First viewed : July 1981
After the induction week, it was a long eight week break before life in the sixth form began. I would perhaps have been better looking for some sort of job but I wasn't really cut out for manual work and I didn't suppose there'd be anything else available. The early part was brightened up by an afternoon re-run of this enthralling mini-series. I didn't see it when first broadcast on Saturday evenings in 1978 and only came to it halfway through this time round but found it absolutely captivating.
The Word was based on a very prescient 1972 novel by Irving Wallace . David Janssen ( who had died since the original broadcast ) plays Stephen Randal, a top flight PR man who is hired by a religious publishing house to handle the publication of "The Gospel According To St James" , a new version of Christ's life discovered in Roman ruins six years earlier and authenticated by leading Biblical scholars but fiercely opposed by some factions in the Christian world, personified by radical Dutch minister de Vroome ( Nicol Williamson ). After some rather improbable escapades including the brief kidnapping of the manuscript from its Fort Knox-style vault, Randal is alerted by a spy in the camp to a historical flaw in the text and decides to investigate its authenticity. The remainder of the story is quite close to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People as Randal discovers it is almost certainly a forgery and tries to pursue the truth whatever the personal cost.
At first Janssen seems a bit miscast as you can't imagine his grumpy persona being useful in persuading people of anything but he comes into his own in the second half as the lone honest man in a sea of crooks . The sometimes unwatchable Williamson is in good form too but the best performance comes from Ron Moody as the forger De Bruyn whose revelatory encounter with Randel is brilliantly filmed. The music too is terrific , adding a real sense of tragic gravitas to the story right down to its downbeat conclusion. It isn't perfect - you require a fair suspension of disbelief to accept the number of murders for instance - but very good indeed.
Life has imitated art since in two completely separate instances. Not long after this was re-broadcast, you had the infamous Hitler Diaries hoax which developed along remarkably similar lines . And then ,we've already discussed the whole Priory de Sion nonsense which hadn't yet been exposed as a hoax. You wonder if Leigh, Baigent and co ever saw this and recognised themselves.
Warning : If this write-up encourages anyone to seek it out , beware that the video currently on YouTube is culled from the VHS release which was a three-hour condensation of a series that was originally nearly eight hours long. You can imagine what that does for narrative continuity but if you don't mind characters disappearing without explanation and multiple plot threads left hanging in the air please do check it out.
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