Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.02: ‘In Camera’ (BBC1, 4 November 1964)

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), I feel 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 full textual analysis.

Due to personal circumstances, this post is incomplete, but it contains the core of my thoughts and some on the play’s reception.

01.02: In Camera (BBC One, Wednesday 4 November 1964)

Directed by Philip Saville; Written by Jean Paul Sartre (play – Huis clos, aka. No Exit, 1944), translated by Stuart Gilbert & adapted for TV by Philip Saville; Produced by ; Designed by Clifford Hatts

Now, this one is actually available to watch on YouTube, so no excuse, watch now, before reading on! :

Off-air video via the play’s screening on BBC Four in the early hours of Monday 28 June 2004

Inez (Jane Arden) is a lesbian postal clerk.

Estelle Rigault (Katherine Woodville) is from Paris, shallow, entitled.

Garcin (Harold Pinter) is a pacifist from Algiers, who stood up for his beliefs amid the Algerian War, and was executed as a result.

This is a primarily video-studio play, but with a few filmed inserts which have a cinema vérité look. At one moment, we hear a familiar track from Miles Davis’s A Kind of Blue (1959), engaging with popular modernist jazz from the Black Atlantic. Estelle and Inez dance to a tango by (I think) Emile Prud’homme Et Son Orchestre.

The play reflects on choice, willpower and acting in order to be. After a massive dramatic zoom-in, Garcin proclaims, “I was a man of action once… I’m dead and done with, a back number.” This associates with him with agonising protagonists Patrick McGoohan performed on TV, whether in Arden and Ibsen adaptations or The Prisoner (1967-68). He later reflects, “I chose the hardest way. A man is what he wills himself to be.” The play piercingly hones in here on our masculine culture’s dominant binary concepts of heroism and cowardice.

There are haunting, double-edged lines like Garcin’s “Men at least can keep their mouths shut.”

I enjoyed what I saw of BBC Four’s recent repeat of The Roads to Freedom (BBC2, 1970), David Turner’s expansive TV drama serial adaptation of Sartre’s trilogy of novels. It had a serious toughness and worldly humour, representing a fine encounter of French and British ideas, aesthetics and tones.

Sartre’s leftwards shift from “apolitical” individualism to non-party socialism, to revolutionary socialism to belief in anarchism and non-statist social movements fits the shifting trends from the 1930s-70s. His experience of German Nazi occupation and French colonialism influenced his emotional and intellectual progression towards a greater political Commitment, as encapsulated in his key late 1940s What Is Literature? Despite denunciations of bourgeois society he largely kept clear of Communism and seems in line with the New Left’s anti-Stalinist socialism with a human face.

There are also 1954 and 1962 film versions, and a 1985 TV version called Vicious Circle, directed by Kenneth Ives and featuring Omar Sharif as Garcin and Jeanne Moreau as Inez.

Rating: *** 1/2 / ****

In Camera is a largely but not totally talky piece, enlivened by Saville’s direction and the performances which enact Sartre’s ideas about action and talk and being. Saville mixes long claustrophobic takes, which are invariably close-ups, two-shots or intricate three-shots – centring on the actors’ faces.

We also see elliptical images from outside, which I’m assuming are memories. Harold Pinter can be a fine actor and he fits in well here, as a man who was called up to fight in the war, but executed for deserting, in a scene we see near the play’s opening.

As I take existentialism to concern making authentic individual decisions and actions, against group conformism, this play faces the fraught complications that inevitably come with other people. Here, this is exacerbated by the three’s enforced confinement with each other. There’s no rationalist optimism or fellow feeling but individual worlds clashing, with sexual attraction and repulsion featuring significantly.

There is a pessimistic coldness in the refusal to entertain the possibility that people might find accommodation with each others’ worlds. It’s colder than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot wherein for now Vladimir and Estragon do have each other. Here, the mention of torture and demonstration of psychological torture bring to mind Pinter’s later play One for the Road (theatre – Lyric Studio Hammersmith, 1984; TV for BBC2’s Summer Season, 1985), a chilling dissection of the language and acts of a totalitarian police state.

It seems well ahead of the general run of British TV, historically, in depicting an open lesbian character. The dead Inez expresses a relatable ennui and alienation amid modernity. While she would likely come across as incredibly haughty to many viewers today, she’s actually a more grounded and often wistful**, emotive presence than Estelle, who’s a spoiled, arrogant posho of the sort presumably familiar in many anti-super rich films today. Estelle’s utterly oblivious sense of her own superiority comes across in her voice and gestures and most pointedly in a line when she is insulting about lowly workers.

I enjoyed and was absorbed by this: its tight human close-ups being highly suited to the TV box in the corner of people’s living rooms. This viewing context enhances moments of jarring discordance, cuts to others outside who are in these people’s heads. Saville marshals them into several evocative framings and, periodically, we see their separate heads confined as the screen draws in with an effect resembling black curtains.

Clifford Hatts’s minimalist white sets also include abstract sculpture and art works, which convey this as more of an ambivalent critique of modernity than Sartre’s stage original, Huis clos.

Just as notably, the original – which I’m unfamiliar with, so please correct me if necessary – featured Garcin as a journalist whose avoidance of military service presumably in the Second World War is perceived more as an act of cowardice. Here, Saville’s TV version makes his stand a more heroic refusal: to be part of France’s colonialist war in Algeria, 1954-62. Sartre’s book of essays, Colonialism and Neocolonialism was published in France in February 1964, so there is some chance Saville and Arden read it…

Despite this, it still does not feel big-P political but rather an abstracted variant on what Raymond Williams termed ‘enclosed room’ TV dramas which explored interpersonal conflicts behind closed doors in domestic settings – with public affairs offstage. Thus, I’m sure this garnered some of the many viewers familiar with Armchair Theatre, which of course had included not just the crucial Alun Owen, but also Harold Pinter himself, a superb dramatist of everyday menace and absurdity.

There’s no surprise that director Philip Saville and his then-wife Jane Arden went to work on The Logic Game for BBC2’s experimental film slot, Six (9 January 1965). This is also an impressive and more eccentric work, which, I dare say, some viewers may find even tougher going than In Camera, but I’d urge people to give it a go!

**Unsurprising to see the luminous Jeanne Moreau cast in the role in 1985, who is utterly superb in Louis Malle’s existentialist crime thriller Lift to the Scaffold (1958), which has a specially composed Miles Davis underscore.

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

While all three actors are good in the roles, it’s unquestionably got to be Jane Arden, a magnetic force. Her deep intelligence and seriousness comes across in her role of the transgressive lesbian “coward” Inez.

Her voice is powerful, modulated and a stiller, subtle centre against Katherine Woodville’s faster, more shrill delivery and greater movement as Estelle. A self-professed ‘bitch’ who calls Estelle likewise, Arden portrays a complex, intellectual lesbian, who states some of the more tangible messages of the play.

Arden’s voice is grandiloquent (listen to her sardonic pronunciation of “hero!” while languishing back on the bench). Her fringe itself is stark and transfixing and her tired eyes carry a depressive, compelling power. We fully believe we are with her in this eternal Hell of the enclosed room, in camera, with no exit.

Jane Arden, born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire in Wales in 1927 was a major figure in underground British theatre and filmmaking in her collaborations with Jack Bond, which IIRC began with the extraordinary documentary Dali in New York, where she brings a burning intelligence and to reveal Dali’s autocratic and misogynistic tendencies. Arden had studied at RADA in the 1940s, moving into film and TV acting and writing. Clearly, her ultra enunciated RP tones in this play come from her RADA training. I’m assuming she had at least something more of a Welsh accent growing up…I

I’m glad to say that this isn’t the last time we’ll encounter Jane Arden in this story, though it’s a matter of historical regret that she never wrote a Wednesday Play or Play for Today herself. That would have been something remarkable…

Best line: One line for this play…? Nah!

“Forget about the others…? How utterly absurd. I feel you in every pore… Silence clamours in my ears..You can nail up your mouth, you can cut your tongue out, but it doesn’t prevent you being there… Can you stop your thoughts? I can hear them ticking away like a clock: tick, tick, tick… And I’m sure that you can hear mine. It’s no good sulking on your seat. Every sound comes to me soiled because you’ve intercepted it on the way. You’ve even stolen my face. You know it and I don’t. And you’ve stolen her from me. Do you think she’d dare treat me as she does if we were alone?! I’ll never leave you in peace… That would suit your book too well. You’d go on sitting there, like a Yogi in a trance. Even if I didn’t see her, I’d feel her in my bones. Knowing that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress for your benefit. Throwing you smiles that you didn’t even see. Well, I won’t stand for that. I prefer to choose my Hell.” (Inez)

Of course, Garcin’s “Hell is other people” is crucial to the play, but you know that already, so I have opted for a great monologue that Jane Arden delivers with focused intensity, seen behind Harold Pinter, both faces in frame.

Also, “You can’t throttle thoughts with hands!” (Inez)

Audience size: 5.88 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (N/A), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Billy Fury Show/Wrestling)

BBC2 figures clearly weren’t being calculated or at least published, even internally, at this point.

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 100%

This figure excludes the Daily Telegraph and New Statesman which did not have TV columns directly following this broadcast. John Williams, who has helped with cuttings, did not uncover any regional press reviews, interestingly.

Reception: The London press reaction was largely positive about most aspects of the play, especially the acting, with most but not all critiquing aspects of the visual style.

The Times‘ anonymous reviewer felt that Arden and Pinter’s characters ‘ground each other savagely away’, seeing Estelle as more an instrument to torture them, but finding Jonathan Harris ‘extremely menacing’ as the Valet (5 November 1964, p. 16). While they found the shots of outside the room/hell less effective, ‘the close groupings and limited movement in front of the camera reinforced the play’s thesis’ (ibid.)

Mary Crozier in the Guardian went even further in admiring a TV ‘event’ which had an appropriate intensity in conveying imprisonment and suffering (5 November 1964, p. 9). Crozier disliked the ‘dark shadows closing in on each side of the face of one of the speakers whenever he of she went into monologue’, and like the Times reviewer she (presumably) wrongly ascribed this to producer Peter Luke rather than director Saville (ibid). She was even more favourable towards the cast, finding Arden ‘very affecting’ (ibid.).

Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail stuck up for the play against the ‘droves’ who telephoned the BBC to grumble’ about In Camera, far preferring its moral seriousness to Frederick Knott’s play Write Me A Murder (BBC2), ‘which toys endlessly and boringly with murder, and not a soul complains’ (6 November 1964, p. 3). I’m impressed by Furlong’s disappointment at BBC2 failing to cater for ‘intelligent minorities’ here (ibid.). She was well ahead of, say, Chris Dunkley in 1982 with his reactionary broadsides against Channel 4.

Maurice Richardson in the Observer noted how the play had been recorded earlier in the year for Festival but held back, and was glad of this ‘glossily superior, genuinely compulsive viewing’ (8 November 1964, p. 25). He admired Pinter’s sensitivity and control and Catherine Woodville’s ‘correct suggestion of fathomless greed’, and the play having the ‘peculiar quality of a tragedy in which the purge is forever withheld’ (ibid.). Like most other reviewers, Richardson disapproved of the ‘totally egregious pseudo-cinematic capers’ which interrupted the actions, but felt that a great play survived these, and quite liked the set design being akin to a modern art gallery (ibid.). He felt this cliffhanger play made Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide 1964 election victory – an actual landslide, not like Biden in 2020 or Trump in 2024 – over Barry Goldwater seem an anticlimax (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times dissented from the general consensus, finding Sartre’s philosophical insights ‘squalid’ and banal (8 November 1964, p. 44). There is a clear anti-intellectualism underlying Wiggin’s rhetoric:

I don’t know why they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to this bore: there isn’t a market gardener who has not done more for peace – simply by living his fruitful life, in decent silence. I don’t wonder that the gap between our ever-growing population of sensitive squealing intellectuals, and the multitude who do the world’s work – and live its abundant life.

Wiggin far preferred Knott’s BBC2 ‘entertainment’ Write Me a Murder. As we shall see, the audience, in their collective diversity, rejected Wiggin’s simple-minded binary perspective. The Sunday Times subsequently printed one bluff letter in support of Wiggin from Sussex and two correcting his misinterpretation of Sartre’s play and ‘message’: David Cooper in Oxford and the imperious Mrs Angela M. Aspinwall of WC1, London (15 November 1964, p. 10).

Marjorie Norris in Television Today was, largely, an outlier the opposite way to Wiggin, loving Saville’s three-dimensional visual direction and claiming it seemed Sartre’s play had been written for television, though even she found some fault with the fragmentary glimpses outside the room (12 November 1964, p. 12). Norris liked Hatts’s set design and found it ‘impossible to distinguish’ between the actors in their excellence, admiring Jane Arden’s ‘tortured eyes’ and Pinter as ‘a sensitive (and good looking) actor’ (ibid.). Norris faults a 30-second segment around 10:30pm where she heard a backstage ‘racket’ which shouldn’t have been there, but the quality of the acting forced her to ignore it (ibid.).

John Russell Taylor saw it as the ‘event of the month in drama’, acclaiming Saville as the ‘nearest thing we have – or are probably likely to get – to an Orson Welles of the small screen’, being fascinated to see whether he would succeed or fail (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915). While Taylor doesn’t especially like Sartre’s play – ‘intellectual grand guignol, ingeniously put together but terribly thin and mechanical once one sees how it works’ – he felt Saville did a ‘brilliant job’, even admiring most of the flashbacks, as they are so subliminal (ibid.). Taylor’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:

And it was, surely, a piece of self-discipline akin to genius on Philip Saville’s part to refrain until just before the end from doing the obvious, inevitable thing, shooting the three on their separate couches from immediately above, so that when at last the shot appeared it came with full dramatic force instead of looking like just another piece of applied technical bravura. (ibid.)

In line with all other critics bar the leaden Wiggin, Taylor extols the acting, highlighting both Arden and Pinter’s status as playwrights.

The BBC audience research report (VR/64/589) is a fascinating document which speaks to the emotional intelligence of a majority of viewers at the time, and their varied personal responses.

‘I am quite sure I shall never forget it, but I certainly didn’t like it.’ (Housewife)

‘Really way out. I just had to watch it. One could feel the torment of mind portrayed.’ (Caretaker [in the year of the Pinter film!])

‘Just like a cross-section of clients in my waiting-room. Quite brilliantly written to make the point that “hell is other people”.’ (Social Worker)

None of the comments reported suggest neutrality or indifference. These are strong reactions: 47% either A+/A in the ratings and 30% the lower C/C- ratings with just 23% in the middle with a B.

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 – 01.01: ‘A Crack in the Ice’ (BBC1, 28 October 1964)

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 full textual analysis.

01.01: A Crack in the Ice (BBC One, Wednesday 28 October 1964, 9:25pm – 10:50pm)

Directed by Ronald Eyre; Written by Ronald Eyre, dramatising Nikolai Leskov (short story – ‘The Sentry’, 1889), translated by David Magarshack; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Susan Spence; Music by Norman Kay.

Near the start of the play’s very mobile opening shot.

This first entry in the Wednesday Play, or at least which some think is the first (!), is a dramatisation of a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895).¹ And, unlike Catch As Catch Can, this one exists, so I can write about my thoughts and feelings from an informed, inevitably partial way. For all plays I can watch – or read an existing script of – I adopt a reductive Halliwell’s Film Guide-esque rating system, which may nevertheless be useful to capture my responses in relation to critics and audiences.

Leskov’s original short story, dating from 1889, was first published in the UK in the early 1920s. It concerns what is, on the surface, a good deed, but which opens up a can of worms in the heavily stratified Tsarist Russia of 1839 under Nicholas I. Private Polkinoff (Derek Newark here) is a sentry in the imperial Russian Army, guarding the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. One night, a drunken Peasant (Ray Mort) unwisely walks across an iced-over lake and falls through a crack in the ice.

Polkinoff saves the unnamed Peasant, but, in doing so, deserts his post and, amid the recriminations, is incarcerated in solitary confinement. Lt. Col. Svinin (Bill Fraser) fears that the social disgrace of what he perceives as Polnikoff’s temporary desertion and neglect of his duty will mean the end of his regiment, given the autocratic Tsar Nicholas’s volatility and current preoccupation with maintaining high levels of security.

Duplicitous Lt. Kirov (Jack May) pretends that he instead performed the deed and brazenly walks away with a medal, saving the Ismailovsky Regiment’s skin, while the unfortunate Polnikoff remains confined for four days. Svinin is smugly delighted with the providential way things have turned out, yet cruelly insists that Polnikoff receive the birch 200 times, and forces his underling in the officer class Captain Miller (Jack Maxwell) to oversee this process.

A coda, ambiguously affirming the worldly here-and-now over lofty ideals, features Polnikoff larking around with his comrades and uninterested in the liberal Miller’s desire that he receives a due reward for his heroic good deed.

Rating: *** / ****

While A Crack in the Ice felt slightly overextended, I enjoyed what was a pungent and intellectually absorbing brew. There’s a clear indictment of arbitrary power and hierarchy that seems especially absurd when dramatised. Lt. Col. Svinin sets out the importance of rank late on: Tsar, General, Lt. Colonel, Captain, Private…

Leskov’s politics feel elliptical and carefully submerged in a philosophical tale which allows viewers to take different interpretations. We end with Postnikov happily enjoying the material things of life, simply glad to be alive, whereas the one man with a liberal conscience, Captain Miller, wants a fairer outcome. The strange labyrinthine muddle of Russia’s various institutions (army, police, church, monarchy) produces an outcome which isn’t exactly good, but nor is it as bad as it could have been…

Therefore, while John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (theatre – Royal Court, 1959; TV – Granada for ITV Play of the Week, 1961), John McGrath’s The Bofors Gun (theatre – 1966; film – 1968) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) all initially came to mind, it communicates more stoicism and ambiguity than those broadly anti-war pieces. Polkinoff, soundly played by Newark, ends up as either a paragon of grounded, materialistic common sense, or, a haplessly gullible and deferential pawn in powerful people’s game, depending on your perspective…

Director Ronald Eyre, one of many at the BBC in the 1960s-70s who moved seamlessly between theatre and television, opts for many facial close ups, filling the small screen. There are some deft filmed inserts, amid a mainly multicamera studio production on video-tape. We see an array of art works attributed to the enigmatic ‘Signum’² which brilliantly add an extra dimension, steering our emotional responses and directing us to imagine a larger canvas than the BBC studio could offer.

Richard Hurndall gives a clear RP voice over, 19 years before some expert pineapple munching when playing the First Doctor in Doctor Who. Hurndall’s authoritative narrative voice initially has the ring of a BBC newsreader or a sponsored documentary voice-over, while being an attempt to retain some of Leskov’s literary flavour.

There’s more music than a typical contemporary realist studio-based Play for Today, but less, say, than Doctor Who of this era, perhaps implying that the military sounding tunes are necessary to anchor the audience in familiar ground. However, the relative silence keeps the focus on the words and, in a significant moment, the sound of Church bells. Production design is by one of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today’s most prolific designers, Susan Spence, who does a solid job in creating spaces which reek of rank and privilege.

Eyre’s experimentalism in superimposing Signum’s art (left) alongside the moving images of Pte. Postnikov (right).

Significantly, all 18 performers in the cast are male. That means that precisely no women performers have appeared in the two plays in our story so far. It is realistic for this narrative to be performed by a hermetically sealed masculine group, given its portrayal of presumably male dominated institutions at this time in Russia. While I’d personally liked to have seen some women as part of this story, with its piercing of the bubble of “heroism”, we can admire how this drama exposes the closed world of men in power and the ridiculousness of hierarchy and delusions of grandeur.

Best performance: BILL FRASER

There’s some great ornery harrumphing from the inimitable Michael Hordern as General Kokoshkin, but the honours have to go to Bill Fraser, here, who plays a stolid, preening and cantankerously cunning man, obsessed with his Regiment’s standing in Russia’s social pecking order, but even more preoccupied with his own status. He regards a portrait of himself near the start and later delivers a stern speech rebuking the liberal Captain Miller (James Maxwell), waffling about “Providence” and “the greatest good for the greatest number”, enabling Miller to chide his inconsistency in citing an English liberal philosopher. Suffice to say, Fraser nails Svinin’s pompous rhetoric, entitled inhabitation of his military uniform and clodhopping political manoeuvring. Fraser would play even greater parts in Trevor Griffiths’s Plays for Today All Good Men (1974) & Comedians (1979).

Best line: “Whatever is best for the country is true, whatever weakens it is a lie.” (Lt. Col. Svinin, speaking for many in 2024 too, sadly)

Audience size: 7.35 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 55.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (Peter Nero – pianist-composer/Curtain of Fear – Victor Canning serial thriller/Newsroom), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Goldwater. Man of the West – report by John Freeman/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 78%

Reception: This was heralded as a ‘Russian play for the intelligent’ (Liverpool Daily Press, 24 October 1964, p.6). Yet, in an interview for, significantly, the Mirror, Ronald Eyre drew links with Sid Colin’s sitcom The Army Game (Granada for ITV, 1957-61), which made Bill Fraser a household name through playing Sgt. Maj. Claude Snudge who marshalled a group of post-Second World War National Service recruits. Eyre is quoted: ‘Instead of just dealing with Bootsies and Snudges in a hut, this is the full Army Game from top to bottom – and it has a lot much punch’ (Jack Bell, Daily Mirror, 28 October 1964, p. 18). There’s also focus on how Fraser was cast after playing a sinister Nazi SS chief in a play at the Mermaid (ibid.).

After the play’s broadcast, Marjorie Norris admired its detail and techniques, the performances, Signum’s Picasso-like drawings and Spence’s designs of the Chief of Police’s quarters for their ‘Byzantine splendour’. However, she felt the actors were rarely ‘given a chance to act with each other’, and disliked the close ups and voice-overs of characters’ interior thoughts (Television Today, 5 November 1964, p. 14). More critical still was Lyn Lockwood, who thought it had several ‘excellent passages’ and strong performances, but found Eyre’s experimental approach ‘somewhat cumbersome’, leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination (Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1964, p. 19).

Signum art as used during Postnikov’s imagining that he will end up in Siberia.

However, the London press response was broadly favourable. An anonymous Times reviewer felt Bill Fraser ‘combined richness with restraint’ and admired Ray Mort’s ‘genuinely touching little performance’, while admiring Eyre’s adventurous and kinetic style and, again, Signum’s ‘sometimes sensationally vigorous’ drawings (29 October 1964, p. 5). John Russell Taylor found the play initially slow to get going, but felt it became ‘the best, most intelligent and gripping piece of television drama we have had for a long time’ (The Listener, 5 November 1964, p. 735). Taylor loved its particularity and universality, and how the interview between the liberal Captain and the bishop (Peter Madden) was ‘a model of civilized irony’, with both of them ‘right but according to completely incompatible standards’ (ibid.).

Philip Purser thoroughly enjoyed a ‘funny, ironic, consistently entertaining’ play which was ‘universally true in its description of officer-man relationships and particularly true in its depiction of emergent liberal humanism.’ (Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 1964, p. 13). A briefer mention by Kenneth Baily in The People claims it started the new series ‘so splendidly’ (1 November 1964, p. 4).

Even more fulsome were Maurice Richardson and John Holmstrom. The former found it ‘electrifying’, being delighted to see Leskov’s ‘satirical masterpiece’ on TV, with the key action scene ‘a surprisingly successful piece of cinematic realism’ and the acting ‘magnificent’ (Observer, 1 November 1964, p. 24). The latter thought it ‘remarkable’, with Hordern giving one of ‘his finest shaggy-vulture impersonations, an insanely awesome mass of throat-clearings, back-humpings and bouncings on the balls of the feet’ (New Statesman, 6 November 1964, p. 711). Presciently, Holmstrom acclaims Fraser’s ‘steadily growing depth and finesse’ and predicts that Fraser ‘will be seen in five or ten years’ time not as a comic but as one of our great straight actors.’ (ibid.)

In the regional press, A.A.S. in the Birmingham Evening Mail enjoyed it, emphasising Fraser’s ‘rich, wise and amusing’ performance’ (29 October 1964, p. 3). However, further up North, John Tilley was bored, finding the dialogue ‘poor in its attempt to illustrate the profound banality of the military mind’ (Newcastle Journal, 31 October 1964, p. 9).

In the USA, reviewer ‘Rich.’ was in line with the general positive consensus, feeling it was ‘obviously intended for the more thoughtful viewer, though not the longhair type’, which augured ‘well for the skein’ (Variety, 11 November 1964, p. 38). ‘If this series of adaptations and new works by established writers can keep to this standard BBC drama will deserve nosegays’ (ibid). Notably, Philip Purser had felt this play brought to ‘full maturity’ the policy of the previous Festival strand, considering the BBC’s likely abandonment of Festival next year ‘typical BBC hara-kiri’ (op. cit.).

The audience generally liked it, with its 64 RI higher than the average of 62 for TV drama in the first half of 1964. While there was criticism of the still images and, typically for a play of non-British origin, ‘Quite a number found the theme unpleasant and depressing’, more of the large audience commended ‘something different at last’ and ‘an intellectual treat’ (BBC audience research report, VR/64/571). A teacher gave a perceptive extended paean:

The BBC is to be congratulated on the choice of this play. It is a courageous expose of the issues that torment men and bedevil their lives. Greed, ambition, corruption in high places, the pitilessness of officialdom and the ineffectualness of liberalism against closed minds, self interest, fear and helpless ignorance were laid bare without cant or sentimentalism or even more surprisingly, without undue cynicism.

The general length and depth of the responses in this 1960s report far exceeds what I have been used to analysing in many of the 1970s-80s ones. However, I can’t help but feel that more people today would agree with the viewer who said, ‘I would forfeit the whole series of Perry Mason for one play of this calibre’? than this equally positive response from a Dental Surgery Assistant: ‘A pleasant change. No women! No sex! No kitchen sink! No long-haired youth or pop music, therefore to me – marvellous!’ (ibid.).

Overall, A Crack in the Ice was clearly a successful opening to a run of plays intangibly poised between the Festival and Wednesday Play modes. While not quite the scale of ratings success of the adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector (BBC TV, 9 February 1958)³, featuring Tony Hancock as Hlestakov, it did easily defeat ITV opposition: emphasising, again, the democratic wisdom of using established radio or TV stars to make European plays more palatable to a wide audience.⁴

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. 🙂

This is the first billed in the Radio Times as a ‘Wednesday Play’, so is good enough for me. However, clearly the concept and identity of the strand would fully be established in 1965 when Sydney Newman assigned the producer James MacTaggart to it. Clearly, A Crack in the Ice is more akin to Peter Luke’s previous stage adaptations for Festival (BBC1, 1963-64) ↩︎
Can anyone help in identifying who this was? ↩︎
See this Alan Bromly-directed version of The Government Inspector on YouTube here ↩︎
See Billy Smart’s excellent journal article here for a full account of the BBC’s rhetoric in promoting Television World Theatre and Festival, and an account of critical and audience responses: ‘Drama for People ‘in the know’: Television World Theatre (BBC 1957-1959) and Festival (BBC 1963-1964)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37:1, pp. 34-48. ↩︎

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy at 60: unofficial 01 – Catch As Catch Can (BBC1, 30 September 1964)

The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC single drama strand, 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), I feel it’s an apt 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 full textual analysis.

Unofficial 01: Catch As Catch Can (BBC One, 30 September 1964)

Directed by David Benedictus; Written by Jean Anouilh (play: La Foire d’empoigne, 1962); Translated by Lucienne Hill

We start with a play of questionable status as a ‘Wednesday Play’, as such. The IMDb regards it as the first, but this enigmatic play wasn’t even scheduled in the Radio Times, let alone billed as a Wednesday Play. However, it was shown on Wednesday night at 9:45pm on BBC1, broadly speaking, in the slot that would become home.

This 80-minute TV play, set during the Hundred Days war (1815), was adapted from a French stage original by Jean Anouilh (1910-87), the major Bordeaux-born playwright, known for tragedies and comedies, and for being tangentially in touch with absurdist and existentialist currents. Under its French title, La Foire d’empoigne, it was first performed at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 20 October 1962, directed by the author and Roland Piétri. Anouilh famously adapted Sophocles’s Antigone (1944) and his plays Becket and The Waltz of the Torreadors were filmed in the 1960s.

It can tentatively be argued that Anouilh’s apparent earlier political ambiguity and non-alignment and later conservative disillusionment with post-War developments bears a strong relation to a loose grouping of far-from-committed Play for Today dramatists who exceeded the likes of Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths and John McGrath in number.

My main source of information about Catch As Catch Can are contemporary reviews in the Times, Sunday Times and the BBC’s magazine, the Listener. Notably, this play was a late replacement for Clive Exton’s The Bone Yard – which we’ll come to later. John Russell Taylor claimed that Exton’s play’s indefinite postponement was due to ‘some supposed similarity’ with a legal case concerning the police officer DS Harold Challenor (1922-2008) (‘Television of the Month: Drama’, The Listener, 8 October 1964, p. 561). Interestingly, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer’s comments indicate a clear expectation – already – that this time-slot would host the ‘sour’:

Those disappointed at the loss of Mr. Exton’s uproariously sour attention to our age were probably consoled by M. Anouilh’s no less sour, extremely polished theatricality

(Anon, ‘A NAPOLEONIC EMBROIDERY’, Times, 1 October 1964, p. 15)

This critic seems generally an Anouilh sceptic, disliking his ‘high-handed’ way in treating history as malleable putty, but admires this particular TV production. Typically for a TV critic, as Katie Crosson has shrewdly argued, they see sentimentality as a cardinal sin in plays: ‘this hides an enormous sentimentality behind a vigorously savage treatment of almost everybody except its noble hero, and salts the whole with wit.’ This suggests a courtly, cerebral rhetoric, matching Dickensian attitudes to the various characters.

Lucienne Hill’s translation is ‘stylish, epigrammatic’, helped also by ‘stylishly stagey acting’ (Times ibid.). In line with Richard Hewett’s (2017) historical findings about TV acting, actors’ stage training still remained a dominant influence on performances in 1964, despite the steady growth in scaled down playing. Notably, Kenneth Williams plays Napoleon here – ‘unlikely’ casting for the Times‘ critic – but he ‘gives a fine theatrical glitter’ to a ‘theatrical rascal’, while another major stage and cinema actor Robert Helpmann is a quieter and sardonic foil as Fouché. The Times critic also admires the performances of David Horne as King Louis XVIII and Simon Ward as ‘the young idealist in a corrupt world’.

This critic admires the ‘touching sincerity’ in Ward’s performance and his avoidance of the temptation to send-up the role: this earnestness effectively counterpointed the sharp treatment of the other characters. Maurice Wiggin, the Sunday Times‘ trustily crusty critic of early Play for Today, felt this play ‘thin’, with the characters lacking in life except Horne as Louis, who ‘spoke the lines as if he had just thought of them: a ripe performance.’ (”Luvvable cockney sparrers”, Sunday Times, 4 October 1964, p. 44).

John Russell Taylor disagreed about the play, admiring its ‘elegance and glitter’, and the performances, finding Horne’s performance ‘much straighter’ than the ‘unashamedly theatrical’ Helpmann and Williams – who worked ‘rather well in the context’ (Listener op. cit.). For Taylor, Horne’s restraint unbalanced the play somewhat.

However, JRT liked how even this weaker Anouilh play made history ‘homey’ by ‘cutting the great down to relatively domestic proportions’: chiefly, by presenting the Hundred Days conflict as ‘the flimsy but sometimes diverting charade it is’. For me, this indicates it might just have been a forerunner of the bathetic Sellar and Yeatman-esque satire in Keith Dewhurst’s Churchill’s People instalment The Great Alfred (1975) and Mike Stott’s Play for Today Soldiers Talking, Cleanly (1978), whose earthy humour demystifies British army life.

Compared to many Wednesday Plays that await us, Catch As Catch Can‘s audience was fairly low, according to BBC Daily Viewing Barometer: with a 6.3% share of the UK population. It was notably less popular in London (4%) and more watched in the Midlands and Wales (9%) and Scotland and Northern Ireland (8% each).

Director David Benedictus (1938-2023) had a novel adapted by Francis Ford Coppola – You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) – and wrote an interesting sounding short film The Beach (1966), a TV musical for the 1926 General Strike’s sixtieth anniversary, What a Way to Run a Revolution (1986) and adapted C.A. Jones’s novel Little Sir Nicholas (1990) for TV. I watched this last period drama myself when a child. He had previously directed three episodes for Cold War anthology thriller strand Moonstrike (1963) and would return to The Wednesday Play.

It’s fascinating that our Wednesday Play story begins with the unlikely figure of Kenneth Williams, three years before playing Citizen Camembert in Carry on Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). Williams had appeared in Peter Brook’s film of The Beggar’s Opera (1953), TV versions of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and W. Somerset Maugham, and Orson Welles’s self-reflexive Moby Dick Rehearsed (1955), alongside Patrick McGoohan, based on the staged Moby Dick, so he was yet to be entirely pigeonholed. When I watched Carry on Nurse (1959), an affable film, Charles Hawtrey and Williams stood out as the most skilled comic performers, conveying great depths of idiosyncratic eccentricity.

Now, imagine Williams as Napoleon, no less; forgive me if I don’t quite trust the verdict of Mozza Wiggin… It’s our loss that we cannot watch this and judge for ourselves, sixty years to the day.

We *can* at least see Williams in role as Napoleon in this photo from the *Listener*, with Robert Helpmann (left).

Audience Size: 3.09 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: N/A. (Don’t have BBC2 or ITV figures)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Danny Kaye Show), ITV (A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On / Professional Wrestling)

BBC Audience Reaction Index (RI %): N/A.

Reviewed in publications consulted: 60%

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. 🙂

Book review: Liz Smith (2006) OUR BETTY: SCENES FROM MY LIFE

As with many memoirs of famous people, this has greatest power in its reflections on childhood, growing up and life before fame. Smith’s fame has been as a skilled character actor, not any sort of star, but nevertheless the latter half of the book is rendered blander by the very human diplomacy and tact she adopts in discussing people she had worked with, and still might work with.

That said, this book is a resounding corrective to any idea of Liz Smith as a cuddly, mild eccentric. While ‘I love playing nutty creatures in eccentric outfits’ (p. 145), Our Betty establishes the reality of her as a perceptive observer and unconventional performer, able to move from sitcoms to social realism to Samuel Beckett absurdism, with these experiences blending into and informing each other.

Smith reflects on her love of cinema growing up in 1920s Scunthorpe, noting films like The Singing Fool, Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway alongside The Variety Theatre and strolling players doing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a boxing ring below the railway lines. Her mother died when she was two, and her father deserted her when she was seven, after several prefiguring instances of his irresponsibility. Adopted by her Grandma, she got fascinated by performance when at school: ‘That was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. Make people laugh, have lots of lights, no gloom and no oil lamps.’ (p. 50)

One of her most vivid childhood memories of playing in the street constitutes one of the most magnificently bleak ripostes imaginable to any ‘good old days’ nostalgic romanticising (pp. 21-2). There are also fascinating tales of her Grandad and the 1926 General Strike and how life working in the steel furnace was ‘pure theatre’ (p. 27). The segment about the Plough Jags reads like a condensed, five-paragraph J.G. Ballard short story rooted in Scunthorpe strangeness (pp. 27-9).

It’s fascinating to read about her time in Portobello from the late 1940s, at art and then drama school, moving in a milieu including Rita Webb, Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and even Diana Dors. She seems to have far preferred this life in a London ‘village’ than in the suburbs near Epping Forest that she subsequently moved to in the 1950s. Smith, who had worked at the impressively open and democratic sounding Gateway Theatre (pp. 82-3), joined the Unity Theatre and then Charles Marowitz’s experimental group which rehearsed at Fitzroy Square. They all needed day jobs to manage this, as Marowitz paid them no money for their evening work. She had some great creative experiences with Marowitz, but the economic side of it seems exploitative and he dropped them abruptly to go to the RSC with Peter Brook.

The creative heart of the book is Smith’s association with Mike Leigh, who cast her in his feature film, Bleak Moments (1971) and then Smith’s first of seven Play for Today roles: in Leigh’s Hard Labour (1973). The section on the latter (pp. 131-7) is riveting. It provides insight concerning Smith’s creative input into her role as Mrs Thornley, ‘a woman who worked for others. Like a slave’ (p. 133). At a time when Chantal Akerman has now supplanted male auteurs in Sight and Sound’s greatest films ever poll, Hard Labour stands as Play for Today’s most prescient and subtle feminist drama of 1973, alongside Nemone Lethbridge’s more baroque Baby Blues. Smith’s enactment of Mrs Thornley’s painful life was meticulously researched but clearly also has some roots in her own experience of dull and exploitative labour (p. 54, 120-1). Smith relished Leigh’s rigorous and challenging ethos; working with Leigh continued her learning process with Marowitz, but was more fairly rewarded and lasting. Hard Labour enjoyed the vast luxury of eight weeks of improvisations followed by a month of shooting, all enabled by a BBC steered in a radical direction by producer Tony Garnett.

Call me a doyen of Play for Today’s ‘deep cuts’ if you will, but I do just wish she had reflected on playing Miss Pritchett in Elaine Feinstein’s Breath (1975); she is unnerving in that, channelling elements of Whitehouse and Thatcher, and showing her vast acting range.

The latter section has some fine vignettes on the more unusual side of British TV and film. We hear about Smith working on the likes of Peter Tinniswood’s offbeat I Didn’t Know You Cared (pp. 147-9), with its variety of settings, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), by Viv Stanshall whom she rightly calls ‘wonderful’, Peter Greenaway’s tremendously original The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and a series for children called Pirates. We learn how Smith features in a student film production involving Timothy Spall, Sanscape. While she absolutely adored the experience of being in LA for various projects, film productions often fell through or parts got cut.

Apt given her lifelong love of the cinema medium, Smith also provides a welcome roster of now neglected films of the 1980s-90s: A Private Function (1984), Apartment Zero (1988), High Spirits (1988), We Think the World of You (1988), The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) and La Nona (1991) for BBC2’s erformance play strand, alongside drag artiste extraordinaire Les Dawson.

Smith makes the crucial point that The Royle Family, which she calls a career ‘highlight’, felt deeply naturalistic due to the lack of an audience, which naturally leads to larger, communicative performances, but it was also performed as scripted and totally without improvisation (p. 209-10).

Smith comes across as a perceptive and caring person: a long time vegetarian who loves animals, commits to charitable activities, including Water Aid, and reflects on childhood memories of encountering one Black man locally (pp. 30-1) and her cosmopolitan experiences as a WREN in the Second World War (pp. 58-67). On the final page, she recounts sitting in a favourite armchair and how she listens to Al Bowlly every day and takes joy in her family life, which was clearly far more stable for the younger generations than hers was.

Book review: Andrew Roberts (2020) IDOLS OF THE ODEONS: POST-WAR BRITISH FILM STARDOM

This is a fine book. It’s not a gadfly’s project undertaken detachedly for a short time; it’s the result of a lifelong passion for British cinema and screen acting. An especially notable moment is Roberts’s closing comment in the chapter on James Robertson Justice where he asserts the value of the affection we may feel for actors. This deeply analytical and emotive book treats a distinct group of British screen performers as if they are a fascinating, varied but oddly cohesive extended family. Roberts analyses a range of careers and performances, drawing on a vast web of idiosyncratic contextual knowledge.

You could quibble with how relatively few women are featured in comparison to men, but that in itself is a reflection of who we got to see on screen in British films of the 1950s, by and large. Plus, the chapters on Diana Dors, Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are equally tremendous as the rest on Sellers, Finch, Justice, Wisdom, Terry-Thomas et al.

There are occasional copy editing errors, but not so many to detract from what is an absolutely delightful book. I’ve been making a list of key films mentioned in this book, woeful or fascinating sounding, and indeed some of Roberts’s clear personal favourites which cut so deeply: Genevieve (1953), The Fast Lady (1962), Heavens Above (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Smokescreen (1964), among others. His chapters have a tendency towards pithy asides in footnote form, and they often end with what he sees as the most immortal, telling and deeply characterful performance from each actor.

This is a book which reminds me of the delights of The Pleasure Garden (1953) and Simon and Laura (1955), wonderful sui generis films, and I didn’t need much reminding of The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). There’s also an often righteous pleasure in his setting the record straight about how certain films or actors’ images have been traduced and simplified. Roberts has watched, and watches, closely, which hopefully makes us all want to do the same.

The conclusion does a fine job of summarising the book’s spirit and what a spirit: crucially, there is both humour and unabashed – sincere and caustic – value judgements concerning many films. But I do feel that such a rich kaleidoscope of actors and films needed somewhat more drawing together: i.e. with more identification of historical trends and patterns. Much of this is embedded implicitly within all chapters, but making a few key findings explicit would have helped seal the book’s achievement even more.

Reading it, I got the sense that Roberts felt there was a particular configuration of people, places, voices and vehicles – vintage cars are a further special interest of his – in British Cinema circa 1953-64 which made that a special era and that there was then a gradual decline, becoming steeper into the 1970s. Evidently, there are exceptions, and he can be scrupulously nuanced. But he makes a persuasive cumulative case that many performers became marooned in changing times, which sadly involved a decline in the quality of screenwriting and the social vision behind the British films being made, alongside increasingly tatty, bathetic production values. This is a far more rigorous and deeply felt way of making the argument about the paucity of British Cinema in the 1970s than the various 1980s tomes by men called Walker.

There is a moving account of the sad career trajectories of Terry-Thomas, Justice and Jacques, being hemmed in and diminished by changing trends in British cinema and culture. I recall just how painful The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) is to watch, only very briefly alluded to here in the Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas chapter. Roberts also rightly asserts that the same year’s Carry On Emmanuelle is a vile film.

Such incontestable judgements are supplemented by use of a plethora of fine scholarly work on stardom and acting by academics like Melanie Williams, Peter Kramer, Alan Lovell, Geoffrey Macnab, Tom Ryall, Richard Dyer and a brace of Sight and Sound articles by Raymond Durgnat and Lawrence Shaffer. There is an attentiveness to how recurring, persona-based star acting differs from shifting, impersonation-based character acting. But also a sense of how certain actors, in their careers, oscillated between these poles.

This book is deeply scholarly, yet humanly opinionated: it lovingly investigates the past, while avoiding roseate nostalgia. Roberts is a fine neurodivergent writer, who knows this patch of cultural history incredibly well. This has a narrower spatial and temporal remit than Molly Haskell’s assessment of women in cinema or David Thomson’s biographical dictionaries, but it has much the same compendious heft, grasp of complexity, and makes compelling subjective judgements.

It makes a more digressive, personal companion piece to Richard Hewett’s book – also for MUP – on British television acting from the 1950s-2010s.
While I can’t really stand the things in real life, I’d love to see his historical analysis of cars in cinema, including Jacques Tati’s remarkable Trafic (1971) and so many others. Also, hopefully, we will get his BFI Film Classics book on Smokescreen or The Pumpkin Eater before too long. Roberts cites Roger Lewis and Jonathan Meades a few times, which is apt: this work is unapologetically knowledgeable and bursts out of the pages with lively wit and cantankerous invective.

If this sort of thing is out of fashion, then it’s a duller world for it. Never conform.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.