Johnny Jarvis
| Johnny Jarvis | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Genre | Drama | |
| Created by | Nigel Williams | |
| Starring |
Mark Farmer Johanna Hargreaves Ian Sears Alrick Riley Jamie Foreman Nick Stringer |
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| Theme music composer |
Gary Shail & John Altman |
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| Country of origin | United Kingdom | |
| Original language(s) | English | |
| No. of series | 1 | |
| No. of episodes | 6 | |
| Production | ||
| Producer(s) | Guy Slater | |
| Running time | c. 50 minute episodes | |
| Release | ||
| Original network | BBC1 | |
| Original release |
10 November – 12 December 1983 |
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| Music sample | ||
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Written by Gary Shail
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10 November – 12 December 1983
Johnny Jarvis is a 1983 British television drama series created and written by Nigel Williams, adapted from his novel of the same title. The series was directed by Alan Dossor and produced by Guy Slater for the BBC. The principal actors were Mark Farmer, Johanna Hargreaves, Ian Sears, Alrick Riley and Jamie Foreman. Today it is credited as capturing the zeitgeist of early 1980s UK life. The adaptation was broadcast between 10 November and 12 December 1983. The signature tune for the series was provided by Gary Shail and the music for the series was by John Altman. It had been rumoured that the original series has been erased from the BBC's tape archive, preventing any further release but extant copies on sale prove the rumour to be incorrect.
The story centres on Johnny Jarvis (Mark Farmer) and Alan Lipton (Ian Sears) who are two teenagers in their final year of secondary school at a comprehensive in Hackney. Energetic, anxious and occasionally naïve, the pair are on the brink of entering the adult world.
Jarvis has always been the class clown, and his unlikely friendship with ‘bookish’ Lipton - a boy with his head ‘stuck in the clouds’ as he considers what the future has in store for him, and considers the image of the father he has never known - is one of the more unusual unions in the story. The pair successfully leave school brimming with hope, but soon find that the harsh reality of Britain in the late 1970s has little to offer them - they are soon both unemployed school-leavers struggling to make progress in the world and the part they play in it.
Life in the confines of school and life on the outside are two entirely different things, as Jarvis and Lipton discover the strongest elements of their school lives are reversed over the course of the series; Jarvis, once a popular ‘jack-the-lad’ character with the world as his oyster, is ultimately left poverty-stricken and relatively isolated, whilst Lipton, who starts the serial emerging from school and finding himself in a grotty squat existence, blossoms from a studious character into a popular new wave performer in a band, the lyrics of songs for which were based on Johnny's downward spiral and terrible existence.
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