NO-ONE should be surprised that An Inspector Calls, written by J B Priestley in 1945, is being revived by the BBC 70 years later.

Drama Republic, a small independent film-maker is adapting Priestley’s stage play into a television film starring Ken Stott, Miranda Richardson and David Thewlis as mysterious police chief Inspector Goole.

As has already been reported in the T&A, part of the filming is taking place in Saltaire on Sunday, March 1. Other scenes are being shot in Ryedale and Malton during the month-long filming.

The play, written during the last months of the Second World War, premiered in Moscow in 1945 and then Manchester before being put on in London in 1946. Reportedly, the play received a “cool, almost hostile, reception”.

Though the Soviet Union’s Red Army lost millions of men and women chasing Nazi Germany’s three invading armies back across Eastern Europe into Germany, the public attitude towards Russian communism was starting to change.

By 1945 George Orwell’s totalitarian fable Animal Farm had been published and was shortly to be followed by his even bleaker novel 1984.

Bradford-born Priestley, a Fabian rather than a Socialist in that he believed in political reform by evolution rather than revolution, though never a communist did have a rather different take on the war than the Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Whereas Churchill believed that the war was won by elite fighting forces – RAF Fighter Command, the Royal Navy and the Eighth Army under Field Marshal Montgomery – Priestley took the view that resistance and victory owed everything to the collective effort of the British people.

He certainly thought and said that post-war Britain should be shaped by the wishes of the electorate, not just the policies of the ruling party. Priestley’s view was diametrically opposed to Churchill’s patrician top-down approach. Priestley was vindicated by the outcome of the July, 1945 General Election, which comprehensively rejected Churchill.

Priestley’s political outlook in An Inspector Calls is explained by Michael Nelson in the 2002 J B Priestley Society pamphlet, One Man in His Time: A Guide to the Stage Plays of J B Priestley.

“Priestley was a writer – and much else besides – who, to use a contemporary term, was very much ‘connected’ to the society in which he lived. Indeed it could be argued that his greatest attribute was compounded of his interest in, and acute awareness of, what was happening around him (as he perceived it) and his ability to convey that awareness in narrative and dramatic terms which were comprehensible to the ‘common man’.

“And because for much of his life he was essentially left-wing in his political outlook – though never a member of a political party – he constantly advocated a more just and equitable society than the one which, as he regarded it, prevailed in Britain in the 1930s.

“Hence he saw the Second World War as a watershed out of which a ‘better Britain’ might emerge.”

How does this feed into An Inspector Calls?

“In this play Priestley sought to promote the poet John Donne’s theme of ‘no man is an island’, the idea that each of us is part of an interdependent community of sometimes struggling human beings and that we have a responsibility towards each other,” Mr Nelson said.

“Hence, he portrays the Birlings as a well-off, middle-class family, at ease with itself, complacent in the isolated comfort of its existence in the period just before the 1914-18 war.

“A police inspector called Goole, dramatically a very powerful figure, visits the family during a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of the daughter, Sheila Birling, to the son, Gerald Croft, of a prominent businessman.

“As the play unfolds he reveals, through questioning, their secret and separate culpability in the agonising death of a young working girl. None of them is exactly ‘bad’, let alone ‘evil’ yet each of them is made to share the guilt in the girl’s death.”

If this sounds didactic, Priestley was too much a craftsman to end on a note of melodramatic redemption. Having resolved to mend their ways the Birlings then start to question whether the girl and the inspector really exist.

Confirmation that this may indeed have been a nasty hoax and the resultant slump back into smugness is shattered when the phone rings to announce the imminent arrival of a police inspector.

The finale is still thrilling 70 years after Priestley devised it. And the message which he put into the mouth of Inspector Goole in act three still resounds: “We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.”

An Inspector Calls has been staged, broadcast and filmed many times since 1945. The Drama Republic TV film will be screened by the BBC later this year. The first film version, starring Alistair Sim as Inspector Poole and the all-round talent of actor, writer and director Bryan Forbes came out in 1954.

A made-for-television adaptation was made in 1982 starring Bernard Hepton as Goole and Nigel Davenport as businessman Arthur Birley.