Harry's Game is a 1982 Yorkshire Television 3-part mini series about Harry Brown, a British agent sent to infiltrate the IRA in Belfast to find and kill the assassin of a cabinet minister. Based on the novel by former-ITN correspondent Gerald Seymour, the series won director Lawrence Gordon Clark the prestigious Golden Leopard's Eye award at the Locarno International Film Festival. The theme tune by Irish group Clannad reached the top five in the UK Singles charts and was also nominated for a BAFTA.
A British Cabinet Minister is gunned down outside his home in London by a member of the Provisional IRA, Billy Downes, (Derek Thompson,). Security protocols are activated, but the assassin evades them and successfully escapes to Belfast. In the aftermath, rash political decisions are made by politicians seeking revenge and the Ministry of Defence responds by sending Captain Harry Brown, (Ray Lonnen) – a special forces soldier who has done deep cover work in hostile territory – into the Falls Road area of Belfast, notorious for civil unrest and Republican activity. Harry is sent deep undercover into the IRA heartlands to infiltrate the local nationalist population, identify the assassin and kill him in his own neighbourhood before Harry’s cover is inevitably blown – to prove to the IRA that they are not safe, even in ‘their own backyard’. As the relentless search becomes more desperate an innocent girl’s life is claimed. The IRA soon realises they have an informant on their trail. Billy Downes is brought back to hunt down Harry. The situation develops into a deadly game which no-one can decisively win.
Of Harry, Gerald Seymour wrote.
‘Others determined the morality. Others had the hatred. Others turned his work into victories. He did as he was told, expertise his trade mark. The soldier in his army.’
Of Billy Downes, he wrote.
‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’
Recently Lawrence decided to put down in writing his experiences of Making Harry's Game:
Preproduction
I bought a copy of Harry' Game at Heathrow in summer 1978 or 1979 when we were going on holiday to Lindos and I waste a good deal of time trying to get the rights or persuade YTV to do so because it was the most thrilling story I'd read for a very long time. I was eventually told that Thames TV held them so I gave up. It then transpired that Thames would not be going ahead because they thought Gerald Seymour had based the story which was about the IRA assassination of a British cabinet minister on the murder of Airey Neave who was killed that year and had been a great friend of Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister. In fact Gerald had written the book in 1974 a few years before Neave's death so they had misconstrued
Paul Fox of Yorkshire television, who had no such niceties about Thatcher's feelings, now took up the running on our behalf and David Cunliffe the head of Drama who'd I'd directed Flambards and Alun Plater's Get Lost for commissioned a script from Gerald. Keith Richardson was made producer. We visited Gerald at his home just outside Dublin to finalise the script in 1980 and met him again in Belfast in early 1981 in very different circumstances. It was just after Bobby Sands, the IRA man, had died of his hunger strike and the town went up in smoke and flames. Gerald had been a reporter for ITN in Belfast in the early 70's and had based Harrys Game on his experiences so he was an old hand but Keith and I were new to the game. We stayed at the Europa Hotel in central Belfast which had been bombed by the IRA on numerous occasions. There was a pub just across the road with three windows on the ground floor which were reserved for the BBC, ITV and assorted camera crews from abroad when they got information that the Europa was about to be bombed.
I went out with an elderly cameraman from Belfast tv who was given the task of filming riots. They were so commonplace in those days that didn't bother much about recording them. We drove to a side street off the Victoria Road and left Biddy, his wife, sitting in the small car taking sips from a flask of brandy. Douglas, the camera man, told me that her southern Irish accent meant that they wouldn't burn the car if they were lucky. The main road was a chaos of burning cars and buses but I don't think we personally felt threatened.
At one point a young man and woman ran through the smoke towards us and paused to ask if Douglas had got it on camera.
Our main job was to find out if it was safe to bring a camera crew to Belfast to film key scenes. We'd already decided to film most of it in Leeds whose derelict 19th century working class streets were a dead ringer for Belfast.
As it happened our driver was a student at Manchester University but native of Belfast who was working as a driver during his holiday. He was obviously a Republican sympathiser, but appeared to be a sympathetic listener. Keith asked him if he considered it was safe to film in the city and he asked us to leave a spare copy of the script in the car. A few days later when he was driving us to the airport he told us it would be safe to film. We went ahead on that basis. Presumably he had left somewhere where it could be looked at by the IRA.
Cast
We cast the show mainly in England. Ray Lonnen had already starred in a series for YTV and was everyone's choice for Harry and Keith and I saw a theatre club production at Regents Park of a play about young soldiers where we found Billy Downs, the IRA gunman and his oppo.
Two excellent young Northern Irish actors called Derek Thompson and Sam Dale. Shortly after Harrys Game finished shooting the BBC started a medical soap called Casualty and gave one of the leads, Charlie, the male nurse, to Derek and he's still playing it today.
Filming
The filming was hampered by the ACTT, the film union. In the early Thatcher days it was still incredibly strong and it's hard to remember how obstructive it was. It was run by a crypto Stalinist called Alan Sapper and it took no prisoners.( In 1979-80 it had closed down the ITV networks for the best part of a year which meant I was out of work for a while.)The result in our case was a four day week with no overtime which benefitted me personally because I could get back to Cornwall most weekends but it meant that filming took a very long time and I almost lost my licence due to speeding tickets I picked up on the M5.
The army would have no part in the production which probably was a very wise decision. We gave the script to a courteous brigadier in security and he returned it after a weekends reading saying it was very good but they couldn't supply any military.vehicles or help of any kind because any hint of it would prove fatal to our project in more ways than one. So we acquired our armoured vehicles from a hire firm and staged the riots in an area of Leeds that was scheduled for redevelopment. I remember standing in a sixty foot crane with Alan Pyrrah, our lighting cameraman, as the double decker blazed and the Saracen armoured car raced up. Alan's hands were shaking slightly as he held his light meter up. "I hope I've got the exposure right," he muttered. "I've never filmed anything like this before". He shouldn't have worried he was spot on as was all of his filming.
The filming went pretty smoothly. The budget was set at £250000 an episode which was a fair sum in those days. Shortly before shooting started I was summoned to lunch with Paul Fox, the boss of YTV and one of my heroes. He'd arrived as a child on the Kindertransport in the early thirties and they sent him back as a para Belgium at Arnhem. God help the Germans that the sten-wielding Fox encountered. He'd been controller of BBC1 when I started the Christmas Ghost Stories and commissioned them. I imagined that he was worried about the story giving offence to Margaret Thatcher but it turned out he was concerned about me overspending. He'd remembered that ten years ago when I made the Stalls of Barchester I had overspent my tiny budget (£8000) by a third and he wanted my assurance it wouldn't happen again. Keith Richardson, the producer, was actually in charge of the budget, but I told him we'd be very careful and he seemed to be satisfied.
As stated before, we filmed the riots and most of the street scenes in Leeds. Some local councillors were concerned that we were giving the place a bad name and a radio report turned up to question me but I made my replies even more rambling and contradictory than they usually are so they didn't us them. The cast included Ben Whitrow as Harrys controller, Maggie Shevlin as Billy Downes wife, who gave a stellar performance and a very young Charlie Lawson who like Derek was captured by a soap after filming. In this case Coronation Street in which he stayed for years. He played a very convincing Provo who was gunned down by Harry at the climax of the film.
When the Leeds filming was finished we went to Belfast for three weeks to finish. It was a volunteer crew for obvious reasons and we went with some natural trepidation but I find one has a totally fallacious sense of invulnerability when behind the camera. We were filming in the Falls Road with Harry using some of the more spectacular Provo graffiti as a backdrop when a section of real Geordie soldiers came round the corner and an understandably unfriendly lance corporal asked me what the fuck I thought I was doing there. I fumbled for my id which was fortunately in my top pocket and said we were from ITV and we're making a bit of a drama. "There's enough fucking drama round here without adding your lot to the mix",he said. I sympathised with him.
On another occasion, we were filming outside the Royal Victoria hospital. It was a scene when Billy Downes drops his Provo companion at casualty after Harry's shot him in the throat. Make-up had done a very realistic wound and Derek had screeched to a halt at the entrance when a passing member of the public rushed to the wounded actors door and told him not to move. He was a doctor retiring to duty. I ran up and explained expecting him to be incandescent with rage but he burst out laughing and said after all the real gunshots he'd treated it was a relief to see a fake.
I've one other lasting memory from filming in Belfast. When it was completed we threw a party for the crew at our hotel in Dunmurray and I got talking to a 55year old crew member who like all the rest were volunteers and asked him why he wanted to come. He answered that he was in gliders in the last war and was curious to know what it was like in Northern Ireland. He was in the one of the first two gliders that were towed by Halifax bombers on the night of D Day 5th June 1944 and released to hold the adjoining bridges across the Orme river and the Caen Canal and stop the German forces destroying them. Both pilots were knocked out in the impact of landing but they placed their craft within fifty yards of one of the bridges and the soldiers swarmed out of the wrecked gliders and bombed out the pill boxes that guarded the bridges and held them until the main forces arrived. It was the only completely successful glider operation of that night and this unassuming man had been part of it. It put Harrys Game into its true perspective.
When I returned to England I was driving past Taunton on my way home to Cornwall when I was stopped for speeding. This would have almost certainly lost me my licence as it was the third time. I told the traffic cop where I'd been for the last three weeks and he let me off with a warning.
Reviews
Review by Mark Cunliffe ★★★★
Based on the best-selling 1975 novel of the same name by the ex ITN correspondent Gerald Seymour, Harry's Game is a three-part Yorkshire TV miniseries from 1982. It was directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark of Ghost Stories for Christmas fame and stars former Sandbaggers actor Ray Lonnen and future Casualty star Derek Thompson.
When a cabinet minister is assassinated outside his London home in front of his wife and children, the prime minister demands swift action to curtail the IRA's sense of victory. With the gunman Billy Downes (Thompson) returned home to Belfast unscathed, the security services and the military send in Captain Harry Brown (Lonnen), a soldier with experience of deep undercover operations in hostile situations to infiltrate the Falls Road, identify the gunman and hunt his prey down. A gripping and compelling game of cat and mouse ensues in a world where mistakes prove fatal.
Compelling, gritty, morally ambiguous and with a nail-biting ending, Harry's Game remains one of the best dramas to tackle the Troubles. I'm surprised no one's ever thought to tackle it for the big screen really. It is also blessed with that memorable, haunting theme from Clannad and this poem written by the young daughter of British magistrate William Staunton, who was assassinated by the IRA in 1973;
"'Don't cry,' Mummy said
'They're not real.'
But Daddy was
And he's not here.
'Don't be bitter,' Mummy said
'They've hurt themselves much more.'
But they can walk and run -
Daddy can't.
'Forgive them and forget,' Mummy said
But can Daddy know I do?
'Smile for Daddy, kiss him well,' Mummy said,
But can I ever?"
A gritty downbeat drama set in The Troubles
26 March 2019
After a cabinet minister is gunned down in front of his wife and children on a London street the Provisional IRA claim responsibility. The killer, Billy Downes, makes his way back to the Falls Road in Belfast but it isn't long before a man is sent to find him. That man is army officer, an Ulsterman who takes lodging in The Falls claiming to have been away working as a merchant seaman. He doesn't know Downes identity; all he has to go on is an identikit picture and information he gleans from the locals. Any information gained has the potential to endanger the person who told him. The IRA learn that there is a man, who is unknown to the authorities in Northern Ireland, and start hunting for any outsiders; it is soon a cat and mouse came as Harry searches for Downes and the IRA hunt for him. This superlative three part TV drama has a very natural feel; there is nothing glamourous about what is happening and Harry is far from the traditional hero. There is an almost constant feeling that things could easily go wrong for him and that would almost certainly mean torture and death. The creators could easily have made Downes a monstrous character but instead he is a fairly ordinary person, almost sympathetic at times as his commanders keep using him without risking themselves. The acting is impressive throughout; the fact that there are few familiar faces makes it feel all the more real. Ray Lonnen and Derek Thompson stand out as Harry and Downes. While most of it was filmed in Leeds rather than Belfast I doubt many viewers will realise... the only times I thought 'That's not Northern Ireland' were when prominent British Rail logos, not the Northern Ireland Railway logos, were shown... a very minor quibble indeed. The story plays out well with many moments of real tension and an ending that will stick with the viewer years after they first see it.
Trades on the credible story from Gerald Seymour
16 November 2013
I read the Seymour novel in the eighties and really enjoyed it then. It was remarkably potent and pithy, with immensely satisfying characters, plot and subplots all so well developed. Finding a copy of the DVD of the miniseries was an opportunity too good to miss. It's great television, and actually gains from the lack of big names, and from the austerity of the production and performances. Credible portrayals in the vein of "the professionals", and even "edge of darkness". To their credit the actors all give a degree of subtle authenticity to their roles that's commendable, and combined with the great plot, HG makes for evocative if nostalgic viewing, especially for enthusiasts of the genre, period or subject matter. Not flashy, but rewarding.
10/10
10/10
The best film I have seen about The Troubles
15 November 2000
A British agent tries to infiltrate the IRA to find an assassin and capture him before he himself is found out. I keep trying to get people to watch this film. This is the best treatment I have seen about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the causes and the futility. Both the British and the IRA are intelligent, and we see the reasons each side does what it does. The tension is very well handled. The film PATRIOT GAMES pays tribute by borrowing some of the music, but it does not match the quality of the storytelling.
So real it's frightening!
11 December 2003
I was over in Belfast not long after this film came out & although it was filmed in Leeds, it is so close to looking like Belfast that it always brings back memories -- good & bad. The acting is excellent, most of the accents authentic, the immorality of the bosses on both sides well shown, & the plot totally believable. There now seems a real chance of peace in NI but if ever the 'troubles' resume, this should be used to prepare anyone posted over there. Thoroughly recommended.
10/10
Treat yourself, and watch this film!
2 January 2007
Those of us who were fortunate enough to see Harry's Game in 1982 on TV were watching a stitched together version for broadcast distribution. It was originally made as a TV mini series in three one-hour parts. The recently available British DVD (PAL region 2) is shown in its original episodic format. The other postings have said enough to describe the story, so I won't go into it. We've seen the story in many incarnations, but the real attraction to this film is the film making. Typical of British cinema, it is very Spartan: no superfluous music, sound, or special effects. The costumes are "everyday," and the sets are actual row houses, typical of the times and area. This gritty story plays out without cinematic distractions or any of the nauseating political correctness which has become "de rigueur" in today's films. It has been said about music that a simple melody well played is far more beautiful than a symphony butchered. Similarly, one can say about film that a simple, believable story well told is far more captivating than a howler of a story tossed together with a dog's dinner of special effects. Think of this film in terms of Zen. ** I will say the very opening of the film with the haunting Celtic vocals by Enya and Clannad instantly caught my attention. At the time Enya was merely the vocalist in the family band, Clannad, and in 1981, was an unknown in North America. However, I knew immediately this was a voice destined for greatness. For Enya fans who only know her music, the "Theme to Harry's Game" refers to this marvelous film. This is yet another example of the abysmal ignorance of marketing on the part of the British film industry. Evidently the owners of the property don't like making money. The only thing this film lacked was a marketing budget and someone to market it. For film lover's who are disappointed by the dearth of North American releases of marvelous British, Aussie and European films, I would highly recommend purchasing a region free DVD player, and ordering your films from England. There are several sites which sell them very cheap. Also, if you like French cinema, set your browser to detect French language hits also when you search film titles. Lots of great used titles available on ebay.fr or amazon.fr.
10/10
This is how you do it
1 March 2003
Easily the best thriller set in Belfast, taken from Gerald Seymour's excellent novel. The film benefits from a degree of accuracy you will never find in 'The Devil's Own,' 'Patriot Games' or any of the other Hollywood nonsense. A good cast with many Belfast actors adds realism and the story is fast-paced and believable. The opening sequence is shocking, but again very detailed and the use of the IRA CO as a voice-over is pretty clever. The tension as the IRA close in on Harry is palpable as is his feeling of isolation and all the characters are three-dimensional. Leeds was used for some filming, but it feels like Belfast and there is good use of Belfast locations as well, especially during the climax. 'It was well done, Billy...'
Short comment about a superb film
12 January 2004
I have had "Harry's Game" in my video collection for about 12 years and I have watched it many times. Nothing released by mainstream cinema, British or American, comes anywhere close to touching the fear and desperate tension felt by the troops on the ground of both sides in the Troubles. It is an intelligent, very well made, exciting and despairing film which deserved wide release in cinemas throughout the world - pity it was made for television. Like Mark Leeper I have been strongly recommending "Harry's Game" to anyone interested in first quality film-making.
9/10
Excellent, gritty, and impossible to find
26 September 2005
From other sites
I viewed this film shortly after it came out and it haunts me to this day. Powerful, sad and beautiful. Of course, Clannad's theme really makes it even more poignant. Great acting by all. I need to view it again. A piece of art and history.
Brilliant mini series from the early 1980s. Gripping and complex with great acting.
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https://www.lawrencegordonclark.com/television/harry-s-game#sigProId6f1f4b94ea