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Director
Alan John Clarke
Year
1974
Country
UK
Runtime
89 min

Also released as

  • Play for Today: Penda's Fen

Filed under

Penda's Fen

A BBC play about a repressed vicar's son in the English countryside, and it is one of the strangest things ever broadcast.

Stephen, a devout, priggish teenager in rural Worcestershire, has visions, angels and demons on his bedroom wall, the composer Elgar, a dismembered manservant, that gradually dismantle everything he believes about England, faith and himself.

Alan Clarke directed David Rudkin's television play for the BBC's Play for Today, and it is a foundational folk-horror text: pagan England beneath Christian England, the land as older and stranger than the nation built on it, and a boy's awakening as sexual, political and spiritual at once.

It was broadcast once and largely vanished for decades, becoming a legend among the people who had seen it, until the BFI restored it.

It is difficult, dense and unlike anything else, and Mark Gatiss and Ben Wheatley both cite it as central to the whole revival.

The final vision, on the Malvern Hills, is extraordinary.

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The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

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Where to watch

Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.

Checked 10 Aug 2026

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