To Kill a King (1980) is a compact riddle of half-hour television, a psychomachia of writer's block that plays like autobiographical ciphertext. Its muse is as elusive as radio astronomy and its spell breaks with a stone face thrown through a television set. Let it come as a surprise to no one that it was written by Alan Garner.

It's concentrated for Garner, actually, adhering to at least two out of three Aristotelian unities as it charts just about twenty-four hours in the stumped and haunted life of Harry (Anthony Bate), rattling so listlessly around the Tudor timbers of the Old Medicine House that he seems a less substantial presence within its pale-washed walls than the golden-tressed apparition first glimpsed like a candle at its window. The invitations to interviews and lectures which pile up in his mail and the glum recurring glance he gives his medal—Carnegie, Garner won it for The Owl Service in 1968—establish him as a writer of sufficient note to receive inquiries even from the States, but he hasn't written anything to feed their interest in years. He lights a fire as if he doesn't believe it'll warm him, clutches a composition book without daring to look inside. It's not hard to read a fisher king's desolation into this drouth of words. The wood into which he trudges to walk off one of his day-splintering "heads" looks sere as a green winter and so does self-neglected Harry, a dead-fall figure in his thistly slept-in cardigan and his barley-mow hair, unshaven as if smeared with ash. His vision is occluded with migraine and something worse: a trouble tuning in. The sky-meshed cradle of the Lovell Telescope tilts behind the prickle of trees to trawl for masers and pulsars and the vast cold spirals of the hydrogen line and Harry flounders awake in the night to transcribe the sudden clear whisper of a woman's voice. "I was asleep and it was already coming. I had to get it down. It came clean, fast as I could write . . . Years of nothing!" As dictated, it's a spellbinding incantation of stone and time and magic, but by the time it's read out over breakfast it's deteriorated into a scatological babble of joke rhymes. "But I didn't!" he protests, disbelieved: a shamed bear of a man bent over his treacherous words like a schoolboy called to account. "I didn't. It was something else." Only the drift-scan witness of the radio dish seems to believe him, cupped like the shell of the moon to his obstinate appeal: "You know. I did not." To his solicitous secretary David (Jonathan Elsom) and his skeptical sister Clare (Pauline Yates), it's just one more episode of lost marbles or silly buggers, to be accommodated with proprietary forbearance or dismissed with indulgent scorn over a lunch which descends from the bitchy to the bizarre as his sister's bland barbs clash as audibly as cutlery with his secretary's waspish deflections and Harry sits mute as a football between them, stirring only to answer his sister's matronly prod of "How's the head?" with the politely blank "Which one?" It is a real question, since we saw the other in the wet wood where Harry paced out the troubled paternity of his words against a ballad of Cheshire and Lancashire, a fist of black stone fished up from the water's iron glass. And if the child be mine . . . The pitted smile it showed him was older than churches. He threw it back with a shout as if it scalded him. A woman's voice sang him the rest of "Child Waters," a woman's shape eluded him across the water, the fields, the pierced mouth of the railway embankment, as if she were that Roland's tower of red gold shining on the other side of the Clyde. It's the question he doesn't want to meet as his afternoon makes a break for the nightmarish, the brittle malevolence of his visitors pursuing him through the uncannily autonomous involvements of telephone and manically swiveling typeball, coming around like a catch in the mind or a cry in the Selectric's chatter: "What are you going to do about it, Harry? What are you going to do about your heads?"

A short course in Jung is not required to suspect that whatever the objective reality of events in this teleplay, Harry is wrestling with himself in as many guises. Migraine is hemicrania, the half-head, the profile on a medal, the blinding eye he medicates with ergotamine and with which he does not see, in half the medicine cabinet's mirror, the woman standing somberly behind his shoulder in her medieval gold stream of hair. Out in what it would be reductive to call the real world, he may well have a smart secretary whose attentiveness has come to feel insatiable and a chain-smoking sister who has never taken seriously either his pain or his poetry, but the David who embodies the suffocation of his successes and the Clare who voices the paralysis of his doubts are as universal as the wolf-hour. All the anxieties of new work, old expectations, wasted effort, misused time, panic of disappointment, of malingering, of failure—of loss of art—come out in their oblique and cutting cross-talk. "Three readings? No." "I'm too old to make appointments. To see my own brother? Just in case he's got a rush of brains to the head?" "You'd be better off lying down." "He used to be only bilious before he discovered migraine." Garner would never call them brainweasels, but they are recognizable of the species even before they do anything as obviously daemonic as stare the writer out of the snuffed light of his own study while their voices down the landline eeny-meeny-macka-racka him out to the abhorred and objectified it. They are static in the head, noise crowding out signal; they are interference, literally. The poem which comes by night in such crystalline transmission and on waking has gone even worse than the average scrawl out of dream was composited from two poems written previously by Garner, "The Island of the Strong Door" (1979) and "House by Jodrell" (1973/2015):

It is not enough to enter
The bone of the mother,
The rope of blood.
It is not enough to enter
By hewn birth
The island of the strong door.
I shall not be older, I shall not be younger
Than I was in the beginning.
There will not come from my design
Fear or death.
I see not and I am not seen.
Where twilight and the black night move together
I gather all given and give back.
In the island of the strong door.
In the four-cornered castle.
In the spinning circle.
In the garth of glass.
Hinged on the sky.
A night to kill a king is this night.

The one draws on the description of Caer Sidi in Preiddeu Annwfn, the other adapts a line from Togail Bruidne Dá Derga. Taken together, their Celtic epic points to the haunter of Harry's inspiration as a textbook case of old-school, Taliesin-style awen. (She is played, with proper uncanny dissociation, visually by Nicola Roch and auditorily by Clare Griffel. Like a ghost in split layers of time, her sound and her image never synch.) She can breathe the bard's vision into him, but he's a clogged receiver, his head jammed with demands and distractions, bisected by illness, buried under untold aeons of crud. "What? No. I can't. What? I can't hear." There is a thing-of-darkness quality to the grimacing ancient stone that Harry finds gripped in his hand as if glued there with a black silt of leaf-slime, but then it must be owned when all the modern technologies of his fame as a writer have turned against him, culminating in the nastily Droste effect of Harry squashed up against the glass of his television set which is the fourth wall of the viewer's screen while David and Clare in self-satisfied possession of the remote control announce his imminent gravitational cathode-ray collapse:

"Wait a moment, Harry."
"We can switch you off, Harry."
"Extinguish and implode, Harry."
"Harry, we're going to switch you off."
"Shrink to a dot, Harry. A singularity."
"And out."
"Nothing."

Where earlier he failed to resist his reduction to a butt, a problem, a thing, now the shout of his self-assertion combined with the smash of the stone through his own trapped image frees Harry: whether it is fusion or annihilation is not made clear and does not seem to matter as the empty, smoking shadows clear to the same white dawn that followed the visitation of the awen, as if time has rejoined itself along with him. He holds himself weeping against the oak and plaster and looks for the first time whole. Now when night falls, Harry looking much less like some derelict woodwose of himself with a shave and a clean shirt can move quietly through the spare, strong, uncluttered lines of his house, its broad beams stamped across with quatrefoils like his own Caer Pedryvan, lighting its candles without the sniping commentary of specters, settling into the great hearth of its chimney-stack as if actually at home. He can close the case on his medal instead of staring forlornly into the stamp it set on him. He doesn't notice when the woman enters the room, crimson-gowned as before she appeared in night-black and day-blue, the bright links of her hair glinting as she circles a slow compass around him, because he is trying out the poem dashed down in the composition book after all, not the dross of a dream of fairy gold but a clear wave come in. It sounds more personal in his voice, rueful, determined. It absorbs him, tapping the page with his pen as if to test its ring. He tampers with an interpolation, crumples it into the fire: he must go on from what he was given, not go back. He doesn't even see she's gone from the tall leather chair he absently moves to, the little flicker of flame at his feet as he begins to write, finally, for real, more than a helplessly fevered conduit, the controlled and vivid risk of creation. She has no need to possess him if he is in possession of himself. Say that he knows the frequencies now for which he searches the sky. "A night to kill a king is this night."

To Kill a King was the last episode transmitted of the BBC's Leap in the Dark (1973–80) and I would love to hear how biographically legible it was to viewers at the time, since I came to it aware of Toad Hall and Jodrell Bank and the bipolar disorder which Garner has discussed freely, to the point where as soon as I saw the broadcast date I knew that by the time it hit the airwaves, its author was in the grip of a two-year depression as bad as anything he gave his "shaggy, draggy, dirty Harry." Its efficacy as exorcism remains; I used it to break my own dry spell of critical writing, which has felt for months like missing a part of my head. I thought that close to the bone was the best place to start. Even without the personal element, the play would feel like unfiltered Garner just from its opening rush of a train past a telescope, an old song heard in an older house, the slippage and compression of all that sandstone time. The version on YouTube has suffered the normal erosion of unrestored TV, but I can't knock the irony of the VT clock at the beginning. "No, no barriers." This night brought to you by my four-cornered backers at Patreon.