Caleb Williams

1 9 8 0 (UK)
4 x 105 minute episodes

At the end of the 18th century, Caleb Williams (Mick Ford) – a poor, stubborn, and honest young man – rises through the social ranks, but the powerful and shady rulers watch and raise a thousand persecutions against him, so his life is transformed into an erratic chase for the truth.

This four-part adaptation by Robin Chapman of a late eighteenth-century novel by William Godwin, which challenged the process of law and order, was made by Tyne Tees Television with international collaboration (which explains why British, German and French actors travelled to Italy to make a film about England).

Internationalism reached its peak in a scene in which Günther Halmer, a German actor playing English nobleman Ferdinand Falkland, taught an Italian girl to speak English.

The Italian girl was, of course, played by a French actress. Filming, as director Herbert Wise explained, was “an exercise in patience.”

Fourteen weeks of shooting in Italy was followed by ten weeks in Hertfordshire.

Caleb Williams
Mick Ford
Ferdinand Falkland
Günther Maria Halmer
Jane Alcott
Chrissie Cotterill
Valentine Forester
Jacques Maury
Grimes
Arthur Brauss
Dyer
Colin Jeavons
Jesse
Paul Kember
Sir Charles Thornton
Stanley Lloyd
Harris
Bill Stewart
Cox
Edward Peel
Tyrell
Stephen Rea
George Williams
Franz Rudnick
Jenkins
Tony Haygarth
Caleb’s Mother
Polly Hemingway