooting the Past (1999) most memorably, photographs, and images more generally, are the key to mysteries, but only if characters learn to read them. And, these images are never singular in meaning.  The stylised settings and colour continuities – the rich blues and reds, mustardy yellows, tangerine, turquoise and lilac – are clear warnings not to take everything too literally. The lush green of the Shaw house grounds spills out into a rolling countryside where, between flowering hedgerows, Samuel and Courtney are pursued by MI6. Hannah is dazzled in St James’s Park by a huge tree in the same green. Her vision of nuclear annihilation shrivels it, along with the surrounding sky. A green that is not only England then, but the world, the planet. These images can be wonderfully rich and strange. The array of animals that recur throughout the series – the Shaws’ calming donkeys, the rabbit rotten with myxomatosis , the bronze sculptures of dogs and birds kept by one of Sasha’s teachers,  the raging pigs in Anthony’s drawings – set up a complex and powerful chain of associations and clues. Other images can seem heavy-handed, excessive, like the private tanks that parade in English fields.

The tanks are a carefully constructed spectacle, a performance – another Poliakoff speciality. Soldiers line up to watch a demonstration of the pager at a military base that looks as if it’s been decommissioned. Is this a ‘real’ demonstration, or simply an attempt to persuade Petrukhin that MI6 can offer him a substantial contract?  Hannah and her friend Nicholas volunteer to take part in an exercise to test responses to a nuclear attack in London. Everyone is categorised as dead or alive before it even begins, and Hannah is made up with hideous burn injuries. Another rehearsal and one that terrifies her as a premonition of the real thing. Many scenes look and feel like always-already memories, or dreams that keep repeating: Sasha’s vision of the enormous, unapproachable staircase at his school for instance; the anonymous corridors where the main characters encounter untrustworthy or ambiguous others; Samuel’s final view of Wallington through the rear window of his taxi as he is conveyed back to a more ordinary, safer life.

The costs of belonging

Summer of Rockets captured me because of the moment at which it’s set, not least because I know something about it as lived from my parents, who both arrived in London in the middle 1950s. My father’s situation was very different from Samuel’s (who arrived in England as a young child after the Russian Revolution). My father arrived in London in his middle twenties as a relatively privileged student from Pakistan. He was not especially enthralled by the English upper class but he was always a committed Anglophile. The bedsits he lived in in Hampstead and Kensington were full of English ex-colonials, back from India in diminished circumstances. Maybe my dad reminded them of better days.  Of course, these were the places he and latterly my mother (white) were able to rent.  Some of her friends found my dad ‘exotic’, others tried to break them up and fix her up with someone more suitable – someone ‘English’. Racism in all its forms was rife – jobs, housing, jokes, silences.  Yet my dad always insisted that he never experienced racism. This was clearly untrue – much later I witnessed it myself – but he was utterly determined that the country he had come to live in accepted and recognised him as one of their own.

This willingness of the outsider to collude with and ignore hostility is brilliantly at the fore in Summer of Rockets. Dropping his daughter off at etiquette school so she can learn to curtsey, he tells her: ‘I taught myself to speak with a perfect, English, upper-class accent. Nobody can tell the difference.’ His daughter smiles a little indulgently. She knows that her father is never going to pass, quite. Throughout the series, Samuel is addressed and referred to as Russian or/and Jewish – and always as an outsider who may have alternative and suspect loyalties. Making his way through a gentleman’s club to meet Winston Churchill and supply him with a new hearing aid, he is spotted by a man who turns to his companion. ‘They’re back,’ he grunts wearily, ‘the Darkie and the Jew.’  Samuel does not ignore the anti-Semitism that is all around him, indeed he challenges it. But he continues to want to be a part of one of the world that reproduces it.

Samuel gradually begins to realise that Shaw, Wallington and co., are up to something and it isn’t fishing or being snobbish about wine. They are ruthless reactionaries who wish to upend the social and political possibilities tentatively set in train by the Labour landslide of 1945. Contemptuous of democracy, they see a military coup as the only way to stop Britain sinking back into small island status. They also believe that the whole state has been penetrated by ‘the Reds’. Their plot is a little bonkers though less bonkers than some contemporary conspiracies.  The plotters are also bonkers (led by a popular Tory MP, they are peers, generals, businessmen) and well-organised and resourced – hence the tanks at the bottom of the garden. The plot and the dangers it represents are real and the forces of reaction are only thwarted at the last. But they are not foiled by Samuel with his notebook and recording technology, or by MI6, or by any other law and order agency (Who would that be? What would they represent?). Instead, they are defeated by the brilliance of the young.  A satirical sketch of their plan appears on a popular TV comedy programme and sends the plotters fleeing.  It is only at the very end of the drama that Samuel begins to understand his daughter’s part in their defeat and how it might be connected to her ‘difficult’ behaviour over the Summer.

The rout has a formal elegance and it is great to see the young win. All those who defeat the coup exist on the edges of official late 50s cultures but unlike Samuel, they don’t hanker after belonging. They have an alternative, more vivid, better way of seeing – in itself highly plausible. Nicholas Hadley, who has tried to teach Hannah suitable etiquette, is a failed novelist who gets lucky writing sketches for a popular TV programme. He is also gay. Esther, who works at Petrukhin’s factory and becomes Hannah’s friend and sanctuary, is central to the unravelling of the Shaws’ son Anthony’s disappearance, which is itself tied to the values that underpin the plotters. Esther can see what others can’t. In the narrative, this ability is tied in part to her being deaf. She lipreads what’s going on in the boss’s office for her co-workers in an early scene. She has learnt to see better because she cannot hear.

But I was also left ambivalent. There is something too convenient about the younger characters’ simple alignment.  Hannah chooses Esther as a friend, as she chooses Nicholas, because she is an outsider herself. But there is something expedient about her friendship with Esther, who at times can seem more like a convenient extension to Hannah than a character in her own right. Esther is the character or device that allows her to meet ‘ordinary’ black and working-class people and be touched by the Notting Hill Riots. Hannah and Joel, a black friend of Esther, are attacked for dancing together.

But can Hannah really represent everything that is good about the future? Via a pattern of friendships and associations, above all through a set of choices, she comes to stand for all the young outsiders. There are so many parallels between Sasha and Anthony in particular, echoes too between Anthony and Hannah. The metaphor of who listens or ‘reads’ well is so extensively deployed, as are the allegiances between those who listen and dance to rock and roll.  But I also wonder whether the narrative and visual richness that makes these connections (and the progressive alliance they stand for) are at times any more than a moment of conjuring, a feat of magic that cannot be sustained.

In the final scene, Hannah hosts her own eccentric debutante party: a street party where everyone is invited: quite literally, open to all.  It’s a beautiful scene and an inversion of the exclusive enclosure of the first scene: couples dance in the sunlight, on the street, on the grass, under the trees.  There is bunting and a buffet and paper clocks everywhere – all set to the reassuring time of 8.30pm – Hannah’s optimistic challenge to the Doomsday Clock. It’s a scene of almost utopian conviviality. We know that Wallington and the dangers he represents haven’t been permanently defeated but we/they can be happy with this for now at least. And yet this party pushes further. Who should arrive right at the end but the Shaws (invited by Samuel, just as he invited them to join his picnic at the races). With the corroding influence of Wallington removed they are trying to be an ‘ordinary’ family, led now, it is suggested, by Anthony’s pacifist values.  In the preceding scene, Samuel tells Field: ‘I no longer want to be the perfect English gentleman.’  He appears to have learnt his lesson.  The invitation to the Shaws could be seen as a turning of the tables: it is Samuel and the Petrukhins deciding who belongs now. But it also demonstrates how hard it is for him to give up his fascination. This is the character’s privilege of course and his ambivalence is persuasive. But the ‘cleansing’ of the Shaws is a narrative choice of a different order and for me it rankles. We’re back to the ‘few bad apples’ or ‘bad influence’ school of history so convincingly challenged by so much of what went before.

All in all, it’s a hugely thought-provoking drama. Catch it while you can or let me know what you thought about it below.