Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.15: ‘The Interior Decorator’ (BBC1, 14 April 1965)

The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), It’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.

This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis.

02.15: The Interior Decorator (BBC One, Wednesday 14 April 1965) 9:30 – 10:55pm

Directed by James Ferman; Written by Jack Russell; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Richard Wilmot; Music by Norman Kay

Magritte your heart out, ye staid telly visioners!

This play centres on a Georgian townhouse, residence of millionaire Frederick Carter-Carter (Michael Finlayson), whose chic and incredibly elaborate interior decoration was done by a Mr Bellamy (Barry Foster). The Radio Times itemises some of them: ‘alligator shoes, Louis Quinze tables, ancestral portraits, tropical fish ponds, Greek statues, and a circular bed.’ (8 April 1965, page unclear).

Bellamy escorts Frederick’s wife – ‘as fragile and exclusive as the treasures she moves among’ – around the house, and gradually this ‘skilled craftsman’ and his work fascinate Susan:

At this point you begin to realize that you are looking in on much more than a conducted tour. Although apparently preoccupied with marvellous surfaces and material excesses, The Interior Decorator is also concerned with the strange and unpredictable depths of a woman’s mind. (ibid.)

Designer Richard Wilmot’s work is trailed, with a note he won the Television Guild Award as designer of the year; the only mention in any press coverage of writer Jack Russell is that he was new to television (ibid.). Several previews, including in the Coventry Evening Telegraph drew attention to how Wilmot had crushed ‘a new Rolls-Royce into a sculptured mass’ and had ‘a table, laden with cut crystal, descending from the ceiling’ – while then quoting Wilmot that it wasn’t actually a Rolls, but ‘we did concoct a nice bit of sculpture out of car spares and wood’ (14 April 1965, p. 2). The Daily Mirror preview solely focused on this, noting the ‘problem’ facing the play’s producers was ‘how to wreck a Rolls-Royce’ (14 April 1965, p. 18).

The Rochdale Observer mentioned other challenges for Wilmot: ‘Plan a room to represent medieval hell. Recreate the beauty of a Grecian bathroom’, while also quoting him on the need for ‘large photographic reproductions of Boticellis and pictures of medieval devils, which were designed from reference books’ (14 April 1965, p. 9).

This ultimately modernistic, non-naturalistic Play is a video-film hybrid, where two of the three (?) filmed sequences are actually fairly substantial and almost work like mini short films in their own right. In a historical curiosity, this play was directed by James Ferman, who became Secretary of the BBFC for a marathon stint (1975-99), and was seen to be somewhat less liberal than his predecessor Stephen Murphy. Michael Brooke calls Ferman ‘complex, contradictory figure, both liberal and reactionary, open and secretive’.

The play exists in full, but isn’t widely available to access yet; I have managed to watch it via Learning on Screen’s Box of Broadcasts, available to subscribing universities.

Rating: *** (-) / ****

Now, where to start with this?! It’s a messy Frankenstein’s human of clashing parts: studio drama and European art cinema; bombastic staged rhetoric (in said studio) and visual storytelling (on 16 mm film); Theatre of the Absurd meets ballet and surreal Bunuel or Bergman film. It’s a domestic set psychodrama fused with interior dream logic.

While such ambition couldn’t hope to work, fully, this vaulting intent is refreshing to watch compared with the intellectual and aesthetic timidity of our current era. Before even reading the reviews, I can safely assume they often judged it negatively against a default yardstick of realism. In the era following Troy Kennedy Martin’s ‘nats go home’ (1964) polemic in Encore theatre magazine, surely some critics would hold out for visual artistry and original imagery?

There are hints of the excellent set dressing of the BBC Two version of Pinter’s A Slight Ache (1967), even if the range of references seems overly dizzying – Ancient Rome, the French Revolution, Japan, the Marquis De Sade – there is a clear implicit critique of acquisition, appropriation and societal power relations. Certain misfires occur when we get unspeaking Black and Asian characters, compounded also by one being shown in an excruciating moment just when the word “white” is uttered on the soundtrack. There may just be a good defence in that this is all an addled dream of an insecure lady with racist leanings.

The odd Jacobin-leaning interior decorator Mr Bellamy – who notably doesn’t design or create anything – seems more like a Svengali or shaper of personality through his artful assembly of existing visual styles. This play rather impressively and literally explores the theme of how tastes in the decor and furnishing of rooms can communicate vivid truths about their inhabitants – echoing more overtly the underlying significance of domestic environments in four house party Plays for Today, The Saturday Party (1975), Tiptoe Through the Tulips (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977) and Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978).

The play positions Bellamy as imagining Susan and bringing into being who she is, within what is finally revealed to be a dream narrative. The reality of her far more grotty, loose bedsprings and nails sticking out the floor environment is a clever twist. We are brought back into a different part of London: kitchen sink urban decay, which a tensed-up Susan inhabits. The rest of the play has been a strange, askew imagining of Susan with herself as a ‘beautiful’ aristocratic lady, in an exotic and eclectic modern home. Richard Wilmot’s exceptional design work conveys the rich difference of each and every room, which further illuminates the crushingly empty expansiveness of Susan’s worldview.

There’s also something of the familiar Wednesday Play broadside against modern advertising rhetoric’s stilted, frozen register as in the first Wednesday Play Barry Foster appeared in and Dennis Potter’s debut. This is highly effective in the dining room scene where banal cliches are uttered by the assembled dummies around the table, prompting Susan to ask for some more human response, wherein The Woman Who Thinks (Marcia Ashton) gives a monologue where feeling is revealed to be subordinated to status-seeking and materialistic desires. It’s a bit like Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot, but perhaps just a bit too easily interpretable and needed more of that earthy Beckettian strangeness to it!

The Woman Who Thinks and Susan, who also thinks

The climactic bedroom scene undeniably brought to mind Sartre’s In Camera, which we have covered, which featured Jane Arden. Arden’s voice even takes on the deeper, harsh sonic attack of her performance in that play.

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

While Richard Wilmot is clearly the star, rising to the challenge of a play intrinsically about visual culture and design, and I admired Barry Foster’s Alan Partridge-anticipating consonantal pronunciation: “it’s pure h-white!”, it has to be Jane Arden, a divine, strange presence and a seer unmoored in the world. Interestingly, given her Doris Lessing-like progression into radical feminism and then Sufi spiritualism, Arden here plays a lost materialist.

Hair woven high above her head in Medusan expanses, Susan Carter-Carter appears to be a self-absorbed, snobbish lady with an absent rich husband. She is vain, colonialist in attitudes and openly admits she loves money and objects, claiming to be “cultured” in a way linked to status and possession. I feel Arden’s performance grows in stature as this develops, coming alive in the “theatre” sequence in the dining room, in the Sadean bedroom and then when she is thrust back into a bleak kitchen sink ‘reality’ at the end.

Arden’s sorceress-like attempts to evoke a preening, privileged lady are faltering enough that, once you know the twist, take on a greater depth. It’s a shame that some of the earlier sections of the play feel somewhat protracted, and lacking in concision. However, while I’d fully understand 2025 viewers tuning out due to the opening scenes being slow and dull-seeming, I feel they would lose out on an awful lot that is bizarre and gripping in the play’s second half. Arden here does some enrapturing work which captures the insecurities in those who chase the glossy Sunday Supplement aspirational lifestyle ideals people were being sold. It seems to me part and parcel of her incredible screen work, which included her intellectually and morally righteous response to Salvador Dali’s misogyny and political cowardice.

Jane Arden was a fearless searcher and magnetic screen presence. RIP.

Best line/s: “I wanted to cause a ripple of doubt. And, at the same time, comment on everything I had excluded from the room: the phony world of the Big Sell. Now here they are. The ruins of our Pompeii. Turning to ashes, fossilising as we watch…” (Bellamy)

Elaborate wall collage assaulting phoniness!

Bellamy also says: “I would have killed Corday. History is always wrong. The wrong things happen! Men of vision were destroyed and the fools lived on. What kind of a world is that?” This reflects from a kind of Machiavellian bourgeois revolutionary perspective on the Wednesday Play strand’s ongoing subterranean feature of undermining ‘heroes’ and ‘heroism’.

Audience size: 7.43 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – part 4 / Horizon – The Other Side of the Pill and Search for the Original Mind / Jazz 625 presents the Wes Montgomery Quartet), ITV (Carroll Calling / The Bacharach Sound / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 26%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 69.2%

Reception: The London critics were fairly evenly divided between appreciators and denigrators, with a few somewhere in the middle. Outside London, it was more ignored and those who did review it showed antipathy, by and large. A small minority of viewers was intrigued; far more detested it.

Mary Crozier praised ‘well poised acting’ by Barry Foster and ‘an emotional tour de force’ by Jane Arden, but felt the play was overlong and unconvincingly symbolic and fantastic, ceasing to ‘be interesting long before it came to an end with the apparent collapse of the luxurious house into a filthy slum’ (Guardian, 15 April 1965, p. 9). Crozier felt this play actually deserved the criticism that Pinter’s Tea Party had (unfairly) received for being obscure and tough to follow (ibid.).

In contrast, Peter Black felt this style of play ‘has become almost a cliche of the pretentious puzzle’, but it struck him ‘as remarkably viewable’, with each room ‘more surprising and splendid than the last’ (Daily Mail, 15 April 1965, p. 3). For Black, the ‘writing showed an unusual mastery of the business of combining words and pictures in separate layers’, while he admired its ambiguous yet incisive conclusion, which proved that Russell’s ‘construction was solid and true whichever ending you chose’ (ibid.). Black’s only complaint was Jane Arden’s casting: ‘Her face, with that thrusting lower lip and Bedlington terrier hair-do, was too strong and characterful on its own to stimulate one’s imagination about the character it was playing’ (ibid.). Oddly, the same paper carried a brief item on its front page noting how ‘scores of viewers rang the BBC and the Mail last night to complain they ‘could not understand the play, which involved long dream sequences and was filmed as if through a fog.’ (15 April 1965, p. 1).

The print I saw: not really ‘as if through a fog’!

Lyn Lockwood admitted it was a visually spectacular play but claimed Russell’s ‘message about material excesses, selfishness and inhumanity tended to get buried’, noting the actors just about ‘managed to keep their heads up’, but that Wilmot dominated and that the BBC’s current demand for a higher license fee doesn’t surprise her in this context (Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1965, p. 19). Such reviews, desiring all plays carry simple ‘messages’, seem haplessly jejune.

Anon in the Times felt concerned such plays ‘may thus repel conventionally minded viewers’ (Lockwood was one of these!), yet acknowledged Russell’s dialogue was elliptical, dealt in paradox and cunning wordplay (15 April 1965, p. 17). Despite the skills of Ferman, Wilmot, Arden and Foster, they saw the ‘sultry, attractive’ Susan Carter-Carter as insufficiently interesting a person, lacking ‘importance’ and professed not to care when ‘we discover this to be the dream of a slattern in a house that has decayed into slumminess’ (ibid.).

Furthering the split verdict, Maurice Richardson defended the play, especially Richard Wilmot’s production design: a ‘marvel of ingenuity’ (Observer, 18 April 1965, p. 25). He liked the room full of ‘actor zombies’, Arden’s wistful playing and the revelation that Susan was ‘a self-obsessed, lost girl with a mind full of advertisement-induced status longings and sex snobberies.’ (ibid.).

Richardson noted how this scenario of a ‘slut’ in a ‘decaying Notting Hill-type slum’ had been planted lightly by the opening sequence, though, like Anon, doubted Susan was interesting enough to have ‘such a singularly elaborate dream’ and desired ‘to know more of her conscious world’ and the true state of her husband (ibid.). This said, Richardson ended by praising ‘devilish clever’ direction by Ferman and how even the dream-within-a-dream dance sequence was ‘bearable’ (ibid.).

John Woodforde found that the ‘settings alone held the eye’, acclaiming ‘Superbly extravagant furnishings’ by Wilmot, claiming Russell’s message about ‘inhumanity and selfishness among very rich females of humble birth’ were swamped by the play’s desire to be ‘different’ (Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 1965, p. 13). He much preferred a Dr. Finlay’s Casebook episode, a tour de force on the theme of abortion, surprisingly for a series with a cosy image! (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin gave a slightly better review than usual, noting that such ‘groping attempts to connect […] need sympathy and encouragement’, and reflecting how ‘This strange, ambitious play by a new writer is still snapping at my heels like – well, a Jack Russell terrier.’ (Sunday Times, 18 April 1965, p. 24). Wiggin waxed literary about Russell’s ‘luxuriant proliferation of image, symbol and innuendo; a sort of Jamesian richness of surface texture, combined with a Joycean richness of sub-surface suggestion’, yet ultimately wanted it to be less pretentious and ‘Over-opulent’ and its writing to be ‘clear, or at least in a code we can break on the run’ (ibid ).

T.C. Worsley also praised Wilmot’s sets and ‘one funny scene’, where Susan and Bellamy ‘draped in napkins […] supped on ortolans’, but ultimately felt the play was a great idea whose ‘treatment’ was lacking in ‘intelligence, imagination and invention’ (Financial Times, 21 April 1965, p. 22). Frederick Laws welcomed its ‘visual inventiveness and plain cheek’; I agree with his admiration of the ‘entertainingly morbid’ dining room scene, though feel his claim ‘all that had been communicated was crossness towards women, wealth, taste or just living’ a tad overblown (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681). While it’s clearly critical of status-obsession and materialism, it’s not having a go at all women from a puritanical perspective.

Clifford Davis used the play as one example in a stinging attack on the BBC’s financial excesses and Hugh Greene’s perceived lack of business acumen, making arguments horribly prescient of the Checkland-Birt BBC reforms of the 1980s-90s, which destroyed in-house production and subjected the BBC to marketisation (Daily Mirror, 21 April 1965, p. 21). Davis noted how a play of 90 minutes like The Interior Decorator would fend to cost between £8,000 and £12,000 but that Wilmot’s lavish sets and filmed inserts put it in the ‘£20,000 bracket’, then attacking the play as ‘a flop’ with ‘most viewers’ (ibid.).

Outside London, Argus felt it was now a critic’s ‘duty’ to comment on such a widely watched ‘programme’ as The Wednesday Play, but bemoaned a ‘tortured and ugly […] Absolutely potty’ play (Glasgow Daily Record, 15 April 1965, p. 15). They mocked ‘the woman’ as representing ‘every empty-headed human being who ever found difficulty in dividing life into reality and unreality’ (ibid.). Fascinatingly, Peggie Phillips questioned its focus on visual detail given it was made for the television medium, where due to the smallness of the visual field, ‘spareness’ and ‘shape’ are important: thus sensing that the fuzziness of people’s TV receptions and the meagre size of their sets could render Richard Wilmot’s great designs unclear (Scotsman, 19 April 1965, p. 3).

W.D.A. felt past caring about ‘the mixed-up fantasy life’ of ‘heroine’ Susan, finding ‘a certain compulsive interest’ but also decrying the ‘cheating’ use of a dream being the explanation (Liverpool Echo, 15 April 1965, p. 2). In the same paper, ‘Onlooker’ had easy fun at the play’s expense, claiming it ‘made Harold Pinter seem very nearly as easy to follow as Enid Blyton’ (19 April 1965, p. 4). The next day, W.D.A. linked Pinter’s Tea Party, Russell’s play and David Adam’s We Thought You Would Like To Be Caesar (ITV) together as excursions into fantasy (20 April 1965, p. 2).

Among viewers, the play received an abyssal RI of 26%, by far the lowest of all Wednesday Plays we’ve surveyed so far. 14% gave it the high A+/A ratings, while 68% gave it the low C/C- scores (BBC WAC, VR/65/199). Most responded with anger and irritation, with several viewers complaining that it represented the squandering of public money, just as the BBC licence fee was being increased (ibid.). A steel smelter claimed it took the ‘prize for poppycock’ and called: ‘Let’s get back to sanity, please!’ (ibid.). A chartered engineer termed it ‘honestly […] the worst thing I have ever seen on television’ (ibid.).

There were characteristic attacks on a play which seemed to lack clear meaning, with some also objecting to ‘distasteful undertones’ they claimed to have detected (ibid.). However, an ‘intrigued’ minority praised its ‘fascinating originality’ (ibid.). There were more doubts about the acting than usual, though the handful who protested about overacting did concede this was deliberate for the style of play (ibid.). The main factor that kept many watching was Wilmot’s design, indeed it was seen as ‘a designer’s play’, though some felt it ‘far too lavish for such material’ (ibid.). My anticipation of critical attacks due to its lack of realism better fitted the audience response: ‘some reporting viewers were irritated by the dancing which struck an absurdly artificial note in a ridiculously far-fetched play, they declared’ (ibid.).

Similarly, in a letter to the press, a C.D. Loader of Haylease Crescent in Hereford found it lacking in ‘entertainment’, deriding ‘an hour and a quarter of dreary, and often stupid dialogue’ (Sunday Mirror, 18 April 1965, p. 22).

I would say I personally was inclined initially to feel this was an unengaging failure of a play worth a 4/10, but I was, eventually, won around to a large degree by its ambition to do something unique on TV, matching many of the Six productions on BBC Two (1964-5) which the magnetic Jane Arden had also been involved with as actor and also writer on the existentialist and surrealist The Logic Game (1965) which features an appearance by R.D. Laing. Costly or not, Richard Wilmot’s production designs are incredible here and alongside an intriguingly overambitious script and theatrical performances, they make it gradually fascinating viewing for anyone open-minded enough.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.14: ‘Three Clear Sundays’ (BBC1, 7 April 1965)

02.14: Three Clear Sundays (BBC One, Wednesday 7 April 1965) 9:45 – 11:10pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Jimmy O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Music by Nemone Lethbridge (lyrics) & Harry Pitch (harmonica)

Now, we are onto a play which began defining the Wednesday Play’s iconoclastic populism. Story editor Roger Smith notes how ‘hundreds’ of letters were received praising James O’Connor’s A Tap on the Shoulder, asking for more from the writer (Radio Times, 1 April 1965, p. 35). Just three months on, their wishes were granted.

Barrow boy Danny Lee (Tony Selby) pushes a man down in a pub brawl and gets landed in prison on a six-month sentence. Herein, he is manipulated by two wily inmates into hitting a police warden – he hits him over the head, sufficient to kill the man. Thereafter, he pleads guilty, honestly, and is faced with the death penalty under law. Despite his formidable Mum’s (Rita Webb) machinations, he is found guilty and is executed by the state via hanging. The play’s title comes from ‘the three clear Sundays a condemned murderer spends in jail before execution’ (Daily Mirror, 7 April 1965, p. 18). The same preview indicates O’Connor wrote the play when in Dartmoor, but revised it for TV (ibid.).

The Daily Mirror reported that ‘the BBC are awaiting Parliament’s decision on capital punishment before fixing a screening date’ for 3 Clear Sundays (6 January 1965, p. 12). Indeed, this play had been the first of O’Connor’s accepted by the BBC, before A Tap on the Shoulder which was screened on 6 January (Television Today, 25 March 1965, p. 9). It has an added non-naturalistic element wherein ballads, with lyrics by Nemone Lethbridge and harmonica playing by Harry Pitch, periodically summarise or comment on the on screen action.

The Daily Express indicated the sensational nature of the play, showing an image from its conclusion, and claiming it was the first hanging scene in TV ‘to be shown in detail’, while emphasising how O’Connor himself was under threat of ‘a REAL noose’ only to be reprieved 48 hours before he was due to he hanged (18 March 1965, p. 7). O’Connor claims the play was not propaganda but was written from the heart and was ‘an emotional autobiography’ (ibid.).

A certain androcentric bias at the root of a drama like this was plainly indicated in a Daily Mail article about Andrea Lawrence’s appearance in the play, titled ‘Andrea stars with 56 men’, though it excludes mention of Finnuala O’Shannon or Rita Webb entirely, both who give significant, substantial performances here (15 March 1965, p. 4). Another newspaper mentions the large cast of 69, while noting the play concentrates on the effect Danny has ‘on the other inmates and those waiting and praying outside the jail’; furthermore, it intriguingly adds that A Tap on the Shoulder ‘is to be made into a film.’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 April 1965, p. 3).

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail reflected how O’Connor’s decade in Dartmoor prison means ‘there is a great deal of feeling and warmth in the play’, also expressing surprise how he ‘has managed to bring a touch of humour to this frightening situation’ (7 April 1965, p. 4). It’s notable how few of the reviews mention Ken Loach’s part in the production as director; one of the few which does calls him ‘Kenneth Leach’. The emphasis in the press build-up was squarely on Tony Selby, with at least six papers publishing images of him behind bars, and O’Connor, who is praised thus by Roger Smith:

But what is remarkable is that in spite of the genuine outrage he feels his writing is warm and compassionate, with an extraordinary joy of life. In the worst situation he can find humour – something very rare in a writer (op. cit.)

In other words, the classic working-class survival – or gallows – humour.

You can watch the play here on the estimable Play For Forever’s YouTube channel (or indeed the excellent Ken Loach at the BBC DVD box set from some years back…):

YouTube video (accessed: 7 April 2025)

Rating *** / ****

The earlier sections of this play felt much in the same brash capering tone as A Tap on the Shoulder, but its tragic development felt very different, all in aid of an impassioned anti-capital punishment stance. The illiterate Danny Lee is unable to deny he did what he did and meant to do it. But is not able to identify the blame that also ought to have been attached to the two men, including self-styled “King of the Underworld”, Johnny May, who persuaded him to do what he did.

The point isn’t really that he was innocent, but just that no one is deserving of state execution, whatever they have done. He’s a wretched individual in terms of what he did, and Tony Selby performs brilliantly to ensure we believe his limitations and gullibility, but then also feel for him as the inexorable fate of the death penalty is cruelly applied. The play’s ending is well edited and sparsely suggestive, not prurient in any way. Then we get three on-screen captions including ones by Albert Pierrepoint and Arthur Koestler.

The songs, lyrics written by Nemone Lethbridge, and music played on accordion and/or harmonica by Harry Pitch, felt an odd, novel gesture, somewhere between Brecht/Weill and English folk song a la Ewan MacColl and the Radio Ballads. They had a worldly, sardonic air.

The drama overall felt like had astute perceptions about varying working-class underworld attitudes and distinct hierarchies of crime. This includes the perception that thieving and making material gains is the way to go, rather than just getting in the nick for violence, as a mug does. Johnny May and Robbo Robertson know how to manipulate a mug, which Danny foolishly allows to happen to him.

This felt like it gave an unvarnished, real blast of experience and untidy, vigorous but painful life in 1965 London. Yemi Goodman Ajibade and Henry Webb get small roles as a Black man who a racist landlord refuses to serve and a Jewish man accused of financial cheating who faces reprisals – it’s not really made clear the truth of this latter situation. These roles, dialogue from some of the lags about “poofs” and also the spirited but constrained Rosa – who lacks the freedom to have a safe abortion – indicate just how restrictive British society still was, in many different ways. We also hear from an appallingly unrepentant murderer of three “whores”, who, in the most macabre of the songs, wants to commit a fourth murder. As with Tony Parker’s plays, you feel you are an eavesdropper of some horrible, unpalatable but true human behaviours and attitudes that exist. It was an uncomfortable moment which reminded me of reading Blake Morrison and Gordon Burn about the Yorkshire Ripper killings.

As is sometimes the case with Ken Loach, you get a clearcut moral judgement on the narrative situation, but here Jimmy O’Connor avoids a neatness and the whole scenario, if not glorifying crime, certainly has something of the Graham Greene-Bonnie and Clyde attitude of fascination and some admiration for these people. But there’s good writing and playing of Danny’s manipulation and betrayal by May and Robbo, which is keenly observed in documentarian style by Loach. The cast is perhaps excessively large, which even more than the previous O’Connor play, makes it somewhat hard to follow the various strands, but it conversely helps to create a rich, untidy tapestry of the life of the times.

As with O’Connor’s previous Wednesday Play, there is a rich variety of colloquial language: ‘Mush’, ‘snout’ (packet of cigarettes), ‘in the family way’, ‘a slash’, ‘chokey’, ‘the screw’, ‘the nick’, ‘geezer’, ‘got his collar felt’, ‘bit of bird’, ‘cock’, ‘done me nut’, ‘a stretch’, ‘nicker’, ‘let’s get down to brass tacks’, ‘straightened’, ‘the cat’ and ‘a diabolical liberty’. And that’s just a cursory list!

I’d say this play’s overall vigorous spirit and campaigning heft – through a tragic human story – made it a fine and crucial addition to the now established, ongoing Wednesday Play project.

Best Performance: TONY SELBY

Television Today noted this was Selby’s thirtieth TV role (1 April 1965, p. 11). Nine days after the play’s broadcast, an article noted that Pimlico-born Selby’s first acting job was in 1949 at the Scala Theatre alongside Margaret Lockwood in a version of Peter Pan (Westminster & Pimlico News, 16 April 1965, p. 1). It reveals also that Chelsea FC fan Selby lived with his wife Jackie Milburn and parents at Kent House, Tachbrook Estate, and he and Milburn were about to buy a house of their own (ibid.).

Now, Rita Webb was very close to getting my nod here, with an indomitable performance as a matriarchal battleaxe. I think I recall reading about how Liz Smith regarded her as a close friend in her early days after moving to London, among many others part of the cosmopolitan theatre circles Smith moved in after the Second World War.

But Selby, whose performance Roger Smith praised as ‘one of the most moving’ he had seen (op. cit.) edges it as he makes the latter stages so tense and, gradually, moving. O’Connor’s script and Selby’s playing convey a hapless man, guilty, but who deserves a better fate than this and clearly deserved some measure of forgiveness and chance at redemption.

Best line: “You ain’t missing much in ‘ere, y’ know… It’s a miserable bastard life outside! What with my back, Aunt Lil’s operation and atom bombs in Scotland, and now there’s a load of flu about, I think I got a dose meself. Now where’s me snuff box?” (Britannia Lee to her son Danny, who is soon to die)

I do also like some of Nemone Lethbridge’s folk ballad lyrics, e.g. “Mother’s got the geezer straightened! She won’t ever let a chance go by!”

Audience size: 9.90 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 68.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – Part 3 / Jazz 625 – Tubby Hayes Big Band), ITV (The Budget – response by Mr. Edward Heath / The Tigers are Burning – dramatic reconstruction of a 1943 battle between the Russians and the Germans / Professional Wrestling from Bradford)

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46% (to be checked later)

Reception: Fairly good response from London critics, if miserly in number and with certain reservations. However, the reviews gathered from outside London are almost uniformly glowing, which, as with A Tap on the Shoulder, says something about how The Wednesday Play was now communicating well beyond metropolitan journalistic elites. This is corroborated by the viewer responses from the time, from a vast audience nearing 10 million.

Anon acclaimed its ‘shattering effect’, Loach’s lucid direction, Selby’s ‘remarkably accurate’ and ‘moving’ performance and Webb dealing with a ‘caricature’ role with ‘strident gusto’s and O’Shannon ‘touchingly gentle’ (Times, 8 April 1965, p. 6). Gerald Larner questioned the structure and plausibility of the first two-thirds’, but admired the harrowing final third, see it as ‘not a play but a plea against capital punishment’, which was ‘valuable’ (Guardian, 8 April 1965, p. 9). Generally, though, Larner felt it undisciplined, with excessive ‘stock’ characters (ibid.). The paper later apologised to O’Connor for an erroneous reference to him having written the play while in Broadmoor, potentially influenced by a stray line in the play mentioning that establishment (Guardian, 10 April 1965, p. 6).

The Daily Express front page rather vaguely reported that ‘Viewers protested to the B.B.C. last night at a hanging scene’, odd given the brief and suggestive rather than lingering and graphic nature of the said scene! (8 April 1965, p. 1). This same page’s main story ‘JAIL FOR RACE HATERS’, reported on Labour Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice’s Bill to outlaw racial discrimination in public places (ibid.). While this had many loopholes, it was a significant step forward in creating a new offence of inciting racial hatred. O’Connor’s play has a scene where a White publican won’t serve a Black man: its truth is demonstrated by the words of Councillor Austin Webb, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers’ Central Protection Society: ‘”We do not preach a colour bar, nor do the brewers. But I know some publicans do not allow coloured people on their premises.”‘

This reveals how multifaceted certain Wednesday Plays could be: focusing on one overall societal problem – here, the death penalty – but then also squarely highlighting others in single scenes: racism and abortion.

Like Larner, Maurice Richardson appreciated the message but felt the characterisation and construction were ‘amateurish’ (Observer, 11 April 1965, p. 29). He found it very viewable and revealing of prison life, though, feeling that O’Connor’s underworld dialogue is ‘the most authentic in the business’ (ibid.). Frederick Laws felt the main story of Danny was unconvincing and lacked sure pacing, but found the use of modern hanging ballads ‘persuasive’, the language ‘vigorous and plausible’ and acclaimed Rita Webb’s ‘proper gusto […] a splendid invention – receiver, mother of crooks, and humbug’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575). Laws thus expresses a desire for O’Connor to write comedies (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris again showed a deep frame of reference, noting similarities to Victorian Melodrama and inversions of morality akin to the Carry On… films (Television Today, 15 April 1965, p. 12). Norris felt seeing ‘the snare closing round’ Danny ‘was pitiful’, and praised Rita Webb for making Britannia Lee an admirable but not loveable ‘harridan’ (ibid.). She liked how Ken Loach knows ‘when to leave well alone’ and not show off with visual techniques, and handled the folk tune sequences effectively: ‘They linked the suffering of a 1965 innocent to all those who have preceded him’ (ibid.). Norris noted ‘Another success from producer James MacTaggart.’ (ibid.)

Jess Conrad, a footballing crony of Tony Selby noted his ‘old chum’ had been ‘hoofing in Edwardian bathing draws – ‘stripes going The wrong way, and all that gear’ – at the Players Theatre near Charing Cross: as a means of unwinding from his ‘sterner performing chores’ elsewhere and with filming of TCS in the bag (The Stage, 29 April 1965, p. 7). John Holmstrom did not see it as all that stern a challenge, describing Danny as an ‘absurdly innocent victim-hero’, with his progress to the gallows achieved via ‘a series of bizarre accidents’, though he did like O’Connor ‘apt yet stylish’ dialogue (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660).

B.L. thought it both a great play and great propaganda, admiring the various settings’ atmosphere, including the home of Britannia, ‘the Cockney female Fagin’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 April 1965, p. 15). B.L. likened the play to Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow – which Selby had appeared in on stage – especially in its use of ‘extremely effective incidental music’ (ibid.). They also felt, tellingly, that Z Cars, in comparison, lacked authenticity and was beginning to feel more like Dixon of Dock Green in its cosy focus on the Newtown police having ‘hearts of gold’ (ibid.). Argus found it ‘stark and powerful’, ‘a tremendous, exciting story [that] came over with a rare strength’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 8 April 1965, p. 19).

W.D.A. spoke up for the importance of emotions, in justifying O’Connor’s appeal to them over reason, and how Danny, the rare straight one in the Lee clan earns our sympathy (Liverpool Echo, 8 April 1965, p. 2). They noted how ‘A combination of the author’s writing and Tony Selby’s excellent acting communicated most powerfully the sensation of the numbing sickness of fear overtaking the condemned man as events took their inexorable course’ (ibid.). Michael Beale felt it avoided over sensationalising or sentimentalising the situation, and emphasised with ‘poor, bewildered’ Danny and found Britannia ‘repulsively fascinating’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 8 April 1965, p. 2).

Accolades grew. In the Somerset-based Western Daily News, Peter Forth avowed it was ‘no play for the squeamish’, hitting ‘home with savage force’ and will be remembered ‘with respect for the author and those taking part’ (8 April 1965, p. 7). Jim Webber went so far as to say The Wednesday Play had ‘contributed very largely’ to the BBC’s ‘return to grace’, with this play’s ‘trenchant bite’ a good example (Bristol Evening Post, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Webber loved the ‘sheer authenticity’, likening it to a filmed documentary which avoided staginess:

Never once did one get the impression of cardboard sets and puppets mouthing lines; so powerful was it all that the mood of the viewer was of complete belief and absorption. (ibid.)

Linda Dyson found all the characters ‘obviously authentic’ and loved the ‘street songs’ and made a rare direct political comment:

It was a bitterly tragic human story. And if public opinion isn’t ready for Mr. Silverman’s Bill to abolish capital punishment – as has been said – it must have shifted towards a more civilised view as a result of this play (Birmingham Daily Post – Midland Magazine supplement, 10 April 1965, p. IV).

Bill Smith felt he had made the wrong choice in opting to watch ATV’s The Tigers are Burning, after watching the last thirty minutes of O’Connor’s play: ‘I laughed, felt sad and, by play’s end, very sorry and emotionally disturbed […] A more crushing indictment of capital punishment has yet to be seen’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 April 1965, p. 15).

Peter Quince praised a ‘savagely eloquent tract’ but joined some of the London critics in finding it less successful as a play (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Quince would have liked a more odious murderer, as ‘the case against hanging is not selective’, but this was retrospective reflections; when it was on ‘I had been capable of nothing but stunned, horrified concentration on the screen’ (ibid.). He felt this ‘strong meat’ needed a warning beforehand for ‘viewers of a nervous disposition’, ending with praise for Rita Webb: ‘quite ‘outstanding’ as ‘his dreadful old bag of a mum’ (ibid.).

A review from the US was similarly positive. Rich. in Variety found O’Connor less a skilled playwright than ‘observer and shrewdly savage commentator on villainy’, with ‘vivid characterizations, punchy dialog’ and realistic settings (14 April 1965, p. 35). While Rich. regarded the cast as ‘unnecessarily large’, they admired an authentic tragedy, finding Selby’s performance ‘fascinating’ and the scene with the priest movingly acted (ibid.). There was further praise here for Webb as ‘his raucous, unscrupulous hoyden of a mother’, whole O’Shannon was said to give the most ‘haunting’ performance (ibid.).

Rich. regarded the scene with the Executioner (Howard Goorney) and assistant ghoulishly discussing their job unnecessarily ‘overloaded’ the anti-capital punishment argument, where a more implicit approach would have been better, but this was another largely positive review (ibid.).

Viewers regarded it as ‘a moving, dramatic and powerful play’, which brought home the ‘full meaning and horror’ of capital punishment, with one wise comment: ‘An eye for an eye does not solve anything – it just confirms man’s inhumanity’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/185). One comment picked up on a doubt I felt when watching: ‘whether a boy with Danny’s background and upbringing would be quite so gullible’ (ibid.). Tellingly, however, a Housewife declared that ‘All the scenes of prison life and crime depicted in other plays suddenly seemed bogus and one realized that this was the reality’ (ibid.). This matched the majority opinion in favour of a ‘warm, down-to-earth’ play, with only a minority complaining of dialogue that was ‘a bit too “natural”‘ (ibid.).

Most felt there was a truth underlying Britannia and ‘her brood’, seeing them as ‘typical denizens of the East End underworld’. The ballads came in for a mixed reception, with some finding them overdone and breaking up the continuity, others feeling they were ingenious and built up the right atmosphere (ibid.). Another Housewife eloquently revealed just why this had scored a RI 12% higher than the recent Wednesday Play average, and which had nearly matched that of O’Connor’s first play:

The play had the resemblance of a modern Beggars’ Opera and had a spark of brilliance both in writing and treatment (ibid.).

There were several letters to the press. M. Kelly of Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh wrote into the Daily Record calling for it to ‘be made compulsory viewing for everyone who favours hanging a murderer’, and expressing hopes the government will help us ‘start recognising crime as an illness that a rope won’t cure’ (12 April 1965, p. 2). B. Howells of Glamorgan, South Wales claimed to have been swayed totally against the death penalty by the play; previously undecided, they now saw it as a ‘barbaric act’ (Daily Mirror, 12 April 1965, p. 6).

In contrast, and in an interesting anticipation of a few responses to Adolescence sixty years hence, Miss E.M.V. Watford of Hertfordshire called for ‘a play giving the other side’, showing ‘The victim struck down; the news being broken to his wife; her struggle to keep the home together. Why does the killer corner all the sympathy ?’ (Daily Mirror, 17 April 1965, p. 4).

The People viewing panel notably championed Three Clear Sundays, with nine of the ten participants rating it ‘tip-top’ (2 May 1965, p. 4). The paper reflects how much better it went down than ‘phoney attempts at daring and tough plays which irritate viewers and the kinky, “way-out” stories drive them to despair’. They claimed that O’Connor’s play provided a corrective moral to TV producers: ‘People will take “tough stuff” so long as it is true to life, and has understandable characters – as this play had’ (ibid.).

On 16 July 1965, the play was repeated on BBC Two at 8:20pm in the Encore slot. A further repeat planned in summer 1966 was cancelled, the BBC claimed due to the World Cup and international horse show (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1966, p. 17).

More broadly, the play contributed to a climate of significant legal change. The last hanging for murder in the UK was on 13 August 1964. Sydney Silverman MP’s The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 received royal assent on 8 November 1965, suspending the death penalty for murder, which was made permanent in 1969.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.13: ‘Cat’s Cradle’ (BBC1, 31 March 1965)

02.13: The Cat’s Cradle (BBC One, Wednesday 31 March 1965) 9:50 – 11:05pm

Directed by Henric Hirsch; Written by Hugo Charteris; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Michael Wield

Do you like cats ? Or just being catty ? Either way you’ll probably enjoy “Cat’s Cradle” (Sunday Mail, 28 March 1965, p. 16).

CATS are by nature independent creatures, keeping their own counsel and not showing the kind of motivation a writer Dan make use of in a play or a film (Geoffrey Lane, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 31 March 1965, p. 13).

Billed as a black comedy, about retired townspeople Hereward Daintry (Leo Genn), of once-landed gentry and Valerie Daintry (Barbara Murray), a town-loving former suburbanite, living in the countryside. Hereward buys his lonely wife a cat called Oscar for company. Neighbouring couple the Ulyatts’ (Billy Russell and Rachel Thomas) cat Copper, a savage tom, takes a dislike to Oscar. Oscar is described as a ‘superb fluffy white kitten which plays a major part’ in the play (Geoffrey Lane ibid.).

‘Soon there are rumours – of savagery and violence, and even murder.’ (Torbay Herald Express, 27 March 1965, p. 4) Jack Bell’s preview in the Daily Mirror indicates that Copper was played by Buster – a cat owned by a Mr. John Holmes – whose first star role was in the Hammer horror film, The Shadow of the Cat (1961) and who can earn as much as £16 a day (31 March 1965, p. 16). A few decades earlier, Skippy, the terrier who played Asta in the Thin Man films, could earn 250 dollars a week.

The Radio Times preview notes Hereward is getting on, just retired from ‘a sinecure in the city’ and ‘His new bride herself is no chicken’ (25 March 1965, p. 43). You don’t say, or rather they did. Further information indicates the play’s theme of women whose social aspirations clash:

But Valerie has always been a town girl and does not hit it off with her rustic neighbours. They expect her to play the part of the squire’s lady, but then resent her intrusion into their social life. They are a close, awkward bunch, always on their dignity. Not a bit like her old London girl-friends. (ibid.)

The play was written by Hugo Charteris, a known journalist and novelist, responsible for several significant works for The Wednesday Play and Play for Today before his death at a sadly young age. It was a second Wednesday Play shot in BBC Glasgow’s studios.

Audience size: 5.94 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon / Jazz 625 with Art Blakey / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Frank Ifield Show / Professional Wrestling from King George’s Hall, Blackburn).

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 50%

Reception: Fairly lukewarm, middling response from both viewers and critics, though far from disastrous.

Gerald Larner bemoaned a ‘petty drama’, of intolerably slow pace which submitted the actors to ‘facial exercises while the camera focused on them and the narrative gave their life histories’ (Guardian, 1 April 1965, p. 11). Larner disliked an ‘untidy’ production and felt that director Hirsch ‘had nothing like the command of style necessary to create a convincing if unreal world out of the script’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood was somewhat more favourable, finding it a ‘goodish’ black comedy, if ‘dangerously on the leisurely side’, also finding the use of a commentator ‘a bit of a plague’ (Daily Telegraph, 1 April 1965, p. 19). But Lockwood acclaimed ‘some nice work’ from Genn, Murray and Russell and revealed how the ending involved tomcat Cooper being ‘given his quietus’ by Hereward, brandishing a heavy candlestick (ibid.).

The Times reviewer felt a ‘cold-hearted little play’ was improbable, but its ‘cheerful dissection of empty lives gave pleasant if very leisurely viewing’ (1 April 1965, p. 5). They questioned the likelihood of Valerie ever marrying Hereward and how a woman of ‘apparently some ability’ was presented, but relaxed into enjoying it when it ignored its own contradictions, like Barbara Murray, ‘who wisely refused to notice the inconsistencies with which she was presented’ (ibid.). Yet, it was foiled by a ‘predictable ending depending on doubts about the cat’s sex and showed us not only what to expect but when and how to expect it’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson mockingly referred to the play to close his weekly TV roundup: ‘the baleful influence of the theatre of the absurd on the theatre of the tea shop ; the result is our old friend the repertory of rot.’ (Observer, 4 April 1965, p. 24). Frederick Laws felt it was ‘nothing to write home about’, but was well acted, with Billy Russell doing some ‘powerful tearing of heart-strings with easy humour thrown in’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575).

Marjorie Norris felt it was trailed in a manner suggesting ‘something disturbing, frightening, and full of Meaning’, which made excessive claims for what still did have meaning – for instance, director Hirsch’s ‘handling of Valerie’s walk through the village under the cold but curious eyes of the women’ (Television Today, 8 April 1965, p. 12). Norris disliked the descriptive voice-over narration, but credits Olive Gregg as doing a good job of a bad case of telling us, not showing us, who the characters are (ibid.). She acknowledged Charteris gave Barbara Murray a very tough task, which she was ‘not entirely successful’ in, but felt that Billy Russell, Rachel Thomas and Ann Way in a smaller part ‘walked away with’ the play, the former showing himself ‘a character actor right up there with the best’ (ibid.).

Outside of London, Peggie Phillips felt Doctor Who had perked up with ‘The Lionheart’, following ‘that last flop with the mansized bumble bees’, but conversely regarded Cat’s Cradle as ‘one of the less happy efforts of the generally sound Wednesday Play’ (The Scotsman, 5 April 1965, p. 4). Over in Glasgow, Argus noted Fancy Smith being beaten up by a thug in Z Cars, expressing disappointment in this play ‘made up of trivialities’; despite admiring Murray and Genn’s talents, they found it ‘just one long bore’ (Daily Record, 1 April 1965, p. 15).

G.F. felt the play defined that ‘very fashionable’ genre, the black comedy, echoing Marjorie Norris about the narration, finding it ‘slowed things down a bit’, but that this ‘offbeat’ offering held the attention due to Genn, Murray and Russell’s performances (Belfast Telegraph, 1 April 1965, p. 9). N.G.P. regarded the play’s tempo as ‘curiously slow and gentle’ having tuned into the exciting Walker-London fight on Sportsview (Liverpool Daily Post, 1 April 1965, p. 5). They warmed to it, having a ‘certain cumulative power’, aided by the ‘authenticity and charm’ of Billy Russell’s ‘ancient rustic’ (ibid.).

W.D.A. was harsher, mocking a ‘distinctly pedestrian and rather ordinary […] mildly off-beat’ effort, that didn’t really justify the ‘black comedy’ descriptor (Liverpool Echo, 1 April 1965, p. 2). The reviewer has fun with a feline pun – ‘category’ – while noting the dialogue lacked richness in what was ‘merely a short story dramatised in an inordinately leisurely way’ (ibid.). They were favourable towards the performances, though, including Russell’s ‘fine cameo’ (ibid.). Russell, ‘one of the greats of music hall’ – first on stage aged seven in 1900 – was interviewed by James Green in the same paper (Liverpool Echo, 6 April 1965, p. 2).

Russell bemoans the invention of the microphone, where previously performers had to project to survive and thrive (ibid.). He notes how variety went far back to the market places of China and reflects that British music hall’s demise was as it had become ‘too static’ and predictable:

The modern artist hasn’t starved the way we all did. Part of the trouble was when artists began playing golf instead of improving their act. We put the business first. (ibid.).

This curiously anticipates the Alternative Comedy criticisms of the cosy clique of popular light entertainers in the 1980s…! Russell’s appearance anticipated later turns music hall veterans took in Play for Today, like Leslie Sarony, Nat Jackley and John Grieve.

The audience response was fair to middling. While it still scored a healthy audience of nearly six million, ITV scored a fairly rare ratings victory in 1965 over TWP. Two housewives’ contrasting reactions – finding it lovely and boring, respectively – represented a fair microcosm (BBC WAC, VR/65/171). Some who found it highly charming nevertheless had to admit the story was ‘a little trivial’, while antagonists branded it ‘piffle’ and ‘one of the most stupid plays I have ever sat through’ (ibid.). There was some anguished critique of the oddly brutal killing of Copper the cat: ‘striking a very jarring note in an otherwise peaceful setting’ (ibid.).

Like the critics, viewers loved Billy Russell, and there was admiration of the resemblance of Leo Genn to Ronald Colman; Genn and Murray’s popularity was noted, the latter playing a ‘spoilt, peevish wife’ (ibid.). Positive response to the production indicates there were mainly domestic interiors, but also ‘outdoor shots’ which created a realistic impression of village life. The two cats were termed ‘delightful’ by one group of viewers (ibid.).

There seems almost to have been a 50:50 split in 1965 Wednesday Plays so far between the challenging and the comparatively anodyne; boundary pushing plays in form and/or content versus plays within existing popular genres. Now, I’d be mildly interested in seeing this if it was ever recovered. While I grew up with cats and still like them, I’m now a confirmed dog owner. While there sounds like there’d be some interest in Russell’s performances and the social class tensions between the women, it really does sound like potentially annoyingly silly fare, and might make even A Little Temptation seem like challenging and cutting-edge by comparison!

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.12: ‘Moving On’ (BBC1, 24 March 1965)

02.12: Moving On (BBC One, Wednesday 24 March 1965) 9:50 – 11:05pm

Directed by Brian Parker; Written by Bill Meilen; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Natasha Kroll; Music by Don Lawson

This play is set in 1952, with the Korean War ongoing. It follows a young medical orderly Thomas (David Collings), who shoots a friend with a sten gun, it seems by accident. Thomas is sent to a military prison in Japan, run by a motley range of Staff officers from the Anglosphere.

Tucker doubts whether Thomas, who brands a “killer”, really did kill his friend accidentally, and pursues a vendetta, planning to break him seemingly just out of base malevolence and prejudice. Tucker is a bully and disliked and feared by the other prisoners, and also by his superiors, who want to sack him, but need evidence – which isn’t easy, as Tucker is a wily operator.

Not exactly wily operating, but no one reins him in one bit after this…

The Radio Times emphasises how things ‘can get really nasty when small bitter men like Staff Sergeant Tucker (Peter Jeffrey) ‘little men in big boots,’ get too much power’, stressing how writer Bill Meilen knew the terrain (18 March 1965, page unidentified). Interviewed by the Daily Mirror, Meilen, a Welsh actor, notes he was a National Serviceman during the Korean War and spent six months in military prison during his three years in Korea and Japan: “My play is based on my own experiences. Everything in the play actually happened… except the ending.” (24 March 1965, p. 16). Clifford Davis’s article notes how Meilen wrote this, his debut play, in five days, at 12 pages a day, and that the BBC have also bought his second play, Sayonara Harada Hideko‘ (ibid). Meilen also claimed to be working on a first feature film treatment on the Seng Henydd Colliery disaster of 1913 in which 432 Welsh miners were killed, with the aim of investigating “who was to blame” (ibid.).

Moving On is mostly a multicamera studio piece, shot on video-tape, but it also has a few notable film sequences, mixing the mainstay of confined scenes with some bits of action which open it all out. Writer Bill Meilen (1932-2006), Cardiff-born, like his protagonist ‘Taffy’ Thomas, acted in Z Cars, Armchair Theatre and the like. And, I’m going to call it: he is surely the only Wednesday Play or Play for Today alumni to have acted in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004)…!

Rating: *** / ****

The play has some incisive subtle commentary on male groups and the petty orderliness of the cleaning rituals the prisoners are subjected to. Staff Sgt Tucker, who demands to be called “Staff”, and his superiors, emphasise the military side of this military prison, though RSM Harry Edwards (Godfrey Quigley) and Staff Pierson (Jack Watson) adopt a more laconic tone and, being far physically more imposing and tougher than Tucker, don’t need to throw their weight around. Tucker indeed asks two juniors, including the Scottish prisoner Jock, to beat Thomas up, one of whom refuses. He furtively hides his own bullying agenda through such delegation.

It is one of several male-dominated Wednesday Plays so far, to the extent of a 100% male cast. This play, as with others by Robert Holles, Keith Dewhurst, Willis Hall, John McGrath and Charles Wood, explores the impacts of a lack of any overt feminine presence. Edwards’s somewhat Machiavellian plans to steer Tucker into exposing himself so they can fire him backfire spectacularly in the stark finale in the Armoury, whereby Thomas corners Tucker with a gun and kills him. Then he takes his own life.

This play benefits from Natasha Kroll’s excellent set design – chalked handwritten signs, organised wall charts with names, carefully placed dust – and Brian Parker’s subtly kinetic direction clearly puts us in this godforsaken carceral environment.

The viewer spies O’Brien’s hidden brush!

Moving On feels of its times in not necessarily caring about casting people who are from the correct places – Bristol-born Jeffrey playing a man from Huddersfield, Irish actor Godfrey Quigley playing a Welshman-turned-Aussie, etc. While largely, this does not bother me and most accents are well performed, Eric Thompson’s accent veers between Birmingham, Liverpool and more generic Northern. This isn’t helpful in establishing authenticity given he plays a character nicknamed ‘Scouse’ who claims to be from Liverpool! Southern English David Collings manages better with a Welsh accent as the tortured central protagonist. This is a slight but tangible complaint; notably enough, Brian Parker became well known for making dramas usually set well outside London, including many Plays for Today via David Rose’s English Regions Drama unit at Pebble Mill. He clearly gradually learned the importance of place specificity.

The play has an added social urgency when you reflect on how young men just out of school were conscripted into the Army to fight in theatres of war like Korea, Kenya and Malaya: a fundamentally illiberal state of affairs we should not want to reinstate, despite rash and shallow political clamour in favour. The play also speaks to how dismally such male-dominated environments fail at nurturing people, simply generating repeated cycles of repression and violence. Not entirely unlike the virtual-infecting-the-real-world ‘manosphere’ which a certain new Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham Netflix drama, Adolescence (2025) has just pertinently exposed.

It’s odd, and a shame, that Bill Meilen had just one other screenplay made (The Division for ITV in 1967), as this is very good work.

Best Performance: PETER JEFFREY

Most other actors in a strong ensemble are just right, too – Godfrey Quigley and Jack Watson, especially. But it has to be Peter Jeffrey. I’ve been used to seeing Jeffrey in more assuredly establishment roles, invariably sporting a moustache. In 1978 alone, Jeffrey is remarkable for a flamboyant guest star actor turn as the villain in Doctor Who‘s ‘The Androids of Tara’ and an incisive contribution as part of a vast ensemble in Play for Today’s Destiny.

Clean-shaven here, he plays a clearly insecure, bullying Staff Sergeant, capturing a nervous energy and posturing swagger. Jeffrey conveys exactly how this man is a misfit, overpromoted and wielding power for his own sadistic pleasure. The crucial scene is where he tries to explain to his superior Harry why he thinks Thomas is lying, using a barely even half-digested psychoanalytical theory he once encountered. In the same scene, he mangles an Australian poem, conveying his flailing attempts to assimilate, being shown up by Harry’s following correct rendition.

Jeffrey is superb at conveying a fundamentally limited man whose presences at being a thinker and a leader are exposed within a tightly plotted play. Familiar barked orders are at times shrieked at a pitch which seems absurdly camp in its performative aggression. Tucker wears a custodian helmet, with the strap hanging loosely around the mouth, not underneath the chin, resembling a certain PC George Dixon. But he isn’t a cosy reassuring figure, but possesses ‘a warped sense of Justice’ (Staffordshire Sentinel, 24 March 1965, p. 6).

Audience size: 8.91 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (Enquiry / Jazz 625 with Buck Clayton / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Circus Comes to Town, from the Belle Vue, Manchester / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 76%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: Moving On was widely reviewed; furthermore, the notices were by and large highly positive all over the UK. This was matched by a now typically large audience size, and the highest RI to date for any Wednesday Play.

Mary Crozier gave a textbook mixed review, admiring its compulsiveness, Parker’s taut and speedy direction, Collings’s moving performance of ‘quiet intensity’ and Jeffrey’s ‘tremendous […] terrifying’ characterisation, while bemoaning ‘a one-track play’ whose events had dubious ‘credibility’ and whose brutality was morally questionable (Guardian, 25 March 1965, p. 9). In contrast, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer found it ‘properly detestable’, without restoring to [Jimmy] ‘Porteresque ranting’: ‘its incidents are painful and its climax shocking, but its attitude justifies it’ (25 March 1965, p. 16). Parker’s direction again found favour, as having ‘the necessary unrelenting vigour’, with David Collings being seen by TV cameras as ‘an actor predestined to suffering’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood accorded, finding it brutal but well-written, with strong performances all round and Jeffrey the stand-out; she noted Meilen’s qualification to create an authentic play, evoking ‘the degradation, the extreme discipline, the excess of “shining” and, when power gets into wrong hands, the sadism’ (Daily Telegraph, 25 March 1965, p. 19). Philip Purser quite liked a ‘tough melodrama’, with Jeffrey’s ‘splendid’ performance, but questions the RSM being presented so positively, as ‘by definition there are no good guys in a glasshouse’ (Sunday Telegraph, 28 March 1965, p. 15). Purser draws implicit parallels with Douglas Livingstone’s debut play for ATV, also on a military theme, I Remember the Battle, which concerns a grudge (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson shrewdly noted how closed community settings – army units and prisons – made good plays alone and even better when combined as here, calling Meilen’s play ‘another telly tour de force‘ (Observer, 28 March 1965, p. 25). This ‘atrociously convincing’ play was somewhat problematic in appealing to the audience’s own ‘latent sadism’ and ‘righteous indignation’, but it ‘was an eyeball jerker’ (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin made an astute comparison with Ray Rigby’s The Hill (1965), a Sidney Lumet-directed film to be released in cinemas within three months later – while praising Meilen and Parker’s work on a taut, able and authentic play (Sunday Times, 28 March 1965, p. 26).

Marjorie Norris was, again, an astute commentator, highlighting how even the compassionate and just seeming RSM Edwards and Staff Pierson allow Tucker’s bullying to go on in order to be able to dismiss him rather than stop it when they can, adding they want to ‘get rid of him not because of his brutality but simply because he got on their nerves with his irritating chatter’ (Television Today, 1 April 1965, p. 12). In a glowing review, Norris reflected on the perennial quality of the Thomas-Tucker conflict, also noting the ‘telling’ impassivity of the prisoners when Thomas is beaten up, showing chilling masculine evasiveness (ibid.). She was also a rare critic to mention the exterior scenes, such as when Thomas has to run in boots too small for him: ‘I felt every wincing step he took’ (ibid.).

In a balder, but still positive, comment, Frederick Laws found it ‘quite horrible’, noting it would make useful propaganda for the abolition of military punishment camps: ‘Well-balanced audiences will quietly swear to reform’ them ‘out of existence, we may hope’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575).

Regional reviews were broadly positive. ‘Argus’ noted the play lacked ‘one ounce of humour or charity’, but how this ‘unrelieved tragedy’ was ‘strangely compelling’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 25 March 1965, p. 17). M.G. had seen a similar themed play on stage recently, but found this a ‘splendid’ TV production, with ‘at times brilliantly dramatic’ direction; Jeffrey’s ‘screaming commands […] reducing his prisoners to the state of cowed animals’ (Liverpool Echo, 25 March 1965, p. 5).

Similarly, Peter Quince had shuddered at the thought of watching this, but was ‘remorselessly drawn in’ to a play which ‘made sense’ and was excellently produced and acted, even if it felt like watching ‘a bloody boxing affray’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 27 March 1965, p. 5). Quince asked:

But now, having wrung our withers with a succession of heavies, could not the Wednesday Play people, without falling back on the “Anyone for tennis?” lark, find something a little lighter and frothier and with a trace of laughter and, above all, of hope about it? (ibid.)

Quince also described the primary setting as a ‘Commonwealth detention centre’, indicating the international collaboration between the UK and Australia within this Japan-based institution (ibid.).

The audience was both large and highly appreciative (RI 76!), notable as yet another Wednesday Play to best the ITV competition – showing James MacTaggart’s eclectic yet reliably powerful mix of dramas was winning over, and forming, substantial publics. Viewers felt its tension and were sympathetically engaged by Thomas’s plight, with many noting its human vividness and feeling personally involved (VR/65/160). Accuracy and sharpness was felt to mitigate the revolting nature of the story; many were sorry and moved by the ending, but saw it is fully in keeping with the play’s picture of life in a glasshouse (ibid.).

While there were some quibbles over access to the Armoury being so easy, there was notable praise from

Several viewers who had themselves been in the Army for some time were particular to say that they did not doubt the authenticity of much that was seen in the play (ibid.).

Collings, Thompson and Jeffrey’s performances were all praised, with the latter’s ‘portraiture’ being ‘described as a most valid study of sadism or least paranoia’; the production was admired for ‘conveying the feeling of man existing in confined quarters’ (ibid.).

Letters to the press largely fell into line with the BBC sample. However, a Mrs H.D.W. wrote in anger to decry the play’s ‘brutality’, taking a Whitehouse-like position: worrying about ‘young thugs, lapping it up and getting new ideas for attacks on some defenceless person ?’ (Manchester Evening News, 27 March 1965, p. 8). However, two public letters to the Glasgow Sunday Mail were highly complimentary (28 March 1965, p. 16). I. Brown of E2 Glasgow commended one of the best plays ‘in years’, with ‘superb’ acting and ‘authentic settings’ making a ‘change from the weird efforts served up so often in this series’ (ibid.). G.W. Smith of Leith, Edinburgh 6 mused philosophically:

Sadism alongside rough but kindly decency – typical army justice. I felt relief mingled with regret when Taffy solved his problems. This is the stuff to maintain the B.B.C.’s prestige. (ibid.)

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.11: ‘A Little Temptation’ (BBC1, 17 March 1965)

02.11: A Little Temptation (BBC One, Wednesday) 9:25 – 10:40pm

Directed by Peter Duguid; Written by Thomas Clarke; Produced by James MacTaggart; Script Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Michael Wield.

The first BBC Glasgow production so far, but oddly this is ‘a comedy of manners’ set in Hampstead (Torbay Herald Express, 13 March 1965, p. 4). This makes it more a play which actually fits Philip Martin’s shorthand view of what Play for Today generally was than, say, The Bevellers (1974). Compared with Roddy McMillan’s gritty, incisive work play, this is an entirely domestic story, involving Ella Cartwright (Barbara Jefford), separated, and Vincent (Denholm Elliott), unhappily married, who is having an affair with her. Vincent, a middle-aged poet, is annoyed by Ella taking in various random strays, like a young secretary Celia (Caroline Mortimer), ‘a semi-permanent resident in the house’ and a Nigerian student Dan (Harry Baird) (Radio Times, 11 March 1965, p. 37). Ella’s ‘worldly-wise’ daughter Heather keeps rats in the sitting-room (ibid.). Vincent’s irritation grows due to constant interruptions from Ella’s various other household residents.

The Coventry Evening Telegraph notes how Hampstead is ‘where, the play suggests, people spend all their time embracing progressive causes and each other’, claiming that ‘their enlightened attitudes make their personal problems more complicated’ (17 March 1965, p. 2). This prose feels a muddled mix of regurgitated press release and standard, anti-‘modish’ smugness. Bill Smith moans about recent ‘distinctly “odd”‘ TV plays, hoping that A Little Temptation would not be ‘”another of those queer things”‘; presumably he is meaning Horror of Darkness there (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 17 March 1965, p. 13). Smith notes how the ‘odd-ball’ assortment of people in Ella’s abode includes Celia, who he brands ‘a chick’ and who ‘makes a play for Vincent (ibid.).

I gather its writer Thomas Clarke probably isn’t the Tom Clarke who wrote notable Plays for Today screened in 1972 and 1978, and he isn’t even mentioned in any of the previews. There are no interviews with any of the cast, the Felling-born director Peter Duguid (1923-2009), nor producer MacTaggart. Duguid, initially an actor, was, oddly, nearly cast as the lead in Doctor Who in 1963, but he had enrolled on a BBC director’s training programme (Michael Coveney, Guardian, 25 May 2009). Of course, the part went to William Hartnell, with whom Duguid had appeared in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963), playing a small-d doctor! Duguid became a prolific director on Callan from 1967-72 and settled in Hampstead Garden Suburb for a long time (ibid.). Intriguingly, Coveney mentions Duguid’s association with George Devine at the Old Vic and the Royal Court, and then James MacTaggart at the BBC but how ‘he unwittingly fell out of step with the political tide in the drama department’, which came to a head with a 1965 Wednesday Play we will come to… (ibid.)

Rating ** / ****

I really took against this at first when trying to watch it at night, and indeed it took me a full second viewing to even finish it. When watched at a more relaxed Saturday morning hour, its socio-cultural interest became a lot clearer and I could enjoy the performances, to a degree. Initially, I was just annoyed at the people and the setting. There are very long scenes packed with floridly verbose dialogue. This isn’t always a bad thing, but as a view of domestic life in 1965 Hampstead, it felt a tad superficial.

Indeed, Clarke’s social and political observations are awkwardly scattergun. He does repeatedly get across the point that young people live for the day due to the atom or H bomb, thereby contrasting Celia with Ella, ten years older, and Vincent, twenty years her senior. Its breezily cynical tone feels more akin to Tom Clarke’s Victims of Apartheid (1978) than the open idealism of Barrie Keeffe’s Waterloo Sunset (1979).

Where it’s most interesting is in portraying Ella as a heart-on-her-sleeve earth mother, who opens her home to all and sundry, while holding down a job on a £2,000 salary at a small advertising agency, where she appreciates being able to let off steam about her dislike of advertising! You take to her all the more when we hear of her expressing a political belief in favour of boycotting a canned fruit product from a “neo-fascist” regime. Presumably a reference here to Apartheid South Africa…? In contrast, Celia has an increasingly acquisitive materialism and sex obsession. Ella’s talk, so often about, rather than with, Dan the Nigerian student is clumsy – e.g. pulling him over at the house party to correct somebody’s claims about Ghana. However Celia makes several outright racist comments about him, and the play’s decision to make Dan – according to her – sexually aggressive in an offstage incident, is a cultural stereotype out of keeping with how he is presented otherwise.

The play’s mixed record is clear in how it vacillates between this scene and Dan’s reasonably eloquent dialogue about falling in love with the city of Lagos and out of love with the village he came from. There is also odd discordance between Ella’s righteousness at work and this otherwise liberal-left earth mother’s implied homophobic attitudes in being worried about her son being at public school and ending up being frightened of girls. I suppose it’s all part of that yawn-worthy, if occasionally relevant, cultural mode: the satire of liberal hypocrisy. Earlier, in a scene aimed to show Ella’s intellectual knowledge, she describes one of Celia’s friends who purports to be Marxist as more of a “queer”, in a manner Clarke and Jefford do not clearly establish as being approving or disapproving: which conveys something of what is meant to be Ella’s practical, loose brand of liberalism.

The acting burnishes the play reasonably well, but they have a difficult job communicating anything deep; it’s all just life’s a muddle and – hey, yes! – we’re going to have that final shot of the fish in the bowl. There’s simply a resigned air about Vincent at the end as Ella has taken in another stray young woman, Julia: he now tolerates this home which is clearly akin to his previous characterisation of Black culture as ‘pell mell’. This comedy doesn’t make this liberalised microcosmic environment seem humanly vivid enough to make this ending chime as sufficiently happy or wise, though.

The occasional music, invariably upbeat piano-led jazz – with vibraphone audible at the end – summarises the light gloss of urban sophistication being depicted. Costuming generally seems apt. Vincent’s jacket has those classic elbow patches, which you would still see on ageing male teachers into the 1990s.

Ultimately, there are too few events or actions of consequence or significance, beyond Vincent haphazardly moving in and his smugly gentlemanly rebuttal of Celia’s nymphomaniacal advances. While Clarke is to be mildly commended for created two relatively substantial roles for women here, you get the distinct impression it’s written from Vincent’s perspective of baffled, profesedly non-political amusement. Always be wary of such disavowals!

So, a telling play to watch as a window into 1965 representations, and how modern Britain’s secular loosening was seen through a comedic lens. But it is as guilty as any ‘slice-of-life’ play of lacking a consequential or structured narrative. The performances elevate it into something very watchable and interesting, even if it’s perfectly understandable that many – then and now – would want to switch off such a play with its setting playing to hackneyed Hampstead cliches – or, to be generous, archetypes.

Best Performance: BARBARA JEFFORD

Barbara Jefford (1930-2020) is excellent here, really showing how the modern liberal career woman, but with conflicting morals. Her domestic habitat shows the incipient Elizabeth David and Terence Conran type middle-class aesthetic in an earlier phase than certain 1970s Plays for Today. Initially, Jefford reminded me of Jane Arden, in hairdo and voice, and clearly bears the accumulated gravitas of her major experiences in theatre.

Jefford always ensures that Ella’s garrulous nattering was intelligent, wherever the script enabled this, and made her a likeable protagonist, who does play off well against the gnarled middle-class pomposity of Denholm Elliott (1922-92). Jefford conveys a fusion of warmth and intensity that contrasts with Caroline Mortimer’s distinctly brattish hedonistic nihilism and performative sexy posing with her arm in the air, as in the contrived and silly scene where Celia tries to seduce Vincent.

Jefford is described by Michael Coveney as the ‘leading classical actor of her generation’ when at the Old Vic in 1956-61, able to shift between ‘intensity and stillness’, ‘joyful exuberance’ and ‘majesty and a grandeur’ (Guardian, 16 September 2020). She was later to play Molly Bloom in the film of Ulysses (1967) and a charity worker in the PfT Edna, The Inebriate Woman (1971) and worked with Stephen Frears on several occasions. She was the youngest civilian to be awarded an OBE, in the very year of 1965…

Best line: “I tolerate my job, because I’m permitted an occasional protest at what it stands for…” (Ella)

“Oh come on, love, we’ll never have time for the drink” (Ella, may as well be to the viewer here) had been my initially flippant thought. But it had to be one of her occasional more developed pithy displays of wit. Indeed, Ella also has a good go at Britain’s “dreary hypocrisy”. It’s a shame really that the play doesn’t more directly revolve around Ella’s verbal barbs. There’s no one really for her to joust with in a sufficiently dramatic or entertaining way.

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 51.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / Turn Again Ted, with Ted Ray / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (Night Spot / Wish Upon a Star)

Audience Reaction Index: 42%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: Not that many London critics reviewed it, but the response was largely positive from those who did; there was a stark divide with critics outside the metropole – the two who bothered to assess it disliked it. The audience reaction was generally more in line with the regional critics and my own response to it, though some of the play’s assailants put too fine a moral point on it.

The anonymous Times reviewer drew the lesson from an ‘admirably moral, quietly hilarious’ play that marriage is easier than a liaison (18 March 1965, p. 9). They pick up on Clarke’s conservative intention, describing Ella’s home’s ‘atmosphere of hardly bearable emancipation’, praising his ‘cool gravity’ in allowing the viewer to ‘realize for himself [sic] the appalling implications of Ella’s emotional hothouse’ (ibid.). They praised the central trio of actors, including how Jefford conveyed Ella’s key grasp of others’ weaknesses – ‘a means of achieving a total emotional dictatorship’ – and Mortimer’s ‘study of a tigress in embryo’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood also praised a ‘sophisticated, nicely buoyant comedy’ about ‘Courtship a la mode’, handled expertly by the actors, which produced ‘a healthy amount of chuckles’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 March 1965, p. 19).

Maurice Richardson notes that the play answered a viewer’s request on Points of View directly beforehand, for a TV equivalent of Dodie Smith, having ‘distinct strong Dodie-ish affinities’ (Observer, 21 March 1965, p. 24). He noted how the characters including Celia, ‘the irresponsible semi-beat girl-lodger’ were close to an updated take on Smith’s ‘unforgettable ambience’ (ibid.). He far preferred this play to John Hopkins’s latest Armchair Theatre, liking the ‘devilish viewable’ antics of the characters, and Clarke’s ‘cunning playwright’s knack’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws was critical of the play’s ‘fatuous’ ideas concerning ‘the principles and conduct of progressive persons, left-wing idealists, Nigerian students, and ‘the young”, also finding Vincent’s later development of intelligence and understanding too ‘sudden and unlikely’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws identifies Ella’s richly paradoxical quality in terming her ‘bossy but permissive’, while identifying Celia’s mercenary materialism in going ‘directly on the make’ (ibid.).

Bill Edmund concurred more with the other reviewers, finding it ‘delightful’ and ‘modern’, comparing it oddly to Noel Coward, French farce and the Goons (Television Today, 25 March 1965, p. 12). Edmund seemed startled by how irresistible Caroline Mortimer was, but understood Vincent’s resistance due to how Jefford made Ella ‘a lovable person’ (ibid.). He admired how Michael Wield’s sets – ‘cluttered with books and divan beds and burnt toast’ – aided Clarke’s comedy (ibid.).

Among a notably minimal response outside the capital, T.J.D. found it ‘ineffectual’ and unfunny: ‘slow, superficial and [which] induced no response other than irritation’ (Leicester Mercury, 18 March 1965, p. 10). They took a moralistic view, calling daughter Heather’s acceptance of the affair ‘pitiful and squalid’, which in itself ruined the play, which had capable performances but which were ‘to no purpose at all’ (ibid.). M.G. similarly found it insubstantial and ‘laboured’, with a ‘fine’ cast struggling with the ‘superficiality’ of their characters (Liverpool Daily Post, 18 March 1965, p. 6).

Audience reaction included a 2% higher RI than Horror of Darkness, but with notably fewer polarising scores of A+ and C- (BBC WAC, VR/65/145). A group of viewers liked its character development and how it exposed the ‘modern untidy and sloppy conception of individual morality’ (ibid.). Among those not impressed, they was at least the telling comment that it had ‘no one actually “nuts” or a “queer”, just “living in sin”‘, which gives an idea of hierarchies of attitudes to different deviant behaviours in 1965 (ibid.). Most, though, just expressed boredom at watching people without morals or purpose, with others highlighting the shapeless plot and lack of interesting incident (ibid.).

The cast however were acclaimed, Jefford and Mortimer especially so, with the latter praised by a Housewife for conveying Celia’s personality development ‘from that of a moody teenager to that of a woman with ambition and awareness of herself’ (ibid.). Denholm Elliott made the most of this ‘somewhat ‘seedy’ character’, according to some (ibid.). Production comments were limited to some awed admiration of Ella’s Hampstead home – ‘what a comfortable living-room they had’ – annoying doors ‘forever banging and swinging’ and Heather’s ‘ridiculous’ clothes (ibid.).

Adding to the somewhat negative audience response, Mrs. O. Scott of Loundsley Green, Chesterfield, noted her own household had switched off ‘in disgust’, asking, pointedly – and not unfairly: ‘When will we sever see a play with some action in it, instead of a load of inane chatter?’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 March 1965, p. 22).

While I would say I liked watching this much more eventually than Ashes to Ashes, it was a case of a disappointing, rather ill-planned play fitting far too neatly into some people’s mistaken thumbnail idea of the typical topical Wednesday Play about, and of, the ‘chattering classes’. For once, I am fairly in accord with audience and regional critics’ views, even if my reasoning differs in some respects. But it’s definitely a pleasure to watch these actors at work. While Denholm Elliott clearly doesn’t have the material here to match Nothing but the Best (1964), he is always going to be watchable. Barbara Jefford uses her vast Shakespearean experience to bring considerable life to what could easily have been a caricatured straw women.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.10: ‘Horror of Darkness’ (BBC1, 10 March 1965)

02.10: Horror of Darkness (BBC One, Wednesday 10 March 1965) 9:25 – 10:35pm

Directed by Anthony Page; Written by John Hopkins; Produced by James MacTaggart; Script Editor: Vincent Tilsley; Designed by Tony Abbott.

Now, we arrive at a major Wednesday Play, whose context is vital to outline before we begin: it was only in 1967 when gay sex in private between men over 21 was decriminalised in the UK. The Glasgow Daily Record provides a good summary of the narrative and tone of John Hopkins’s second Wednesday Play of 1965:

Peter is a free-lance commercial artist and Cathy holds an undemanding job that enables her to cope with the constant demands involved in living with him.

On their doorstep one morning arrives Robin, a friend the couple are delighted to put up. But after a few days the relationship of the three people in the house takes on a new and disturbing meaning. (10 March 1965, p. 16)

Peter Young (Alfred Lynch) used to know Robin Fletcher (Nicol Williamson) in their art school days and is now settled in an unmarried relationship with Cathy (Glenda Jackson) in a luxurious London flat. Robin has given up his day job as a teacher due to success he claims in having a short story published in a magazine under the pseudonym Philip Moss; he subsequently has a play staged in London too and brings a party crowd to Peter and Cathy’s house where we hear distant bustle and upbeat jazz music playing.

James Green notes that the Morden-raised Londoner and Cambridge-educated Hopkins’s extremely prolific TV scriptwriting output, while noting Horror of Darkness had cost £10,000 to make and been shot back in March 1964 (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, 3 February 1965, p. 2). Green reveals this play – described by Hopkins as “A rather grim play about human relationships” – was held back from broadcast due to the BBC being ‘under critical fire for presenting too many grim and kitchen-sink dramas’ (ibid.).

Eight days later, Fred Billany’s article reveals, in dated language, ‘PERVERSION PLAY WILL BE SHOWN’, indicating that a year on it would finally be screened on BBC One (Aberdeen Press And Journal, 11 February 1965, p. 2). The Observer revealed it had been shot on 3 March 1964 and due for transmission on 14 March as ‘BBC brows were raised’ over the play (7 March 1965, p. 23). Jean Woodhams indicates that the BBC now felt ‘something a little stronger’ was now permissible, given how the present Wednesday Play was ‘concentrating on lighter drama’, thus they could not be ‘accused of having a pre-occupation with the seamier side of life’ (Derby Evening Telegraph, 8 March 1965, p. 13).

The Liverpool Daily Post previewed more circumspectly, branding it ‘a new slant to the eternal triangle theme’ (6 March 1965, p.8). The Observer noted it uses Hopkins’s ‘favourite technique : close examination of character, little plot’, while also quoting him on the benefits of the TV medium:

you can use more words than in the cinema and yet be more intimate than in the theatre. You’re communicating personally with your audiences of one or two. They are reticent of reaction, but when you do get them it’s marvellous. I remember watching a Bobby Wilson match at Wimbledon on TV. I got so excited that even though I was alone I found myself applauding shots. (op. cit.)

Rarely among the press previews, the Scotsman highlight the salient fact that Lynch and Williamson had recently appeared as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, in the first UK revival of Waiting for Godot on stage at the Royal Court, directed by none other than Anthony Page (10 March 1965, p. 16).

A later article, around the time George Melly hailed Talking to a Stranger as ‘television’s first authentic masterpiece’ reveals something of Hopkins’s tastes and methods and his ear-to-the-ground cultural antennae, noting his research for Z Cars sitting in police cars and looking through logbooks in Liverpool, and how he listens to Radio Caroline, reads Peanuts and ‘is wild about Dusty Springfield’; he is quoted: ‘When it’s going, everything is relevant. I’m not in the market for polished sentences.’ (Observer, 30 October 1966, p. 23).

Rating **** / ****

This is a deeply affecting, contained domestic drama of tortured interpersonal relationships. This drama overtly engages with gay experience, comparably to Simon Gray’s oblique 1970s TV plays. While it does emphasise gay lives’ bleakness and tragic outcomes and therefore was part of a narrative paradigm that needed escaping historically, its sheer transgressive power and incisive honesty emphasise its truth for its times: so it ought to be celebrated.

As well as the (gradually) openly gay Robin and the repressed Peter, there is a portrait of Peter and Cathy’s ‘free’ open relationship which isn’t all that open really, and isn’t bringing any happiness to either of them. Peter has allowed his life to be dominated completely by work and its deadlines. His commercial drawings for a magazine bring no joy to his life, but have enabled their home to be filled with all the mod cons befitting an affluent London flat, as Cathy shows Robin in a significant early scene. Therefore, this play’s elliptical style is also well grounded in sociological and journalistic observed detail.

A workaholic pattern is bound up with emotional repression, while Peter’s clear communication difficulties could, tentatively, indicate his potential neurodivergence. In contrast to Peter, invariably sedentary at his work desk which dominates the sitting room, Robin by contrast is garrulous and physically mobile, and has a love of 1930s jazz dance band music and showtunes, which he plays in the same space which he occupies. Cathy expresses her dislikes of his music tastes, in a pungent line!

Cathy has a zesty modern spirit and a sardonic humour, which makes it all the more significant that she is generally so tolerant of Peter’s customary inattention to her. Yet, the finale where she finally leaves, symbolically for “Florence, Paris, Rome”, is an Ibsen-like moment: rejecting Peter and the loveless environment, entirely necessary for the play and logical for her subtly formidable character.

While it doesn’t deviate too from naturalism, director Anthony Page deploys artistic visual framings and sequences, as when there is a zoom out from Peter and Cathy on the staircase, one of many vividly stylised images of human distance and discord in a shattering play.

In a five minute sequence (c.37-42 mins) dialogue recedes and we have several pieces of music of a frenzied classical nature used alongside fast cuts between scenes of the trio apart, often joylessly doing household chores, or, in Robin’s case, occupying the fancy leather armchair, stretching out in frustration, or is that desolation? :

We see him from a high angle, emphasising his ultimate disempowerment and odd dependency within this unconventional domestic setup. This sequence is at the absolute core of the play, as is the unbearably tragic flashback at the end that Peter sees of himself and Robin running happily with a dog in the woods when he is having sex with Micaela. While Peter’s forcing himself on Micaela is undoubtedly problematic, well, Peter is a problematic human being; in addition, ultimately she does provide some consent, agreeing provided the act is not in the bed where Robin killed himself.

This was my second viewing – after 19 August 2023 when I called it ‘magnificent’ – and I’d forgotten the details, but what a superb range of performances and economical writing this is. It felt productively in the vortex of Pinter’s territorial dramas, where individuals vie for power over space. It also reminded me specifically of James Kelman’s haunting novel A Disaffection (1989), about a Glasgow teacher’s rejection of the nine-to-five, and subsequent ambiguous dissolution – terrain also navigated in the superb Inside No. 9 tale Tom and Gerri (2014).

I have recently watched Blue Jean (2022), a recent British film which is undoubtedly a more careful and responsible prospect, and provides a necessary socio-political reminder of the ghastly history and dire human consequences of Thatcher’s Clause 28 legislation. Acting, writing and vision are all impeccably sound in that film; however, I must say that this play contains deeper artistry in its ambiguity, subtlety and – actually – its mise-en-scene and use of music. I’d say both that film and this film, 57 years apart, are vital LGBTQ stories which deserve to be experienced.

Best Performance: NICOL WILLIAMSON

This is an utter fool’s errand as all three are magnificent, and the two smaller parts provide very able support*, but I had to go for the great mercurial stage and screen actor Nicol Williamson here as Robin Fletcher.

Williamson is an extraordinary actor, whose brilliance was acclaimed by Samuel Beckett. He is tremendous in similarly idiosyncratic, volatile roles in the Jack Gold-directed and John McGrath-written films** The Bofors Gun (1968) and The Reckoning (1969); but in each of these he feels utterly different to Robin, varying the acting idiolect he deploys.

As Robin, he conveys a fantasist whose sociability and need for companionship is real, but clearly often thwarted in the world. He clearly establishes how his love for Peter is for the old Peter of their art school days – that young man is now long submerged. Williamson has a nervous energy and sly dexterity, in verbal and bodily terms that makes Robin a compelling character: a dreamer lost in even the world of mid-1960s London which seems to be opening up.

*Heck, it’s also worth mentioning Wallas Eaton, utterly defines how to act in a small part: both subtle and deeply memorable.

**These two feature-films feel spectacularly close to the Wednesday Play/Play for Today tradition in a way few others manage. Kes (1969), of course, is another…

Best Line: “Now, if you want to do something badly enough, you’ve got to do it. You have got to.” (Robin)

Cathy’s response to Peter’s refusal to go out is also sardonic truth telling: “Oh, I know you’ve got work to do. Oh well, c’est la vie… It certainly is…”

Audience size: 7.92 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / One Good Turn / Tamara Karsavina: Portrait of a Ballerina), ITV (Night Spot / A Face in the Crowd / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 40%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: The play was very strongly admired by London critics, somewhat more meagre if still quite positive reaction outside London. However, the audience largely disliked it, showing a notable divergence from critical taste, though there was intelligent appreciation from a minority.

Gerald Larner noted how its shocks made it involving, but that such a ‘subtle and complex’ work deserved feature film length, as its narrative became jumpy and elliptical at 65 minutes (Guardian, 11 March 1965, p. 9). Larner admitted however that ‘the obscurities here gave an impression of truth and of depth that formula script editing frequently rejects’ and the excellent script was ‘a splendid vehicle’ for the distinguished cast, whose performances provided ‘considerable if occasionally harrowing pleasure’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood implied that the Pinter or Potter visitation-type narrative is a universal experience: ‘Most of us have experienced the uninvited, temporary guest who threatens to become a permanency’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p 19). Lockwood found its progression to a tragic ending effective, due ‘to what was left unsaid’ (ibid.). The anonymous Times reviewer was similarly effusive, in praising a play which exposed Peter’s ‘way of life which accepts responsibilities but rejects depths of feeling ; it is a tragedy of a man who has made himself an island’ (11 March 1965, p. 15). They gave fulsome praise of a ‘disturbing and at times painful, but […] totally unsentimental’ play which ‘treats youthful, casual ways of speech with mastery’, granting Williamson, Lynch and Jackson great scope for ‘nervously strained acting’ (ibid.).

Initially, Maurice Richardson seemed much as positive, claiming Horror of Darkness was ‘far and away’ Hopkins’s strongest TV play so far (Observer, 14 March 1965, p. 24). However, Richardson felt the ‘elaborate personal tangle was not really properly planted’, finding ‘the sardonic Scots psychopath”s suicide ‘artificially welded on’ and the events of the final act ‘even more contrived’ (ibid.). Notably, the same paper revealed Hopkins had yet another play on ITV the next week for Armchair Theatre, I Took My Little World Away, dealing with the aftermath of suicide (14 March 1965, p. 22).

Philip Purser reveals the prolific Hopkins had also worked on a televised ballet the same week, perceptively likening the five-minute dialogue-free sequence in the play to this (Sunday Telegraph, 14 March 1965, p. 13). He praises Hopkins not as a televisual innovator, but putting others’ showy devices to useful work: especially, the ‘stunning’ flashback near the end – which explained the underlying situation (ibid.). Purser notes all three Hopkins TV works of March 1965 centred on suicide, ‘the pit underlying civilized human society’, while feeling that the ‘very well observed undercurrents of envy’ contained deeper interest than ‘the homosexual undertow’ (ibid.). He noted how the two men both envy and despise each other’s contrasting lifestyles, providing the play’s main ‘tension’ (ibid.). While Purser felt Hopkins had ‘piled on’ the agony, he nevertheless acclaimed ‘very persuasive performances’ and ‘a superbly controlled late appearance by Wallas Eaton’, ending with a command to watch Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play tonight (ibid.).

The New Statesman‘s critic felt the play ‘as impressive’ as Fable and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play were ‘tiresome’, praising ‘powerful, jittery’ acting (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660). Bill Edmund was another to praise Wallas Eaton, knowing him previously from Take It From Here and other comedy shows, saying ‘his few minutes of screen time stole the play’ here (Television Today, 18 March 1965, p. 12).

Frederick Laws was also rather favourably disposed; while he emphasises Robin as ‘a homosexual, a layabout and dangerous’, he found excellent the ‘intolerable tension of the presence of the intruder and the almost benevolent rejection of him by the girl’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws signs off with praise of its matter of fact worldliness:

Remarkable and creditable that the play appeared to have no thesis about homosexuality but took it for granted that we would know there is a lot of it about. (ibid.).

Of non-metropolitan critics, one K.H. termed it ‘a first-class example of the television director’s art’, but the play itself ‘a morbid affair that must have driven many viewers over to the other channel or out to the ‘local’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p. 2). Possibly the same (?) reviewer ‘K.H.’ in a different newspaper said on its later repeat that Hopkins’s play remained ‘depressing […] black, uncomfortable’, and communicated very little, though admitted its saving grace was performances which were ‘deeply considered’ (Northants Evening Telegraph, 28 July 1966, p. 2).

An anonymous – and somewhat eccentric – review in the Scotsman revealed something of the play’s ambiguity, thoroughly taking against ‘the wretched Scot’ Robin:

[who] was so reminiscent facially of his lamentable countrymen of an earlier period, Darnley and his son James I and VI that his peculiarities almost seemed to have an historical justification, and came as no surprise.

With the spite and hysteria which makes such young gentlemen so embarrassing […] (11 March 1965, p. 15).

This review is highly positive, but seems to misread – or at least simplify – the play as deliberately showing ‘the trail of spiritual destruction resulting from such imbroglios’ (ibid.). Furthermore, they are delighted ‘There was no liberal-minded chatter about consenting adults in this piece; a positively Jacobean welter of gloom and catastrophe befell the hapless victims of fate’ (ibid.).

Peter Quince in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was so riveted and ensnared by the play that his precious pipe went cold (13 March 1965, p. 5)! Quince admired its ‘dramatic tension’ and ‘wholly serious study of a human predicament’, enacted through ‘performances of rare quality’:

Off hand, I cannot remember any television play which maintained such concentrated pulling power from its opening lines to its final curtain. (ibid.).

In contrast, B.L. failed to give any clear value judgement, simply claiming that this and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play showed he is ‘concerned, almost obsessed, with the idea of suicide and what drives people to end their lives’ (Belfast Telegraph, 15 March 1965, p. 7).

The only wholly negative response was a thin, tiresomely abhorrent expression of homophobia compounded by lazy anti-licence fee views, from Glasgow’s Sunday Post:

The B.B.C. has done it again. Their Wednesday play, “The Horror of Darkness,” had a homosexual in our living-rooms at a peak viewing time.

This is taking realism too far.

The B.B.C. want a bigger licence fee. It seems to us they’re taking too much licence already. (14 March 1965, p. 3)

Before dwelling on the specific reactions of viewers, it’s worth noting the very large audience, as L. Marsland Gander did: especially impressive and significant in the light of its ‘”extreme”‘ content (Daily Telegraph, 26 July 1965, p. 15). It did a public service to inform and educate people about gay love and desire in the context of its legal prohibition.

However, this clearly went over the heads of rather a large section of the audience (BBC WAC, VR/65/130). 21% gave it A or A+ scores with 52% giving it C or C-, thus leading to the lowest Reaction Index so far in our Wednesday Play story (ibid.). Some comments specifically echoed Mary Whitehouse’s aim to Clean Up TV. A draughtsman stated:

Maybe the play was for intellectuals and queers, but I know one thing – no-one in my office either enjoyed it or understood it (ibid.).

This rather nasty strain of majoritarian conformism was compounded by claims the setting was so huge that it ‘bore no relation to anywhere normal people would live’ (ibid.). This view seems naive, and tellingly resentful, in disputing the reality of large London abodes for well-off couples. It certainly indicated there was an Us and Them attitude among members of the BBC viewing panel.

However, a significant minority loved this play, more in line with London critical opinion, admiring the original framings and arrangings of scenes within ‘a profound study of loneliness in the younger generation’ (ibid.). Its intelligent avoidance of a moral attitude or indeed any simplistic focus on an ‘issue’ was perceptively commended:

the whole play was so much about people and so little about homosexuality as a thing in itself, and people are the ones that matter. (ibid.)

Ultimately, however, the jerkiness and dissonance of the whole play meant many in the public who were expecting Ashes to Ashes or Campaign for One simply weren’t going to enjoy this, hoodwinked by publicity using the hackneyed ‘eternal triangle’ type rhetoric. A compositor recognised that ‘The whole thing was like a nightmare, which is probably what the author intended’ (ibid.). This individual presumably didn’t like the play, as many viewers find empathising with very different people, situations and social settings in drama difficult, especially if any formal experimentation or narrative ellipses are employed…

There were several letters to the press. A June Grundy of 47 Meredith Road, Leicester attacked Lord Ted Willis for defending depictions of sex and aggression on TV, not wanting ‘immorality’ to be ‘presented to us for our light entertainment’ (Leicester Mercury, 16 March 1965, p. 4). As a P.S., Grundy said she’d written the letter just after watching Horror of Darkness, claiming it has put her in Mary Whitehouse’s camp: ‘The fact that the acting was brilliant merely heightened the impact of the loathsomeness of abnormal and degraded human sexual behaviour’ (ibid.).

Similarly, Mary Lisle of London SW3 was affronted, speaking from a silent majority type position, implicating David Frost and John Hopkins as self-obsessed people focusing on what is amusing or interesting and not ‘higher and better’ (Sunday Telegraph, 21 March 1965, p. 27). Lisle asked: ‘Must we watch a man throwing himself on a woman and gnawing amateurishly at her for three or four minutes? Never have any of us been so manhandled. Then why should we be treated to a specimen of their craft?’ (ibid.). Comparably, Mrs. E. Cooper felt a play with a ‘negative and hopeless outlook’ made ‘most undesirable viewing’ and called for ‘more wholesome material’ (Radio Times, 25 March 1965, page unidentified).

On the same page, reducing the margin to 3:1 against, came a positive response from the fine city of Leeds: a Mrs. K. Ewart simply pronounced it ‘perfectly written, perfectly acted, perfectly produced!’ (ibid.).

Claverley’s most famous self-promoting moralist Mary Whitehouse continued her Clean Up TV campaign with a comparatively subtler response to Horror of Darkness than to some other plays – if also one which implicitly attacks permissiveness and homosexuality being represented on screen (Television Today, 1 July 1965, p. 11). She admitted it was technically ‘brilliant’, but felt its material ‘old hat’ and wanted playwrights to ‘accept their share of responsibility for the problems with which the country is wrestling, and show concern for the state of mind in which they leave audiences.’ (ibid.) Whitehouse’s letter had been prompted by script editor Vincent Tilley’s attack on the CUTV campaign for its desire to censor TV drama and stop experimentation. She also evaluates another play repeated in the Wednesday Play slot – that we will come to before too long – as an example of what she feels is more socially responsible (ibid.).

In his column, Philip Purser revealed Whitehouse’s less guarded response to Hopkins’s play: ‘a deliberate attempt to preach suicide and despair to the impressionable and the lonely’ (Sunday Telegraph, 31 July 1966, p. 11). Purser explains how fictional plays work, as if to a child:

But it no more advocates these things than “Othello” recommends husbands to strangle their wives. It shows the plight in which people can trap themselves and shows it with great compassion and skill. Watching it through a second time I admired it even more than the first. (ibid.).

Purser also noted Whitehouse’s ignorance of who Hopkins was, or that he had ‘established some claim to respect’ (ibid.). Purser, at this stage a real drama afficianado, later retreating into crusty conservatism in attacking certain Plays for Today, occasionally in parallel to Whitehouse, though in more intellectual terms. However, in 1965 at least, Purser was on the side of progressive art. Also setting himself against the ‘British puritan Philistine’ tendency, Peter Black felt the idea of a Viewers’ Council to placate Whitehouse was probably unwise, as it might give her kind too much power. Black noted how it was ‘quite easy to justify’ repeating Up the Junction and Horror of Darkness ‘by reference to their objectives’, which were clearly sensitive and serious (ibid.).

By contrast, tabloid journalist Ken Irwin subsequently bracketed Hopkins’s play as an example of ‘weird, off-beat’ plays, alongside ITV’s The Avengers, a Public Eye episode with a gay character and It’s Dark Outside, as being part of ‘a “kinky” trend’ affecting British TV, or afflicting it, in his partial view (Daily Mirror, 24 April 1965, p. 15). Derek Bennett, producer of It’s Dark Outside – which starred Veronica Strong as Claire Martin, a promiscuous ‘gay girl-about-town’ – records that the postbag was 9:1 against his show, abusively calling it ‘filthy, disgusting and too sexy’, but argues, vitally:

I still think there is an audience for dramatic emotions and situations. But viewers must grow up and be more adult. [my emphasis] (ibid.).

The BBC, in one of its bolder historical phases under DG Hugh Carleton Greene, held its nerve this time. From July 1966, Horror of Darkness was one of twelve 1965 Wednesday Plays to be repeated on BBC One in the usual Wednesday Play time slot. A BBC spokesman claimed this repeat season demonstrated how the strand ‘provided intelligent discussion on important moral issues’ (Television Today, 9 June 1966, p. 11).

It is worth emphasising: an implied 1.66 million people liked or loved this play. How many of those did it inspire to become regular vanguard viewers of The Wednesday Play/Play for Today over the next two decades? A fair few, I’d surmise… One who definitely did was TV critic and historian of gay representation Keith Howes, whose words are apt to close this article. Howes told me he deliberately watched the play on TV in a separate room to his parents:

This is your life, really, you’re watching your life, and you think oh, I just don’t want to be
this, you know, I don’t want that at all. (interviewed by the author, 21 August 2020)

Howes also noted how Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) in The Theory Of Everything (2014) watched the play on TV, which brought it full circle and was apt given Hawking’s status as an LGBTQ ally.

— Many thanks again to John Williams for locating most of the cuttings

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.09: ‘Campaign for One’ (BBC1, 3 March 1965)

This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis.

02.09: Campaign for One (BBC One, Wednesday 3 March 1965) 9:30 – 10:45pm

Directed by Moira Armstrong; Written by Marielane Douglas & Anthony Church; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by John Hurst

This isn’t one I feel like I knew anything about, before researching it! While I’ve interviewed the fine director Moira Armstrong, I did not have the time to discuss her earlier Wednesday Plays. I had known nothing about the writers Marielaine Douglas and Anthony Church, and the press cuttings add zilch information about them. In some cursory web scouring, I’ve been able to glean that a Marielaine Douglas acted in three productions at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1964, including alongside Ian McKellen in a stage version of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And that she seems to have been a University friend of Margaret Atwood, married Church and died in 2014, by the signs of this tweet.

The Coventry Evening Telegraph emphasises Jeremy Kemp being formerly of Z Cars (3 March 1965, p. 2). Jack Bell’s very routine article focuses on the ‘Accent Brigade’ of mainly Canadian actors based in Britain who stand in for Americans in British screen works, listing Lionel Murton (also currently in Compact), Jerry Stovin and Robert Arden (Daily Mirror, 3 March 1965, p. 14).

The plot revolves around an astronaut Squadron-Ldr. Philip Osborne (Barry Foster), who spends ten days in space, but ‘During his mission he suddenly disobeys instructions and finally refuses to come down’ (Rugeley Times, 27 February 1965, p. 13), having reached ‘breaking point’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 27 February 1965, p. 8). Set in the USA in the near future, the Glasgow Daily Record trails it as a ‘tense drama’, questioning whether such a stint in space would have ‘any physical or mental effects’ (3 March 1965, p. 14). Squadron-Leader Jack Cooper (Jeremy Kemp) is the man on the ground ‘fighting against time for the survival of his friend in outer space [as] events move towards an equally drastic solution’ (Radio Times, 25 February 1965, p. 39).

I feel this is part of a run of plays covertly or overtly representing mental health issues – with Barry Foster’s two 1965 Wednesday Play protagonists and Stanley Baxter as Hazlitt being referred to as mad, eccentric or similar. Here, Phil is said to begin to ‘behave peculiarly’, refusing ‘to obey routine instructions’ (Torbay Herald Express, 3 March 1965, p. 4), to lose ‘control of his faculties’ (Observer, 28 February 1965, p. 22), or to have ‘cracked up’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 March 1965, p. 2), in the parlance of the time.

Interestingly, on the day of the play’s broadcast, the Daily Telegraph mentioned a constant spate of cases of ‘Mental and nervous breakdown’ coming to light concerning people who had served in both World Wars (3 March 1965, p. 20). This article is on behalf of the Ex-Services Mental Health Welfare Society, asks for donations and notes they can provide secure employment at their Thermega Electric Blanket Factory, and accommodation in hostels or cottage homes with families allowed to be present and psychiatric help available – or end their days in their Old People’s Home (ibid.).

Again, Campaign for One does not exist as a recording in the archives. It is a shame not to be able to see what is surely the closest The Wednesday Play or Play for Today ever got to the terrain of Countdown (1967), Marooned (1969), Solaris (1972), Moon (2009) and Gravity (2013).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 66.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton serial – episode 6 / Hollywood Palace variety / Newsroom), ITV (Night Spot / Colossus at the Crossroads – documentary on Trades Unions)

The main ITV opposition being a documentary on trade unions, implicitly a serious topic, surely helped this BBC play gain double the audience.

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 38.5%

Reception: One of the least reviewed plays, this received a fairly split verdict from the critics who did bother to assess it. Its large viewership however was rather more positive overall.

Mary Crozier saw this play as essentially televisual, and ‘highly dramatic’; she thought Phil’s resentment at being used as a ‘guinea-pig’, or as a ‘machine’, was credible (Guardian, 4 March 1965, p. 9). Ultimately, Crozier gave a mixed verdict: technically admiring it, including fast cutting between scenes, but feeling it was ‘much a thesis’ and not involving enough (ibid.). Crozier saw Jeremy Kemp as giving the ‘outstanding’ performance (ibid.).

Jeremy Kemp and Richmond Phillips in *Campaign* *for One*. Photo courtesy of *Liverpool Echo and* *Evening Express*.

The usual Anon Times reviewer criticised the depiction of the psychologist and felt ‘As is usually in this genre, technology and suspense were more profitable than the human problems involved in them’ (4 March 1965, p. 17). They felt that Foster stood out above the rest of the large cast: despite being ‘almost completely hidden in a space suit, managed to be considerably more real than the urgently active people down below him’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood expressed some reservations initially, but was won over by the ‘grand slam’ of ‘space, psychology and sex’ that Douglas and Church’s play provided, making ‘one sit up and goggle at the box, particularly towards the climax’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1965, p. 19).

Patrick Skene Catling felt palpably bored with its routine narrative and serious tone – compounded by the wider televisual offerings of the week – wishing ‘Good riddance’ to Philip and his wife: hoping the following week would bring ‘nothing but laughs’ (Punch, 10 March 1965, p. 368). In Wednesday Play terms, Catling might not quite have got his wish…!

In contrast, Frederick Laws found it the ‘most rewarding and cohesive’ play of the last three weeks: ‘The sulks and fury of the experimental man who chose not to come down were cleanly developed, and so was the anxiety and anger of his mate on earth, played by Jeremy Kemp’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws felt it was a rare play which included credible psychologist and journalist roles; he reveals the ending whereby Phil’s capsule is destroyed by a missile due to his rebellion and as he ‘might just be giving information to the other side in the cold war’ (ibid.). Laws thought this a politically logical, but dramatically ‘exaggerated’, conclusion (ibid.).

Outside London, reviews were few and far between. There were diverging views from two great cities. In Glasgow, ‘Argus’ felt that Foster’s ‘deranged’ astronaut was a ‘compelling’ protagonist, with his ‘brilliant’ performance making it far from the dull Play it could have been, but instead a ‘thought-provoking and immaculate production’ (Daily Record, 4 March 1965, p. 15). In Belfast, E. McI. indicated that Phil has a tiff with his wife, and that this ‘attempt to equate the cramped style of the eternal triangle with the vast range of outer space never really got off the launching pad’ (Belfast Telegraph, 4 March 1965, p. 11). They were disappointed how Foster’s appearances were just on a flickering TV screen and the lack of ‘filmed shots of the heavens’, resulting in an overly confined feeling studio piece (ibid.). They ultimately felt the situation developed ‘was more suited to comedy than dramatic outbursts’ (ibid.).

Viewers were largely hooked by the play’s suspense and admired a ‘shattering’ climax (BBC WAC, VR/65/117). For a smaller number, it dragged and some got tired of ‘too many people milling around to no avail’; scattered complaints about bad language were, however, outnumbered by viewers feeling gripped by the play (ibid.). While some questioned the American accents, acting was mostly acclaimed, especially Kemp and Foster (ibid.). Viewers generally admired the brisk pace and a Housewife commended the realism:

It was marvellous, the setting. I never once thought of it being done in a studio (ibid.)

There don’t seem to have been any letters published in the press from viewers; generally, my impression is of a play that went down well, if to a fairly muted extent. The main coda I’m aware of is that it was repeated on BBC Two on 3 September 1965 in the Encore slot at 8:20pm. It went up against another repeat, of Dr Finlay’s Casebook on BBC One.

A rare online mention is provided by Keith Topping in 2008, who here describes it as a ‘tensely topical play’ with a ‘compelling and almost documentary-style attention to detail’, which explored how meticulous planning failed to account for the ‘human factor’, in terms of Phil.

While this would be somewhat nearer the bottom of my ‘wants’ list of the lost Wednesday Plays thus far, I sense this would be a perfectly decent, interesting play. While I’m unsure quite how good this will be as a script, a fine cast suggests it would be humanly watchable. Plus, Moira Armstrong as director is always a good thing. In addition, the play’s scenario suggests something of the pulp tragedy of the Rah Band’s magnificent synth pop hit ‘Clouds Across the Moon’ (1985); it’s never a bad time to be (re)acquainted with that:

Top of the Pops, BBC One, 11 April 1985

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.08: ‘The Confidence Course’ (BBC1, 24 February 1965)

02.08: The Confidence Course (BBC One, Wednesday 24 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:45pm

Directed by Gilchrist Calder; Written by Dennis Potter; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Lionel Radford.

Which of these desirable attributes would you most likely to possess? 1. Self confidence. 2. Self expression. 3. Good appearance. 4. Good manners. 5. Good memory. 6. Business flair. 7. Ambition. 8. Concentration. 9. Perseverance. 10. Ability to relax. Choose for yourself. We can give you the confidence which gets you places!

That is how the advertisement read on the Underground. Some people of course were indifferent when they saw it. Some were rather above it, or were frightened maybe that if they considered the offer seriously they were admitting their own failure. Some thought there might be something in it for them, and took note of the address and went. They were curious after all, and the advert. did stress that there was ‘no obligation.’

(Roger Smith, Radio Times, 18 February 1965, p. 39)

Dennis Price as The Director in *The Confidence* *Course*

We come now to Dennis Potter’s first TV play, The Confidence Course, which Roger Smith’s article links to an Underground advert and which develops a ‘theme of gullibility’ concerning how ‘a huge but subtle confidence trick’ is perpetrated (Birmingham Express and Star, 24 February 1965, p. 13).

Firstly, Professor Emeritus of Glasgow Caledonian University – and Potter expert – John Cook provides a detailed contextual account of how the play came about (the section that follows is all John’s barring one paragraph I’ve inserted marked *)

24 February 2025 may mark the sixtieth anniversary of Dennis Potter’s debut as a television dramatist. But by 24 February 1965 and the transmission of The Confidence Course, Potter was already a known name within the public sphere. Previewing the broadcast, the Radio Times made clear that ‘at twenty-nine, [Potter] has already made his mark in a number of fields – leader writer, television critic, parliamentary candidate, and now a television playwright’.[1]

It was particularly his recent stint as TV critic for the Daily Herald, between 1962 and 1964, which provided him with some name recognition amongst a wider public. Adrian Mitchell of the pre-Murdoch Sun newspaper noted that in his fierce championing of the best and excoriation of the worst TV had to offer ‘Dennis Potter is already well known as a passionate critic of apathy and the forces which exploit it’[ii]; while The Stage and Television Today indicated ‘Dennis Potter has shown himself to be a writer of words worth listening to’.[iii] The same journal headlined the arrival of The Confidence Course as ‘First Play from Former Critic’[iv], thus encapsulating the pull and fascination for audiences in terms of how this new veritable poacher turned gamekeeper might do.

*Potter is quoted as saying, ‘The experience of watching television for two years nearly, and writing those silly little pieces in a silly little newspaper, was such that I (like millions of people, no doubt) felt, well, I can do better than this…’[v] The Confidence Course had two elements departing from naturalism, an unseen narrator and the visitation of a man calling himself William Hazlitt, after the great literary critic, who, like Potter, was from a radical and Nonconformist background. These devices acted on Potter’s insight that ‘one of the troubles of supposedly showing things-as-they-really-are… is how difficult it then becomes… not to make people feel deep in their souls that this is also more or less the way things have to be.’[vi]

The path to Potter’s debut as a TV playwright had been by no means straightforward, however, as the writer of that Radio Times preview, Roger Smith, made clear in a personal interview I conducted with him way back in 1990.[vii] In February 1964, Smith, who had worked for several years as a scriptwriter-adaptor for the BBC TV Drama Department, was appointed story editor of the BBC1’s premier contemporary play slot named First Night; later to be retitled The Wednesday Play when, pre-launch, it was decided to move it from its traditional Sunday night slot to a new transmission berth mid-week. Smith’s brief was to work alongside producer James MacTaggart in order to make a more popular series of single plays, at a time when the very existence of the single TV play itself was under scrutiny at the BBC due to falling ratings.[viii] Part of this brief from the new Head of the BBC TV Drama Group, Sydney Newman, was to find new writers to help attract a younger play-watching audience. Given a year to commission, produce and get on to the air twenty-six new original TV play scripts, Smith turned to all his contacts, including his best friend from Oxford University days, Dennis Potter.

Potter, however, was far from convinced he could write a TV play script. Smith remembered: ‘He said “No, I can’t write plays”. He had to be persuaded’. It was only when Potter got back to him with the more modest suggestion of adapting a novel he had half-written that Smith was finally able to secure from him a script of The Confidence Course, delivered to the BBC in June 1964 and set out in Potter’s own ‘meticulous handwriting’. Drafts of the original novel version of The Confidence Course have survived however and can be found within Potter’s own private creative notebooks where he would first hand-draft all his material. These now form part of The Dennis Potter Archive collection and are publicly available for consultation at the Dean Heritage Centre within Potter’s native Forest of Dean.[ix] Though undated, the proximity of these drafts to other contemporaneous writings within the notebooks suggests several versions of the novel were worked on by Potter at different times. The earliest seems to consist of nine chapters of prose, approximately eleven thousand words, detailing the backgrounds of the various confidence tricksters, prior to The Confidence Course event itself actually taking place.[x]

Cover of the Camera Script, courtesy of John Cook

Significantly, these drafts reveal the original name of the character Hazlitt in the play was to have been ‘Crippen’ – an undoubted nod to the notorious wife murderer Dr. Crippen (1862-1910) but also having resonances with the word ‘cripple’. The most telling clue to making sense of these dark undertones comes from a remark about The Confidence Course Potter made many years later to journalist Graham Fuller, as part of his interviews conducted for the Potter on Potter book, published in 1993 – namely, that the real self-motivation courses, on which the original idea for The Confidence Course had been based, was beginning to trouble Potter at that particular time. This was because of the so-called confidence factor that ‘was about self-functioning at a time when I was beginning to feel that I couldn’t self-function’ – in other words, following the 1962 onset of psoriatic arthropathy, a particularly severe form of psoriasis blighting the skin and arthritis crippling the joints, which Potter would suffer from that time onwards until the end of his life. As he told Graham Fuller: ‘The people running [the self-motivation course] were saying “We can give you confidence”’.[xi]

If, in the play, on one level, Hazlitt is the avenging angel, exposing the hypocrisy and taking down the phoniness and cant of the Director and his Confidence Course, he is also a troubled individual who, in his counter-advocacy of failure, doubt and lack of confidence as immutable features of the human condition, stands outside of the group and by extension wider human society. Indeed when Hazlitt first appears outside the door of the hotel conference room where the course is being held, Potter’s script directions describe him as ‘little more than a shadow-with-eyes, standing in a pool of gloom. A sinister feeling’.[xii] Seen literally in this light, Hazlitt is as much an invading demon as avenging angel and it is this ambiguity of motive and intention which fuels much of the tension of the play, animating the conflict between himself and the Director as embodiments of opposing poles of the arguments for and against teaching and selling self-confidence and self-motivation.

In later years, Potter would often to tend sideline The Confidence Course when asked to discuss his origins as a television playwright, usually focusing on the subsequent and better known The Nigel Barton Plays (1^st tx. The Wednesday Play 8 and 15 December 1965).

The lukewarm reception The Confidence Course received at the time from reviewers, with criticisms about its verbiage and general untelevisual nature, may be one reason accounting for this. But so, too, may be the way in which the play tends to argue and work against ideas of the ‘sovereign’ importance of human agency and self-transformation which Potter’s most celebrated work of the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, reaching its apotheosis with The Singing Detective (BBC One, 1986), would later tend to espouse.

Nevertheless, The Confidence Course, according to Smith, was judged at the time by The Wednesday Play production team to be a very sharp and trenchant critique of ‘the Admass society’: exactly the sort of piece the slot was looking for. Accordingly, it was decided in June 1964, immediately after Potter’s delivery of The Confidence Course script, to commission another from him. This became Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, delivered to the BBC by Potter in December of that same year. In his private notebooks, however, there is evidence Potter continued to attempt to complete a draft of his The Confidence Course novel, now envisaged, perhaps, as an extended tie-in with the forthcoming TV play. Amongst much marginalia Potter would doodle in his notebooks at this early stage of his creative writing career, there is a note to himself, urging himself at one point to ‘spend one day on The Confidence Course and two weeks on Nigel Barton’, with the aim of getting a serviceable ten thousand words completed on this newer draft of his novel by January 1^st 1965.[xiii]

But with no other job at this time – Potter had resigned his position as leader writer of the pre-Murdoch Sun in September 1964 in order to contest unsuccessfully the East Herts constituency as Labour candidate in the October General Election – and with a wife and two young children to support together with another on the way (his son, Robert, born March 1965), accepting commissions to write TV plays was always going to prove far more lucrative and provide far more immediate financial returns than attempting to finish a novel. By 1965, The Confidence Course novel was quietly dropped as Potter now embarked fully upon life as a TV playwright, creating and completing on average three full-length TV play scripts per year over the course of this nineteen sixties period.

Many thanks to John Cook for that! The play is one of just two of Potter’s TV plays missing from the archives.[xiv] According to W. Stephen Gilbert, Potter was paid £600 out of the production’s £4,000 budget.[xv] The Hertfordshire Mercury emphasises Potter as a defeated local Labour Party candidate at the recent General Election, and outlines the premise of his debut TV play:

a quack course, supposed to promote confidence and worldly success.

The action covers one evening in one room – the hired room to which come the timid customers of a course in business flair and self-expression. There the clients are tricked and humiliated until they are ripe for plucking. One among them, however, is made of sterner stuff.

He is Hazlitt, played by Stanley Baxter, who tackles the course director (Dennis Price). (19 February 1965, p. 6)

The play sounds to me a close forerunner of Andrew Carr’s fascinating Play for Today Instant Enlightenment Including VAT (1980), if somewhat less clearly centring on a cult than that play did. Carr’s play is an archetypal room-based ensemble play that will feature notably in my forthcoming book about PfT.

Instead of Simon Callow’s brash American Max Schreiber, the course leader here is acidic Dennis Price, best known by me for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), described as ‘smooth, well spoken and utterly confident’ (Birmingham Express and Star, op. cit.). Hazlitt is set up as a similarly sceptical ‘awkward customer’ to journalist Malcolm (Tim Wylton) in Carr’s play, though he is infinitely more successful in turning the tables on the con artist (ibid.).

Dennis Price and Yootha Joyce in *The Confidence* *Course*

Television Today (28 January 1965, p. 9) records Yootha Joyce rehearsing for the play, immediately after appearing in Basil Warner’s Try For White (BBC2). The Daily Record reports Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter appearing in Potter’s play as his ‘first straight acting part’ after TV adverts, stage variety and feature-films (4 February 1965, p. 4). In the Radio Times, story editor Roger Smith notes that director Gilchrist Calder was coming straight from a ‘Broadway success’ (op. cit.).

Notably, Smith informs us that this is the fourth first play from a writer new to TV among the eight Wednesday Plays so far in 1965 (ibid.). This could teach TV commissioners today a historical lesson in giving new voices a chance in prime-time slots, and giving them freedom, not simply the chance to write for long-running precinct dramas (even that valuable option is now severely curtailed).

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 44.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Parade / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Prime Minister speaks on Britain’s production and exports / Richard Boone Show – Arena, Part 2 / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 49%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 42.9%

Reception: There was a mixed-towards-positive reaction among London critics, getting steadily more favourable outside the capital. The audience was quite starkly divided, with many quite simply not getting it, but others impressed.

Richard Sear enjoyed it, with effort, but found it hard work, commenting that even Dennis Price ‘stumbled over his lines’ (Daily Mirror, 25 February 1965, p. 14). Sear commended a play ‘full of original thought’, though felt it resembled three or four plays crammed into one, with Potter using the confidence seller ‘to attack advertising, sheeplike audiences, TV quiz shows, and life itself’ (ibid.). In a largely positive review, Adrian Mitchell in The Sun termed it a ‘powerful parable’.[xvi]

Mary Crozier liked the play in its opening sections, praising a ‘cynically amusing tone’ – somewhat less black and mordant than Clive Exton – ‘sharp and imaginative’ direction and fine performances, but felt that Hazlitt’s character was ‘alien’ and undermined the play’s ‘validity’ (Guardian, 25 February 1965, p. 9). Nevertheless, ‘In many ways this was an interesting play and it certainly held out hope that Mr Potter may do better yet’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood felt for Price’s trickster when ‘a tousled-haired interrupter’ threw a spanner in the works by shattering the course’s ‘illusory and purely temporal’ ideas of success (Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1965, p. 19). She felt its satire on ‘modern psychological promotion’ was heavy-handed, and Price’s and Baxter’s characters were ‘mouthpieces for the argument instead of characters’, also bemoaning ‘that ubiquitous plague of television drama, the commentator’ (ibid.). This narrator was Geoffrey Matthews.

Bill Edmund mentions more of the cast, admiring performances by John Quentin as a man with a stammer, Yootha Joyce as the repressed and ignored Rosalind and John Blythe as ‘the overwhelming salesman’; feeling also that Hazlitt gave Baxter the chance to show he was ‘a very fine actor’ in breaking through the manipulation (Television Today, 4 March 1965, p. 12). Edmund did question the way the Director was so easily deflated by his failure, feeling that it needed stressing that the Director and Hazlitt’s battle is ‘eternal […] which was perhaps what the writer meant to say’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws felt the play ‘made several points sharply’ and that Price’s Director evoked ‘real hypnotists and humbugs in the trade’ (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347). Laws admired how ‘properly painful’ the stutterer being bullied was, and how ‘reasonable neurotic’ man calling himself William Hazlitt slices through the cosiness of proceedings with ‘a tirade on the necessity of accepting the reality and inevitability of death’ (ibid.). He noted how operatives manhandle Hazlitt off the premises, but his words enable the ‘potential students and victims’ to escape exploitation (ibid.).

The end of Laws’s review is worth quoting in full for how it summarises Potter’s already formed unmistakably eccentric originality, as well as misgivings over the narrator device:

I was considerably puzzled by the bringing of the historical Hazlitt into the battle but it could be justified. An all-knowing, invisible narrator who finally gave a commentary on the defeat of the bully and the triumph of the unconfident was strikingly unnecessary. Potter’s wit, eloquence, and tough-mindedness make him a most welcome recruit to television drama (ibid.).

Outside of London, critics were largely positive. An anonymous reviewer perceived ‘an amusing tale of how a nut case [sic] barged into a pep talk session, took it over and made the self-assured director of the course lose his faith, and his audience – with his synthetic philosophy shattered by the sincerity of sheer lunacy’ (Belfast News Letter, 25 February 1965, p. 10). Alf McCreary waxed even more positively in favour of a ‘cruel and realistic play’ about silent, unnoticed human misery, proclaiming that Potter showed ‘remarkable talent’ (Belfast Telegraph, 27 February 1965, p. 8).

Peter Forth praised Neil McCarthy’s, Stanley Baxter’s and Arto Morris’s performances, but most especially Dennis Price’s ‘personal triumph’ as the Director, which ‘turned what could have been an unutterably boring lecture into a gripping play, and one which will be remembered for a long time by those fortunate enough to see it’ (Western Daily Press, 25 February 1965, p. 7). A.B. was impressed by ‘a statement of doubt about the aims of hundreds of years of consumer civilisation’, with Hazlitt ‘movingly played’ by Baxter, conveying ‘the inanity of human goals’ (Leicester Mercury, 25 February 1965, p. 7). Analysing the TV flow in a way Potter would have approved of, A.B. felt this was a sharp rejoinder to some of the assumptions underlying Harold Wilson’s speech to the nation beforehand on BBC One, while also commending Alan Plater’s Z Cars story, commenting how collectively, ‘These twentieth century parables make Wednesday top television night, week in, week out.’ (ibid.)

David Taylor noted how the play followed an impressive PPB by Harold Wilson, Labour PM, ‘a father figure we could be proud to own’ (The [Newcastle upon Tyne] Journal, 25 February 1965, p. 5). Taylor admired how Dennis Price revelled in delivering the Director’s ‘cliches and platitudes’, displaying an ‘urbane charm’ (ibid.). However, he felt the conclusion overly optimistic in its weak become strong and the strong weak scenario – as expressed by the narrator (ibid.). K.H. assailed excessive ‘verbiage’ and the ‘disembodied’ narrator’s voice, but found Price’s acting the ‘saving grace’ and some of the dialogue ‘very smart’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 25 February 1965, p. 2).

The audience sample in the BBC research report saw some hatred and misunderstanding of the play, with some claiming it was ‘ethically wrong’ to put such wise words in the mouth of the ‘madman’ Hazlitt and wrongly feeling the play was a ‘mockery’ of the physically or mentally handicapped, as with the stammering character (BBC WAC, VR/65/102). One viewer railed:

do such people as “Hazlitt” exist outside mental homes? […] this unreal character made nonsense of the whole play, whose message could have been put over much more effectively without such excessive eccentricity (ibid.).

Stanley Baxter as a ‘madman’, apparently…

Stanley Baxter himself rated the play highly and noted he’d seen it as important to retain the ambiguity as to whether his character really was William Hazlitt or not. Baxter, who had read Hazlitt’s essays at school, notes how he ‘played him, in a kind of raincoat, shuffling in’, as a ‘tortured soul’, fucked up by the world.[xvii] Roger Smith termed the Hazlitt character ‘a weirdo’, but Humphrey Carpenter feels Potter ‘may have been portraying the apparently contradictory elements in his own personality.’[xviii]

The play was clearly too caustic for many in the audience, with a finely divided balance of 32% giving it A+/A and 34% the lowest C/C- scores (VR/65/102 op. cit.). The setting’s drabness was disliked but also widely admitted to be realistic for the sort of place such an event would be held (ibid.). The acting was praised, though some felt that Baxter was overacting (ibid.). A section of viewers loved how subtle wit and humour were balanced with ‘moments of truth’; somewhat more desired more of a ‘good story, scenery and warmth’ (ibid.). A William McLachlan, of Dunoon, Argyll, shared the negativity of many, feeling Stanley Baxter was miscast and the play ill served his comic talents though felt he did his best with ‘poor material’ (Sunday Mail, 28 February 1965, p. 16).

Potter explained a key background element: ‘It is really about the self-motivation courses run by bodies like the Dale Carnegie Institute, which I covered as a newspaper reporter at one of their so-called free sessions. The Herald wouldn’t use the article because Dale Carnegie was advertising in the newspaper’.[xix] In a particularly significant reaction, the Dale Carnegie Institute wrote to the BBC to complain about the programme, a claim the BBC easily batted away: ‘You yourself have pointed out that there were differences between the demonstration shown and the one which you run’.[xx]

The play was unusually overt in its politics in the context of Potter’s oeuvre, where his Christianity and socialism, his radicalism and conservative sides, usually act at a deep subterranean level in his works.[xxi] As Gilbert explains, ‘Hazlitt bestowed upon Potter a vehicle for articulating in a play the rage against admass that he was denied on Panorama. He was a mouthpiece.’[xxii] Here, as John Cook explains, the narrator basically ‘urges the viewing audience to recognize its power to overturn the existing social order’, pronouncing in voice-over:

The party’s over and the game is done. The weak have become strong and the strong weak. Soon it will be time to turn out the lights and the Director will walk out into the rain… a failure.”[xxiii]

Potter’s attack on a society ‘based on class and money’ is not accompanied by ‘a coherent vision of the future but rather in the name of the past’, via Hazlitt’s visitation.[xxiv] However, it would be a complacent person who claimed that the core of Hazlitt’s speech here does not still have great relevance to our society today:

It is, of course, a gigantic conspiracy. We, as human beings, are all the time and everywhere being mocked and tortured by poster-big images of the Ideal Family, the Ideal Girl, the Ideal Husband… An arbitrarily defined Perfection assails us all the time.[xxv]

It’s a real shame that this doesn’t exist. It seems to carry on the assault on consumerist “Admass” culture from Hugh Whitemore’s satirical Dan, Dan, the Charity Man. I’d love to see this ‘outsider’ or ‘visitation’ play, which John Cook links well to key 1960s texts by Mercer and Pinter and the burgeoning counterculture.[xxvi]

References

[1] Roger Smith, ‘Dennis Price Gives The Confidence Course in Tonight’s Play’, Radio Times, 18 February 1965, p. 39.

[ii] Adrian Mitchell, The Sun, 25 February 1965, p. 9.

[iii] Bill Edmunds, The Stage and Television Today, 4 March 1965, p. 12.

[iv] Anon., ‘First play from former critic’, The Stage and Television Today, 25 February 1965, p. 14.

[v] Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 142.

[vi] Ibid. p. 144.

[vii] Roger Smith, interview with the author, recorded 16 March 1990, Peckham, London. All citations henceforth attributed to Smith are taken from that interview.

[viii] The then Controller of Programmes for BBC1, Donald Baverstock, wanted to ‘wipe out all single plays’ from the channel: a move to which Head of Drama Sydney Newman was fiercely opposed. For further on the controversy, which was eventually resolved in Newman’s favour following the success of The Wednesday Play as well as the departure of Donald Baverstock from the BBC in 1965, see John R. Cook, ‘Between Grierson and Barnum: Sydney Newman and the Development of the Single Television Play at the BBC’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, November 2004, vol.1, no.2, pp. 211-25.

[ix] The Dennis Potter Archive, Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean, was opened to the public in June 2013 after the local Forest of Dean community won Heritage Lottery funding to purchase Potter’s handwritten scripts, writer’s notebooks and typescripts from his estate and house these within a dedicated facility. The archive is searchable online using the following link: https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/dennis-potter-archive

[x] Notebook containing The Confidence Course novel drafts (undated), accession no.: DP2012.22.7, Dennis Potter Archive catalogued materials, https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/_files/ugd/dce9b1_a9a0063790c54cbc944e5d251b174aad.pdf

[xi] Dennis Potter, Potter on Potter, edited by Graham Fuller (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 19.

[xii] Dennis Potter, The Confidence Course, BBC Camera script, February 1965, Wednesday Play 21/64/1040, p. 8. BBC Television Script Unit.

[xiii] Notebook containing The Confidence Course novel drafts (undated), accession no.: DP2012.22.8, Dennis Potter Archive catalogued materials, https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/_files/ugd/dce9b1_a9a0063790c54cbc944e5d251b174aad.pdf

[xiv] Dennis Potter, The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction, 1953-1994, edited by Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams (London: Oberon Books, 2015), p. 335.

[xv] W. Stephen Gilbert, Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter (London: Sceptre, 1995), p. 112.

[xvi] Gilbert op. cit. p. 112.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Carpenter op. cit. p. 147.

[xix] Potter in Fuller (ed.) op. cit. p. 19.

[xx] Gilbert op. cit. p. 112.

[xxi] Potter in Fuller (ed.) op. cit. pp. 19-21.

[xxii] Gilbert op. cit. p. 113.

[xxiii] John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 26.

[xxiv] Ibid. p. 25.

[xxv] Quoted in Carpenter op. cit. p. 147.

[xxvi] Cook op. cit. p. 25.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.07: ‘Wear A Very Big Hat’ (BBC1, 17 February 1965)

02.07: Wear A Very Big Hat (BBC One, Wednesday 17 February 1965) 9:30 – 10:35pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Eric Coltart; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Peter Kindred.

The Radio Times explained this latest Wednesday Play was a story where an evening out is spoiled by an ‘incident’, suggesting this would be common experience for ‘MOST people’ (11 February 1965, p. 35). This revolves around Ann (Sheila Fearn) buying a new hat – ‘a daring stetson’ – for a night out with husband Johnny (Neville Smith) (ibid.) “Seriously. It’s gear,” is Johnny’s verdict on it, as they go out for a meal followed by a drink with friends in a local Liverpool pub (ibid.).

The RT continues thus:

When they meet Johnny’s mates, Harry and Billy, a very pleasant evening seems to be in prospect. But then something happens. Two rather foppish men are standing by the bar when Ann passes – with her striking new hat still perched cockily on her head. What follows is a small, slightly disagreeable ‘incident.’ It passes over inconclusively, but it leaves a mark – particularly on Johnny’s mind. Endlessly he broods over it; he plays and replays the scene in his imagination; the mods he thinks about it the more determined he becomes not to let the matter rest (ibid.)

The RT emphasises this as ‘a play about ordinary, very human people’, ‘social insecurity’, ‘honour and a sense of humour’, ‘being stubborn and being reasonable’ and the ‘untidiness of life compared to the simplicity of the world of the imagination’ (ibid.). It was Eric Coltart’s first TV play after two Z Cars scripts, and stresses the ‘regional authenticity’ of its dialogue, Coltart being ‘a Liverpool toolmaker’ (ibid.). I know Coltart’s name from his decidedly offbeat Play for Today Doran’s Box, screened eleven years after this and which doesn’t have a particularly clear geographical location. The Aberdeen Evening Express noted that Coltart was working on a selection of short stories, which he had began while on National Service in the Army (17 February 1965, 2).

Interestingly, this loving tribute to Coltart implies that he was a father to someone now closely associated with the weird pop band the KLF.

The Liverpool Daily Echo promoted local lad Neville Smith, born in Liverpool’s Cornwallis Street, as having gone from Ellergreen Commercial School to Hull University to radio drama to this leading role (16 February 1965, p. 6). Smith, from a working-class background – ‘the son of a fitter’s mate’ – didn’t have theatre training but did amateur acting at University and was now living in London, the main regret being ‘He doesn’t see Everton very often.’ (ibid.). The Liverpool Echo also emphasised local angles, like the play being shot in Liverpool itself, ‘against the backdrop of all our familiar Merseyside scenes’: it is a safe bet that ‘the scouser slang will be gear’ (16 February 1965, p. 2). It also reveals that Smith spent some time teaching drama, and his parents are outed, in pre-data protection days, as currently residing at 8 Caledonia Street, Liverpool 7 (ibid.)

Fascinatingly, the Echo carried an advert the same day by local Speke firm Whiteley Lang & Neill Ltd., mentioning that the BBC filmed part of Coltart’s play on their premises and jokily disclaiming that any of their workers resemble Johnny Johnson, while also offering work for any aspiring toolmakers, toolroom machinists, tool draughtsman or planners (ibid., p. 10). All a sign that Britain’s economy was doing very well in 1965 in terms of offering people skilled work. The intense local flavour of this play is clear in its adoption of a local saying:

“If you can’t fight, wear a big hat. The brim might protect you.” (Aberdeen Evening Press, op. cit.).

Coltart seems to be addressing a masculinity in flux, with old toughness vying with more peaceful attitudes, within the protagonist Johnny, who ‘prefers discussion to violence. But what is the manly thing to do when a “hard case” insults you in front of your wife?’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17 February 1965, p. 2).

Sheila Fearn probably as in *Wear A Very Big Hat*. Image courtesy of *Coventry Evening Telegraph*

While the cast has a few quite familiar names – William Gaunt, David Jackson – I can’t picture too many of them. An exception is Alan Lake, an interesting actor of incredibly varied screen roles, latterly married to Diana Dors. Lake is specifically mentioned as ‘busy filming and rehearsing’ as Harry in Wear A Very Big Hat (Television Today, 4 February 1965, p. 11). I know Neville Smith from the Play for Today Long Distance Information which he wrote and starred in; fellow lead Sheila Fearn is mostly known for sitcom roles, including as a regular in The Likely Lads. Helpfully, we are informed she was a member of The Scaffolds, the group ‘that brought a touch of TW3 to Gazette, the late night ITV show from which The Eamonn Andrews Show was obviously fashioned.’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 17 February 1965, p. 9). William Holmes plays the ‘Liverpool tough who wants to pick a fight’ with the play’s ‘hero’ Johnny (Daily Mirror, 17 February 1965, p. 14).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.0%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton – part 4 / The Hollywood Palace), ITV (Night Spot, with Frank Berry, Christine Holmes and The Seekers / The Fall and Rise of the House of Krupp*)

*’The story of two generations of German arms barons’, who armed Germany in both World Wars.

On radio, the Third had a symphony concert, the Light the cloying-sounding Time for old Time, and Luxembourg had David Jacobs’ Plays the Pops.

Audience Reaction Index: 48%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: A fairly scant number of reviews, by and large. However, the reaction it elicited from the critics who mention it was highly positive, certainly better than usual. Reaction from (the many) viewers was polarised.

Johnny Clive and Neville Smith in *Wear A Very Big* *Hat*. Image courtesy of *Radio Times*.

Anon of Times-shire helpfully places Johnny as a Mod and indicated that Ken Loach had used much ‘nondescript “pop” type’ music to root the play in Liverpool, in what they found an ‘absorbing and effective’ TV play (18 February 1965, p. 16). They feel that initial difficulty in hearing the dialogue against ‘the twang and jangle of electric guitars’ was overcome by an unusual story deftly directed by Loach:

risking sequences of unusual slowness for the sake of truthfulness rather than for the degree of suspense they might carry. (ibid.).

Fearn – in a ‘charmingly grotesque hat’ – and Smith are said to have given ‘unassailably truthful’ performances, and the play’s final message is approved of: ‘his honour cannot be destroyed by a mindless drunkard.’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood found the drama’s focus on an unpleasant incident relatable: ‘a good human situation’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1965, p. 19). While she was a little worried by its effect on ‘the sensitive ear’, ‘What with the authentic, hot potato in the mouth accents and the medley of background noises, my mind was reeling more than a little towards the end’, she ultimately liked an ‘extremely well acted’ play (ibid.) While this clearly falls prey to metropolitan sociolinguistic prejudice, it’s far from the worst TV critic instance of such that I’ve encountered in my PfT research.

Patrick Skene Catling saw the play as ‘skilfully harrowing account of Liverpool pub bullies and the underdog’s consequent Mitty reveries at a Sillitoe lathe’ (Punch, 24 February 1965, p. 290). Catling’s admiration for this and Cleo Laine on Jazz 625 (BBC2) far exceeded that for Dr. Who – ‘The Web Planet’, not unreasonably, I feel! :

a series that has descended from the wonder of daleks to the ludicrous bathos of giant cardboard ants. (ibid.)

Continuing the acclaim, Bill Edmund reflected on it having ‘some of the most genuine characters I’ve ever seen on television’, with a textbook realism discourse praising ‘real words and real actions’ (Television Today, 25 February 1965, p. 14). Edmund liked how it stayed focused on ‘the way a small incident can rankle and get out of proportion’, and expounded in greater detail on the plot than any other reviewer (ibid.). He clarified Ann and Johnny were out to celebrate their wedding anniversary, while lapsing into a fetishistic ode to Ann’s hat: ‘If was rather a startling hat but it looked very attractive perched on the top of her blonde hat.’ (ibid.).

Edmund admired Smith’s acting range, from ‘haughty and proud’, to ‘loud-mouthed and bullying’ and ‘calm and sarcastic’, and Holmes at the snarling Snapper Melia: ‘Here was a man toh longed to see dealt with as he deserved. I revelled in the scenes where Johnny dreamed his victories over Snapper.’ (ibid.). Loach’s direction was admired as perfectly putting us in Johnny’s position, ‘sharing’ his ‘doubts and puzzlement’ over what was going on (ibid.).

Frederick Laws was somewhat grudging, echoing the brickbat about loud music at the start, while also describing it as not being ‘major treatment of great passion’; however, he admired its sanity, wit and ‘shrewd’ observation, with a ‘detailed atmosphere’ evoked from its pub and Chinese restaurant scenes (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347).

Outside London, reactions were also largely positive. A.B. gave a rare mixed reaction, feeling unsure whether it was ‘a sermon about pride and violence, with real people as props for the message, or about a young man who had the misfortune to become the enemy, temporarily, of a psychopath’ (Leicester Daily Mercury, 18 February 1965, p. 8). The first of two Liverpool critics, anon in the Daily Post, felt that Coltart gave the production a ‘splendid Merseyside flavour’, commending Loach for the ‘very live’ feel and Stanley Spell for documentary style photography (18 February 1965, p. 3).

They also note the ‘foppish’ young man Peter (William Gaunt) who steals Ann’s hat – a description implying the toughs are teddy boys – while emphasising how Johnny’s nagging insecurities are resolved ‘only by a sense of humour’ (ibid.). W.D.A. in the Liverpool Echo was surprised more plays hadn’t ploughed this one’s original furrow, given its universality (18 February 1965, p. 2). While they felt it was slightly overextended in length, they loved a ‘thoroughly and convincingly explored’ situation, and a satisfying ending, though felt let down somewhat by how the Liverpool locations lacked specificity: they ‘could have been shot in almost any large city’ (ibid.).

Peter Quince liked how it was ‘in no sense a “significant” play (thank goodness) or an exciting piece of drama. It was a play about ordinary surroundings told in ordinary language that held the attention from start to finish and kept one viewing to see what happened next’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 20 February 1965, p. 5). Quince praised a most ‘agreeable’ play, especially singling out William Holmes’s ‘character acting’ as Snapper and ‘his cronies’ (ibid.). Further North still, Michael Beale found the dialect ‘painfully real, but also rather boring’, though he admired Fearn and Smith’s performances, noting how it ‘showed how easily a little incident could lead to a pub punch-up.’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 18 February 1965, p. 2).

The audience response from another very large Wednesday Play viewing public was decidedly, even archetypally mixed: evidence of James MacTaggart’s good sense to know that producing plays which would delight a third, and disgust another third of a large audience, would be proper Public Service Broadcasting. That telling adjective ‘sordid’ appeared among negative responses, which betrayed a partiality: ‘yet another unsavoury picture of Liverpool and its ‘semi-illiterate’ inhabitants’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/87). Coltart’s play clearly hit that significant spot, later achieved by many Plays for Today, whereby realistic scenes of working-class life were either refreshing or distasteful to see, depending on the viewer.

About a third of the sample really liked the play, admiring its capturing of Liverpool’s mood, with a Night Sister and a Sales Representative admiring its identifiable, human qualities and an ending – Snapper, flush with a darts match win, does not even recognise Johnny – ‘exactly right’ (ibid.). Others could not deny how it was horribly realistic, but didn’t find it ‘particularly edifying or entertaining’ with one Machinist enjoying it up to a point but bemoaning, ‘What about showing us the other half of Liverpool some time!’ (ibid.). The play’s earthy freshness is clear via how a few question a scene in a gent’s toilet, alongside ‘jerky’ visuals, though there was some praise for the dream sequences (ibid.).

One public letter from a H. Merrick of South Harrow, Middlesex, complained of the ‘monotonous guitars’ in the opening sequence, which ‘nearly succeeded’ in driving him ’round the bend’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 February 1965, p. 20).

Overall, I’m sad that Ashes to Ashes exists and this doesn’t. Pubs are great settings for contained dramas of human diversity and conflict, much like train carriages or broken down lifts. It’s a real shame that Julia Jones’s and Eric Coltart’s first TV plays, both Northern-set, aren’t available to watch. They would present evidence of precisely what-happened-next after British New Wave cinema in 1959-63 to go alongside The Beatles’ films and Albert Finney and Shelagh Delaney’s Charlie Bubbles (1967) and John McGrath and Jack Gold’s The Reckoning (1969).

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.06: ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (BBC1, 10 February 1965)

02.06: Ashes to Ashes (BBC One, Wednesday 10 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Alan Cooke; Written by Mark Brandel; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Norman Percival

Our next Wednesday Play, Ashes to Ashes runs on the presumably not entirely original promise that go-getting Barbara (Toby Robins), an executive in a London advertising agency, in her 30s, becomes a blushing ‘young bride’ after meeting Paris (Scott Forbes) in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 10 February 1965, p. 2). She soon moves into his isolated Cornish abode by the cliffs, a cottage which ‘contains an urn full of ashes. She also discovers a slaughterhouse and electric furnaces that could have other uses than firing pottery’ (ibid.).

Aye, you might just have guessed: her new husband’s wife… disappeared… mysteriously.

The Radio Times told readers that one character makes a ‘significant’ statement: ‘Inside every woman is a victim begging to be let loose on a man’ (4 February 1965, p. 35). An of-its-time flippancy is evident in the mention of Dr. Crippen’s waxwork, visible in a still image, clearly framing Brandel’s play as a black comedy.

Anglo-American writer Marc Brandel (1919-1994) specialised in thrillers – including many novels, including series – who also wrote for many US play strands like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, alongside Armchair Theatre and Danger Man in the UK and two subsequently Wednesday Plays after this. Despite Brandel’s grounding in the thriller genre, Bill Smith notes how the BBC did not give the play a comedy or thriller ‘tag’ in the pre-publicity, presumably aiming to maintain ‘an element of surprise’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 February 1965, p. 13).

Toby Robins is referred to as a ‘Canadian star’ (Staffordshire Sentinel, 10 February 1965, p. 4). Smith notes that Robins apparently had her own television panel show in Canada and had worked at Stratford, Ontario on stage with James Mason, though he can’t bother to get her name right, spelling it as ‘Tony Robins’ (op. cit.).

This play can be watched here, again via the PlayForForever YouTube channel. See what you think! :

Ashes to Ashes

Rating * 1/2 / ****

While there are echoes of Gaslight, Rebecca and even, very vaguely, Robin Redbreast, this doesn’t feel an especially gripping or suspenseful tale. Marc Brandel’s script and Alan Cooke’s direction feel ordinary and conventional, besides what I saw in Fable and gather was Dan, Dan, the Charity Man‘s experimentalism. The apparent links between Whitemore’s play and this, suggested by the opening in the advertising agency, are quickly dispelled with the crushing inevitability of another Nigel Farage appearance on Question Time.

The Wednesday Thriller was to follow in the summer 1965 break months between Wednesday Play series, and this seems rather in the humdrum mainstream vein of those I’ve seen from. Too much nattering about apple strudel; a fair bit more musical underscore than in the typical Wednesday Play or Play for Today. It feels like the Wednesday Play equivalent of the PfT The Chief Mourner (1979): barely apt for the strand, with only very vague hints of insightful topicality.

It’s understandable that there needed to be the occasional play in this mould which merged more with ongoing series, but it seems a bathetic change of style after the previous weeks. I had been quite engaged by the opening centring on the advertising agency and depicting Barbara Manson as a camply domineering boss. Yet, it dives from the moment the absurdly named Paris Belmont appears. Scott Forbes plays this tediously ‘suave’ ‘charmer’ Paris who doesn’t have the charisma or menace of a Hitchcockian husband. Despite, or linked to, the bizarre touches in his Cornish home decor: ashes in a large urn, a kiln, a slaughterhouse on the premises. Forbes’s performance is as leaden as one of the Zarbis pictured above him in the Belfast Newsletter (10 February 1965, p. 4).

The ending just felt smug, from Paris with his pipe in the mouth, to syrupy light music, right down to that final, crushingly obvious zoom into the outbuilding after the couple have gone in. The breezy jazz music over the end credits feels out of kilter with a very traditional comedy-thriller, which abandons the barbed modernity promised in its opening scenes. Aptly, there’s a fussy antediluvian type face used for the end credits: for me, this summarises the play’s temporal retreat into humdrum androcentric hi-jinks.

I love a good Hitchcock thriller, or something like Wait Until Dark (1967), say, but I didn’t feel this was thrilling enough, nor did it have the strangeness of John Bowen’s plays in this genre. It lacks richness of subtext, thrills or indeed anything tangible to comminicate about British society in 1965, and thus seems out of kilter to me as a Wednesday Play.

Best Performance: TOBY ROBINS

Just about, as she’s very good in the opening scenes. She struggles with having to sport a lampshade around her neck for much of the second half.

Worst Line: “Ah, Jack the Ripper. Now there was a real artist!”

Audience size: 8.42 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (Labour Party Political Broadcast / The Hollywood Palace / Newsroom; Weather), ITV (Labour Party Political Broadcast / Woody Allen / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46%

Reception: Well received, critically, though they weren’t notably rushing to review or even mention it in their columns, compared with some others. This was very much a Wednesday Play better received by the viewers, who strongly admired its familiar brew of macabre comedy and thriller.

The anonymous critic found pleasure in writing that was ‘cheerfully, glibly, and unpretentiously trivial’, and a play that had ‘validity’ if ‘judged simply as a game’ (The Times, 11 February 1965, p. 15). However, they see the flipside of this, observing that neither Barbara nor Paris ‘can be seriously considered as personalities’, implying that we should have our sympathies or antipathies provoked on a human level. They are especially critical of Barbara’s thin characterisation, but claim that Scott Forbes cleverly maintained ‘a sinisterly delightful ambiguity’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood felt Ashes to Ashes was a ‘very entertaining’ spoof or parody of Frank Vosper’s theatrical warhorse Love from a Stranger, adapted from a 1924 Agatha Christie short story – itself adapted for film, TV and radio (Daily Telegraph, 11 February 1965, p. 19). She felt Robins and Forbes acted ‘with just the right touch’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson liked how ‘a tremendous detensioning scene, when all seemed to be collapsing into an ecstatic uxorious anti-climax’ was followed by the final shed pay-off, though it had ‘gone almost too far over to the bright side’ for this to work (Observer, 14 February 1965, p. 24). Richardson praised ‘a perfectly acceptable, glossily slick little entertainment piece that was streets better than the average British B picture’ (ibid.). It’s far from in the same league as Don’t Talk to Strange Men (1962) or Smokescreen (1964), in my book!

33% of the London press critics who assessed this play were called Maurice: huzzah! Maurice Wiggin found the smugly inconclusive ending ‘frustrating’ but nevertheless enjoyed it, ‘Which is more than can be said for nine new plays out of, say, eleven’ (Sunday Times, 14 February 1965, p. 44). Frederick Laws far preferred Brandel’s ‘slight but thoroughly enjoyable’ play to Graham Greene’s The Living Room (BBC2, 18/02/1965), appreciating how Paris’s ”picking up’ technique’ in Madame Tussaud’s ‘had a healthy charnel-house jollity’ (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347).

Marjorie Norris, not for the first time, had a more rounded, thoughtful take on the play: arguing it declined from the ‘off-beat humour and sophistication’ of the early London scenes to the ‘heavy-handed obviousness’ of its Cornwall majority (Television Today, 18 February 1965, p. 12). Norris alone berated the action’s slowness, and how Toby Robins was so ill served overall, after being ‘superb in her early scenes as a bitchy advertising executive with a contempt for men’ (ibid.). She admired the wider cast and Eileen Diss for conveying the brash ‘showiness’ of Barbara’s office and how her Cornwall cottage sets were ‘So exactly right for the man who lived there’ (ibid.).

Outside London, the play was extolled. M.G. gave brief praise of a ‘comedy-thriller’ in which seeds of suspicion were ‘well-sown’: ‘It certainly kept us guessing’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 11 February 1965, p. 3). Argus waxed more lyrically, about a ‘triumph’ and a ‘spell-binder’ well above the general run of TV plays:

This play has everything. It was gruesome but tender, horrifying but delightful. It had more facets than the Koh-i-Noor diamond. (Glasgow Daily Record, 11 February 1965, p. 13).

Anthea Hall’s response feels markedly alien to 2025 sensibilities in acclaiming Robins enacting how Barbara’s ‘sharp intelligence […] just melted away when she was swept off her feet by Paris Belmont’ (Newcastle Journal, 11 February 1965, p. 5). Hall acknowledged the play’s ‘trick may be an old one’, but felt acting and writing ensured it worked ‘beautifully’ (ibid.).

Michael Beale admired a gripping evening’s television including ‘tycoonery’ in Northern England on regional programme Prospect, and, echoing Lockwood, felt Ashes to Ashes resembled Frank Vosper’s theatrical warhorse Love from a Stranger, adapted from a 1924 Agatha Christie short story – itself adapted for film, TV and radio (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 11 February 1965, p. 2). Beale regarded Brandel’s play as similarly ‘compulsive’ (ibid.).

The audience Reaction Index was one of the higher we’ve seen, equalling A Tap on the Shoulder‘s 72, with a substantial majority enthused by a play they found gripping, where tension ‘was said to have been cleverly contrived’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/74).

There’s a fine domestic snapshot here:

Wonderful! Even my husband who is not a play fan became absorbed in it, so much so he allowed himself to miss the first part of his beloved wrestling! (ibid.).

A minority did find it boring and unoriginal, with rather more questioning the inconclusive ending, which spoilt the play for some, though as many liked being allowed to draw their own conclusions (ibid.). Acting and production were praised, if not in especially detailed or distinctive terms by the panel! (ibid.)

In letters to the press, a Mrs Weldon of Glasgow, C.5, acclaimed the best TV play for a while, which, unusually for her, made her stop her usual knitting and even forsake her ‘usual “cuppa.”‘ (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 14 February 1965, p. 16). In the same paper, Mrs W. Donnelly of Glasgow, E.1, praised the suspense while being pleased that ‘you were left wondering if the husband really was a murderer’ (ibid.).

The play’s broad success with critics and viewers is clear in how it was repeated as soon as Wednesday 7 July on BBC One in a slightly earlier time slot of 9:25pm, coming up against a tough BBC2-ITV one-two of The Likely Lads and Nye! (a documentary about Welsh socialist legend Aneurin Bevan), respectively. Lyn Lockwood’s review of Patricia High Smith’s The Cellar, shown as the last in the Wednesday Thriller spin-off strand in September indicated her strong preference for Ashes to Ashes over a ‘routine affair’ in which Scott Forbes as George ‘was almost a repetition of his lady-killing husband’ in Brandel’s play (Daily Telegraph, 23 September 1965, p. 19). Lockwood named this alongside Dan, Dan, the Charity Man as one of her six best plays of 1965 (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17).

Overall, it can be argued that this sort of play, a mainstream crowd pleaser, was necessary to have in the Wednesday Play mix, and it clearly displeased few among critics and viewers. However, this clearly needed to be a very occasional part of the roster, rather than dominant; else, the Wednesday Play would have been a blander, more toothless prospect with less to communicate about contemporary society.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂