Category: BBC

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.18: ‘Cemented with Love’ (BBC1, 5 May 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.

02.18: Cemented with Love (BBC One, Wednesday 5 May 1965) 9:40 – 11:05pm

Directed by Michael Leeston-Smith; Written by Sam Thompson; Produced by Peter Luke; Story Editor: Harry Moore Designed by Douglas Smith

Sam Thompson (left) and Denys Hawthorne as Bob Beggs (right)

Finally, Ireland and Northern Ireland enter our Wednesday Play story, with a play by Sam Thompson brought to the world by producer Peter Luke, who had featured much more in autumn-winter 1964, but was to remain a significant figure.

John B. Kerr (Harold Goldblatt), married to Ethel Kerr (Elizabeth Begley) is a ‘wealthy butcher and due-hard politician’: a corrupt Orangeman MP for the fictional Ulster constituency of Drumtory, a seat he has held for 20 years, but is now about to retire (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 5 May 1965, p. 2). He expects his son to take over his seat while maintaining his prejudices. But the boy William Kerr (Anton Rodgers) returning from a time in England, is an idealist, and bases his campaign on ‘religious reconciliation – unaware, apparently, of the bribery, blackmail, rumour-mongering and personation-plotting going on around him’ (Guardian, 8 October 1966, p. 6). His election agent is Alan Price (J. G. Devlin) Crucially, William’s campaign is hampered when he reveals he is married to a Catholic. William’s rival in the race Swindle (Sam Thompson) had already  understandably begun attacking the notion of Drumtory being a ‘family seat’ for the Kerrs (Coventry Evening Telegraph op. cit.).

The Radio Times preview indicates the play’s source of satirical humour in anachronistic beliefs and language: ‘the electioneering speeches with which the play opens seem to have more relevance to the seventeenth than the twentieth century’ (1 May 1965, p. 43). Minds are shut and there is no ‘real discussion’ (ibid.). Writer Sam Thompson (1916-65)

sees the political speeches of his Loyalists and Republicans as little more than repetitive history-mongering [while] he sees their political methods as a ludicrous travesty of parliamentary democracy (ibid.).

The article affirms how Thompson’s representation of an election campaign is not a wild exaggeration given ‘last year’s pre-election riots’ in Belfast, and that his own experience as a candidate in County Down clearly informed the play, ‘just as his time as a docker must have provided material for his first major work’, Over the Bridge (ibid.). Thompson’s electoral experience notably echoes that of Dennis Potter, who also stood as a Labour candidate in the 1964 general election – both men lost comfortably.

The South Down constituency has had a fascinating, historical trajectory. While Irish Nationalists tended to win the seat from 1885-1918, the Ulster Unionist Party comfortably won all 1950s contests, Lawrence Orr amassing a majority of 30,577 in 1959. In 1964, Sam Thompson as a NI Labour candidate, gained 6,260 votes (11.2%), finishing third behind an Independent Republican, helping cut Orr’s majority to a still-mighty 21,891.

Subsequently, the former Tory purveyor of racist discourse Enoch Powell held the seat for the UUP from October 1974, if not as solidly as before, generally. In 1987, Powell lost the seat to Eddie McGrady of the centre-left SDLP, who were pro-Irish unification but anti-violence. McGrady and his successor Margaret Ritchie comfortably held the seat for thirty years, until Sinn Fein gained it on a 9.3% swing in the 2017 general election, extending their majority significantly in 2024.

Thompson, from a Protestant working-class background, worked as a painter in the Belfast shipyards. His politics were socialist and he was a trade unionist who became a shop steward at Belfast Corporation, but his opposition to sectarian discrimination cost him his job. Thompson wrote extensively for BBC radio in the late 1950s, with plays and documentaries about his experiences of working life and sectarianism. His writing and political outlook were crucially formative for fellow Northern Irish Protestant writers born in the 1940s like Stewart Parker, Derek Mahon and Graham Reid. Thompson was an especially strong influence on Parker’s lively comedic style and anti-sectarian socialist humanism (see my PhD, Volume One, pp. 193-4).

An interesting cast includes Margaret D’Arcy, Paddy Joyce, Ronnie Masterson, Denys Hawthorne, Basildon Henson, Kate Storey, Doreen Hepburn and Sam Thompson himself as John Swindle, William’s rival for the seat. The play was commissioned and recorded in London, but its original planned December 1964 screening was cancelled by BBC Northern Ireland Controller Robert McCall, which showed the Unionist establishment’s sway with the BBC (John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 156). There is much extensive coverage of this controversy both in John Hill’s excellent book and cuttings I don’t have the time to dissect just now.

Sadly, Thompson collapsed and died at the Northern Ireland Labour Party’s offices in Waring Street, Belfast, on 15 February 1965, aged 48; he had suffered from a heart condition and had suffered two heart attacks in 1961, but kept highly active, such as touring Ulster with Joseph Tomelty’s play, One Year in Marlfield (Belfast Telegraph, 15 February 1965, pp. 1, 4) This same article noted Thompson lived at 55 Craigmore Street, off the Dublin Road, Belfast, and extolls his persistence: ‘until his death he continued to criticise and challenge authority in all its aspects’ (ibid.).

On 30 March 1965, a ‘local BBC production’ of Derryman Brian Friel’s play, The Enemy Within, about the 6th century monk Saint Columba of Iona, had been screened and was seen by Alf McCreary as ‘simple, beautifully written and profound’ (Belfast Telegraph – Ireland’s Saturday Night, 3 April 1965, p. 8). BBC Genome does not turn up any hits for this, but a radio version was on BBC Home Service Northern Ireland in June 1963. The Enemy Within had been first staged at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1962, and its televising made McCready look forward helpfully to Cemented With Love (ibid.). It was incredibly sad that Thompson himself could not sit back and watch his play when it eventually emerged on 5 May 1965, and the sense of loss is compounded by Harold Goldblatt’s report that Thompson’s last words to him were that he had been commissioned to write two more TV plays (Belfast Telegraph, 15 February 1965, p. 2).

This is another play we cannot, sadly, watch today, as the recording was not retained in the archives.

Audience size: 5.94 million.

The play gained an especially high TAM rating in Ulster, the highest BBC One programme of the week: 44, just outside the Ulster top ten (Television Today, 20 May 1965, p. 10).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 50.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Many Happy Returns – Diamond / Enquiry: Austria – The Great Survivor / Jazz 625: Dixieland Revisited), ITV (Thinking About People: Liberal Party Political Broadcast / A Slight White Paper on Love: 1 – Can This Be Love? / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 14.3% (needs a more thorough check to be totally certain!)

Reception: There was a tellingly scant response from London critics, somewhat more in Glasgow, Bristol, Leicester and Liverpool, and far more response in Belfast! Critics were positive, with slightly more resistance in Belfast, though viewers were well behind this play, especially those from Ulster.

Lyn Lockwood noted the play dealt with the most ‘provocative subjects’ of religion and politics, and admired how Thompson delivered ‘hard blows’ at both Protestant and Catholic camps, feeling that ‘Reactions across the Irish Sea to this political satire will no doubt be fast and furious’ (Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1965, p. 21). As a ‘neutral’, she found it all ‘highly diverting’ and praised ‘admirable’ performances from J. G. Devlin, Harold Goldblatt ‘and other familiar interpreters of the Northern Irish character’ (ibid.).

Left to right: Elizabeth Begley, Harold Goldblatt, J. G. Devlin, Anton Rodgers and Sam Thompson

The best Irish play I have seen for years. Remarkably well written, funny yet didactic, unbiassed yet vigorous and strong (ibid.)

Frederick Laws’ response was mixed, calling it ‘a rough-and-ready comedy about political and religious ill will in Northern Ireland’, which ‘worked well when patently fantastic and grew weak whenever we were asked to take it seriously’ (The Listener, 27 May 1965, p. 803).

There was somewhat more response across other British cities. In Bristol’s Western Daily Press, Peter Forth liked the acting of ‘an enthusiastic and talented cast’, including Devlin, Rodgers and Begley, while describing the political meeting scenes as ‘lively and amusing’ (6 May 1965, p. 7). Interestingly, A.B. felt the prospect of a comedy – a ‘goodwill-straining vein’ – was usually incredibly ‘daunting’, but Thompson’s comedy was ‘great fun’, with a ‘vast – and presumably expensive – array of characters ranging from the downright vicious to the genially innocent’ (Leicester Daily Mercury, 6 May 1965, p. 10). A.B. reflected that Thompson must have ‘known well what he was about in showing that the opposite of apathy is not bound to be social awareness and political idealism’ – a very up to date sentiment for British local election results in 2025 (ibid.). This is perhaps slightly condescending and complacently trivialising, though:

Bigotry and blind hatred keep the electoral fires burning and it is almost tempting to wish that we could look forward to as much fun and games in the municipal congrats now building up to their annual anti-climax in Leicester (ibid.).

N.G.P. felt the play was a posthumous tribute to Thompson’s ‘talent for witty, sometimes savage, observation of life as he had known it’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 6 May 1965, p. 3). They liked a ‘riotous comedy’ with an underlying ‘thread of biting satire’, with the themes ‘pushed home with dickensian gusto by the extravagantly Irish characters’ (ibid.). Gnomically, Alan Stewart commented: ‘For my money there were quite a few cracks showing’ (Glasgow Sunday Post, 9 May 1965, p. 12).

As you might expect, the vast majority of responses were from the Belfast press. An anonymous front page review felt it wasn’t serious enough and was not in the class of Thompson’s Over the Bridge ‘as a cauterizer of bigotry’ (Belfast Telegraph, 6 May 1965, p. 1). You can tell Cemented With Love had struck a nerve in this passage; it was clearly too unpalatable in its truthfulness:

But we must look now for less of the rawness and crudity which Thompson’s lurid and rebellious mind tended to make melodrama of what Ulster people know to be real and earnest. (ibid.)

They also desired a more St. John Greer Ervine-style Ulster playwright to write ‘of a more rational people tested by a changing environment – and comprehensible to all the world’ (ibid.). Unfortunately, this viewpoint was wide of the mark, while Thompson was spot on, concerning where Northern Ireland was headed, given the subsequent history of the Troubles.

Harold Goldblatt

Similarly, William Millar found it was not enlightening, feeling it partially succeeded in providing ‘a laugh or two’, being a ‘light-hearted romp in which all the good old stage Irish parts were utilised to the full’ (Belfast News Letter, 6 May 1965, p. 12). Millar was entertained by the first 20 minutes but found the underhand doings ‘boring’:

Even the personation scenes towards the end showing women feverishly changing costumes to vote a second time, did not come off (ibid.).

While Millar loved Patrick McAlinney as the Irish United Party representative and Harold Goldblatt’s ‘tub-thumping’ performance, he felt Thompson’s last play was ‘far from being his best’ (ibid.).

In stark contrast, Christopher Cairns loved ‘a vigorous, rumbustious, provocative and at the same time human and, I think, deeply felt extravaganza’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 3). Cairns saw it as sadly ‘predictable’ that many Ulster people would feel the play would do them harm, when actually ‘this kind of self-critical picture of the conflicts and prejudices of a community, done with sincerity and skill, increases interest in us and respect for the colour and vitality of Ulster’ (ibid.). He suspected politicians like those represented in Thompson’s play would hate it, and that demonstrated its success (ibid.).

A clear-sighted Ralph Bossence was also impressed by a play which left him feeling ashamed of what it revealed, especially given how he’d encountered local people afterwards who had regarded William’s bigoted parents as rational and justifiable. William’s own expressions of ‘incredulity, indignation and despair […] were the emotions that should have been stimulated’ (Belfast News Letter, 10 May 1965, p. 4).

Similarly, Olive Kay noted this ‘funny, heartwarming’ play was ‘too realistic for some’, and how it had been defended by Jimmy Greene on Ulster TV Channel nine’s Flashback against press comments attacking the play; Greene ending in ‘a homily deploring our lack of ability to laugh at ourselves’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 3). An anonymous Correspondent reflected how the play’s muted, less extreme reactions reflected well on the people of Northern Ireland, now more able to ‘smile, no doubt a little acidly, at what passes at times for public piety’; they are hopeful that civilised decencies expressed in private will eventually be observed universally in public (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 6).

Olive Kay also soon revealed there would be a Folk Song concert at the Ulster Hall, organised by the committee for Thompson’s memorial fund (Belfast News Letter, 11 May 1965, p. 3). This was to feature Dominic Behan, the Irish Rovers, Irene and Dave Scott, The Ramblers, alongside Cemented actors Begley, Goldblatt and Devlin as the compere (ibid.).

Harold Goldblatt and J. G. Devlin

The BBC audience sample was largely very positive, with several Ulster viewers attesting to its truth, with a Clerk tellingly claiming, ‘everybody watching enjoyed laughing at themselves’, when watching with six others (BBC WAC, VR/65/240). Thompson’s humorous light touch and the fairness with which he treated both Catholics and Protestants was commended; a Schoolmaster apparently summarised many views, feeling it was

The best Irish play for years. Remarkably well written, funny yet didactic, unbiased yet vigorous and strong (ibid.).

Some were bored, and certain naive English viewers failed to grasp or believe this was what Belfast was like, which confirmed the suspicions certain Northern Irish viewers themselves had (ibid.). Others complained the play was ‘rowdy’, with too many ’emotional gasbags’ shouting at each other to little purpose (ibid.). There was some criticism of artificial studio settings, but also admiration for natural acting and the use of filmed inserts of the Orangemen’s procession (ibid.).

A Belfast News Letter reader, the Rev. M.W. Dewar, who’d admitted not seeing the play, nevertheless attacked critics from the ‘new intelligentsia’, like Ralph Bossence as ‘humourless’, and unable to see that people can respect each other across religious divides, and ended up quoting lines from Lynn Doyle’s Ballygullion which expressed how individual character transcends collective identity (14 May 1965, p. 10).

The Belfast Telegraph reported relatively few comments received by readers about the play, but they were ‘mostly complimentary’ (6 May 1965, p. 2). They quoted viewers praising how accurate it was and how much ‘courage’ it had taken to show it; others comments included:

very good, if it had been for local viewing

Congratulations; you have shown everybody up

I think it was very fair from both points of view.

Very funny. A riot. Congratulations.

(ibid.)

Fascinatingly, the paper reported how a late sitting at Stormont meant that few local MPs could see it, but that Unionist MP Bessie Maconachie and Nationalist MP Eddie McAteer had managed to and both had liked it, especially McAteer (ibid.). Denis Tuohy had chaired a discussion of the play on BBC Two’s Late Night Line-Up, with fellow Ulstermen the actor James Ellis and Guardian journalist John Cole. While the latter felt it was outdated and not suited to English audiences, he hoped it would help Northern Irish people ‘look at their own attitudes’ (ibid.). Belfast-born Ellis paid a tribute to Thompson, calling him ‘an outspoken but very lovable man’, and an interesting writer usefully helping Irish people ‘to take a look at themselves’ (ibid.).

The play was soon central to discourse in Stormont debates: UUP’s Brian Faulkner hoping that the contract for a new plant for Cookstown would be ‘cemented with love’, while Gerry Fitt, then of the Republican Labour Party, ‘got in a dig about the exposure of religious intolerance in Drumtory when the Racial Discrimination Bill was being discussed’ (Belfast Telegraph, 7 May 1965, p. 12).

Robert Thompson, of Pinner, Middlesex, wrote a highly eloquent letter noting the intense pleasure Cemented With Love had given him and that, had Thompson lived, he ‘would surely have become the O’Casey of Northern Ireland’, and delineated the play’s deep significance:

The appalling tragedies to which all these vicious philosophies [from various European imperial regimes] were indelibly imprinted on our minds by the recent TV series on the First World War.

In Northern Ireland a far more sinister method has been in vogue for 150 years, and this consists in brainwashing the tender youth of the country. When thoroughly done, ever afterwards the individual will never be completely rational, but will in effect always be a neurotic emotional cripple. Sam Thompson’s play brought home to us the unutterably tragic consequences of all this, but what heed will we give to his message? (Belfast News Letter, 12 May 1965, p. 4)

Two letters from Kilmarnock and Glasgow respectively expressed the feeling it might do some good, with J.B. in the former arguing:

it seemed all set to cause trouble. But by showing the truth, they made the whole religious question in Ulster look so ludicrous that even our minister told me he had to laugh. It made the right point (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 9 May 1965, p. 16).

A wry piece soon reported that the ‘first fruits’ of the play’s screening in England have ‘blossomed’ in how Parliamentary pairing arrangements between the main two parties were being broken, while the Oxford University Conservative Association treasurer had confessed that some of its members voted twice in the ‘Queen and Country’ – Oxford making ‘a good start’ in catching up with Drumtory! (Belfast News Letter, 28 May 1965, p. 4).

In October 1966, Thompson’s play was staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival at the Gaiety, with Eric Shorter terming it ‘amusing and sometimes instructive entertainment’, enlightening him about ‘personation’, i.e. hiring bogus voters (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1966, p. 19). He felt it wouldn’t go down so well outside Ireland, given the treatment being slow and the development obvious, noting how Tomas MacAnna’s stage adaptation of the TV original had extensive ‘parochial detail’ (ibid.). Shorter liked Ray McAnally as the Kerr, boss of the Ulster town, and commented:

The play is very repetitive and the moral is thumped home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But it has an easy, effective and amusing way of dealing with highly relevant issues; and its heart is very much in the right place (ibid.).

Shorter ended by praising Barry Cassin’s production for marshalling crowds confidently and even bringing ‘a motorcar purring on to the stage.’ (ibid.) Benedict Nightingale felt that Thompson failed in writing personal relationships, but his treatment of the political campaign was ‘direct and forceful in a vivid, semi-documentary style’ (Guardian, 8 October 1966, p. 6). He appreciated Thompson’s message about parallel historical dogmas and how Feinians would also seek vengeance were there a united Ireland. Nightingale detailed its strengths alongside its significance being more geographically particular, and the problem of ‘preaching to the uninvolved’:

This combination of verve, didactism, and fair mindedness is rare in a pop play, and it had the audience clapping agreement in places. It was energetically performed too, especially in crowd scenes ; yet nothing could hide the fact that the play, lifting its sights no farther than a very particular problem, could only achieve a full meaning within the six counties themselves. There is always something a little comfortable about the applause and approval of a non-participant, even a Dubliner (ibid.).

The anonymous Times critic felt it a simple play, but appealing in liberal Thompson’s ‘sincerity’ in showing the ‘clash of sectarian hostilities, and the ugly methods of the politicians who exploit them’ (8 October 1966, p. 6). Furthermore, they extolled Thompson’s ‘peculiar strength’ in entering ‘into the cynicism and passion of the forces he was attacking’, and McAnally’s dominant performance and ‘excellent caricatures’ by Maurie Taylor and Dominic Roche (ibid.).

Ultimately, it is a real shame we cannot see this: perhaps the biggest loss so far, alongside Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and The Confidence Course. I can only end with Christopher Cairns’s eulogy to its writer:

What a loss Sam Thompson is to us! Who will take his place to scourge our extremists and intolerant fools with such humour and delightful energy? (Belfast Telegraph, op. cit.)

Happily, Stewart Parker (1943-90) was this very writer, though, less happily, he lived a similarly truncated life. Play for Today’s subsequent rich and varied representations of Northern Ireland were formidable: all plays written by Parker, Dominic Behan, Joyce Neary, John Wilson Haire, Colin Welland, Jennifer Johnston, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Ron Hutchinson, Graham Reid and Maurice Leitch ought to be released on Blu-ray and repeated on BBC Four.

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 – 02.17: ‘The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler’ (BBC1, 28 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.

02.17: The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler (BBC One, Wednesday 28 April 1965) 9:40 – 11:00pm

Directed by John Gorrie; Written by Jean Benedetti; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Leo Radford

This play was based on a true story, of a payroll robbery in Massachusetts, USA, on 15 April 1920 – misreported as 1925 in several newspapers. Two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried for murder following this, and the case ‘attracted international attention, lasted several years and developed into a political witch-hunt’ (Liverpool Echo, 24 April 1965, p. 2). On 23 August 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were ‘electrocuted for murder’ (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). At their trial, they were defended by lawyer Fred Moore (John Barrie).

Kenith Trodd, previewing Jean Benedetti’s play, acerbically detailed the political and legal context of the events depicted:

They [Sacco and Vanzetti] were not only foreigners but anarchists – that is to say their political views struck right at the narrow bigotry of New England, and this at a time when the country was outraged by anarchist bomb attacks.

On its legal merits, the case against Sacco and Vanzetti was not a strong one. The evidence was shaky, the witnesses unreliable, and both men had strong alibis. But what transpired was not justice and fair play. The two men were tried not for what they had done but for what their opponents believed them to be (Radio Times, 24 April 1965, p. 43).

Trodd added that Vanzetti in particular was ‘a man of fantastic courage and determination’ (ibid.).

Sacco (Bill Nagy) and Vanzetti (John Bailey)

In contrast, Robert Pitman emphasised the two payroll guards as victims, ‘both quiet married men’ and how Fred Moore’s worldwide protest was supported by ‘Shaw, Wells, Stalin, etc.’ (Daily Express, 28 April 1965, p. 10). Pitman went on, very much in crusading right-wing opinion columnist mode:

But were they [Sacco and Vanzetti] really Martyrs ? I used to think so until my wife worked on the case for an encyclopedia. I remember her surprise when she turned from the legend to the facts, namely that this supposedly pathetic pair were both heavily armed when arrested – in Sacco’s case with a revolver which was almost certainly the murder weapon.

Both also undeniably belonged to a group which was amassing revolutionary funds by armed robbery.

Even then I did not realize that Carlo Tresca, revered leader of U.S. anarchists, privately admitted in 1943 : “Sacco was guilty.” Or that another Italian later confessed to being coached by the anarchists to provide a false alibi for Sacco (ibid.).

Pitman detailed how US Liberal Francis Russell changed his mind and felt Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti an accessory after the event and how even Fred Moore confessed to Upton Sinclair that he no longer believed in their innocence (ibid.). Pitman then attacked Trodd’s article and the BBC:

Narrow ? I say that, whatever his motives may be, a ruthless killer of innocent men is surely an enemy of any society. And it is irresponsible and reactionary for the B.B.C. to present him to ordinary viewers as a martyred “good shoemaker.” (ibid.)

Other coverage emphasised people involved in the production. The Daily Mirror emphasised John Barrie’s star status, who plays the defence lawyer here, known for playing the title character in Sergeant Cork (ITV, 1963-68), the long-running series (28 April 1965, p. 16). John London in the London Evening News and Star stresses Jean Benedetti’s status as an actor who had been in Beyond the Fringe for 11 months, but was now writing between parts for the ‘lucrative’ sum of £500 per play (29 April 1965, p. 3). Benedetti is said to find writing

a terrible bore. I only do it for the money. I’m far more interested in acting. My aim is to get to the Comedie Francaise or Stratford-upon-Avon (ibid.).

London’s article nevertheless states there are two more Benedetti plays ‘in the melting pot’ (ibid.). Benedetti is quoted giving a slightly more measured account of the case than Trodd or Pitman:

We may never prove conclusively whether Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent or not. Their accusers could only see them as subversive and murderers. Many of their supporters were only too willing to exploit them as martyrs of the Left.

Political passion raged and destroyed justice. This is what I have tried to show – as well as something of the two men’s human qualities during their long and bitter ordeal. (Liverpool Echo op. cit.)

Benedetti (1930-2012), was actually born as Norman Bennett in Barking, Essex, changing his name by deed poll in 1965 to reflect his passionate love of French and Italian culture. He advised Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre on the European repertoire and translated Brecht plays and became a leading scholar on Stanislavsky. He also worked as Principal at Rose Bruford College during a ‘golden period that produced a new breed of British stage and screen actors including Gary Oldman’ (Guardian, 20 April 2012)

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail described the case simply as ‘the most famous and controversial’ trial of ‘the century’ (28 April 1965, p. 3).

Audience size: 6.93 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (Liza of Lambeth – Part 1 – Innocence / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Sound of Motown / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 69%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: Mixed-towards-positive among London critics. At least from the evidence of cuttings provided, it was comparatively ignored outside London. Viewers were largely appreciative of a play that felt like familiar fare in several ways.

An anonymous reviewer perceived that Sacco and Vanzetti ‘live as symbols of the power of blind prejudice’ and felt the drama valid and found John Bailey’s growth into spirituality as Vanzetti made the ending ‘deeply moving’ (Times, 29 April 1965, p. 17). However, ‘everything that followed the combination of passion with quiet, resigned nobility in his courtroom speech was an anticlimax’ (ibid.).

Clive Barnes gives a more nuanced account than Robert Pitman, by noting it doesn’t matter whether the men were innocent, but whether they were given a fair trial (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). Despite the play ‘suppressing certain facts’, it made ‘gripping television’, while demonstrating probable bias against them from the judge and foreman of the jury, and how witnesses lied and evidence conflicted (ibid.). Barnes, however, ends by emphasising how the play, while based on the trial transcript, ‘ignored a completely impartial contemporary committee report which found both men guilty’ (ibid.).

Peter Black described it as ‘dealing honestly enough’ with a case which had outraged the world, establishing ‘beyond anyone’s capacity for doubt that they did not have a fair trial’ (Daily Mail, 29 April 1965, p. 3). Black therefore derides ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pitman’ for obtusely claiming it was clearly about their innocence, while praising a ‘very strong and troubling play’, distinguished by John Barrie as the ‘bull-headed lawyer-politician’ and John Bailey’s ‘simple dignified’ Vanzetti, whose speech from the dock ‘still rings with the voice of the unjustly accused’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood professed to find courtroom drama fascinating, especially when ‘taken from life’ like this ‘excellent reconstruction’ of a ‘furiously discussed and now almost legendary’ case’ (Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1965, p. 20). Lockwood sees the trial as representing an earlier period of McCarthyism, with ‘poor, even coerced, evidence on which they were convicted’; again, Bailey and Barrie received particular praise (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson regarded the material as strong, centring on the Red scare which followed the First World War, and admired John Bailey’s ‘simple eloquence’, calling Benedetti’s use of verbatim transcripts ‘not unskilful’ (Observer, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Yet, he found the production and acting often monotonous, meaning the ‘symbolic quality tended to get lost’, and saw this as ‘one of those rare cases for a more televisual style of presentation, with even, perhaps, a commentator’ (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin was more positive, regarding Benedetti’s play as stronger than Marc Brandel’s Goodbye Johnny, about the last hours of the troops on Anzac Cove (Sunday Times, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Wiggin’s claim ‘court rooms are eternally dramatic, trenches have had their day’ points wisely towards Crown Court (Granada for ITV, 1972-84, 2007) and Showtrial (BBC One, 2021- ) (ibid.). He noted how both plays ‘rubbed in the lesson that we can never afford to assume that our leaders are over-endowed with either intelligence or integrity’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws notes how ‘we’ felt Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution was unjust in the 1930s, though felt the play was not fully satisfactory bar the ending; he did find John Bailey’s Vanzetti ‘effective as a cry of innocence’ (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681).

Marjorie Norris expressed feelings of desensitisation towards such true-life stories, when the tale’s telling was ‘ponderous’, ‘wordy and boring’: ‘we have supped too full of horrors to care unless the victims can be made to live again for an hour and their wounds can bleed afresh’ (Television Today, 6 May 1965, p. 16). Norris found Sacco and Vanzetti either too wordy or ‘as motionless and lifeless as the figures in the Chamber of Horrors’, while John Gorrie did little ‘to bring home to us’ how long they were imprisoned (ibid.). She admired John Barrie’s ‘naturalist style’ but felt even his performance was constrained by the play’s undramatic ‘adherence to the facts’; similarly, Cec Linder – who she admires – has a few ‘good scenes and vanished’ (ibid.) Robert Ayres’s performance justified it being on TV rather than radio, his face staying with her, ‘personifying unyielding prejudice’ as ‘a sleepy-eyed unmoveable bigot’ of a judge (ibid.).

The audience response was rather more consistently positive: 69 places it alongside the O’Connor plays, if somewhat below Moving On. Viewers liked its ‘strong and moving theme’ and basis in a true story, though quite a few felt it was overly slow, boring – ‘I felt no pity or passion’ (VR/65/223). More were engrossed in a play which was easy to follow, while also feeling glad to live in England, not America; a Piano Tuner could have been forecasting Trump’s America, with its attempts to make the orange fascist’s word law:

Extremely well written, bringing out political bias as the jumping off platform for legal judgement (ibid.).

Costumes, settings and performances were all enjoyed, with viewers liking Barrie and Bailey as much as the critics had; typically, ‘a few found the two rapid sequences of ‘stills’ somewhat trying to look at’ (ibid.).

While clearly Benedetti’s subsequent TV writing was not going to be prolific given his attitude in the aforementioned interview, he did write extensively for BBC Two’s Thirty Minute Theatre, at least: three plays in 1969, about dictators Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin (with Brian Cox starring as the latter), and the two-part Lilly (1970), centring on campaigning muck-raking journalist William T. Stead (Iain Cuthbertson).

Significantly, in summer 1977, Sacco and Vanzetti received posthumous pardons from Massachusetts Governor – and future Democrat Presidential candidate – Michael Dukakis, who declared ‘their conviction was permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility towards unorthodox political views’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1977, p. 17). In a lengthy article, Richard Boston declared himself totally certain both men had received an unfair trial and that Vanzetti was definitely innocent of the crime, and Sacco probably was too (Guardian, 27 August 1977, p. 9). Boston also traced the significant backdrop of FBI and state repression and imprisonment of left-wing politicians like Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, the first Socialist member of the House of Representatives: which amounted to a now-forgotten precursor to McCarthyism (ibid.).

This history should be urgently remembered anew when the world witnesses a US gulag in El Salvador and evil specimens like Stephen Miller given excessive power. It is a shame this doesn’t exist, as it would provide another corrective to the view that The Wednesday Play was simply one thing. True-life crime and legal dramas were clearly part of the offering, anchoring its appeal to those with mainstream tastes. It would also be good to see John Bailey, another actor familiar to me via Doctor Who, where his performance in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967) showed his skill in conveying pathos.

— With thanks again to John Williams for the press 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 – 02.16: ‘Auto-Stop’ (BBC1, 21 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.

02.16: Auto-Stop (BBC One, Wednesday 21 April 1965) 9:25 – 10:45pm

Directed by Brian Parker; Written by Alan Seymour; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Eric Rogers

This play shows the evolution of an old, formerly elite cultural practice. The Newcastle Chronicle reflects, with a notable indication of class democratisation:

The Grand Tour of Europe was an essential part of the wealthy Oxbridge student of former days. Now more people undertake a tour of Europe, but they make it the hard way, hitch-hiking (21 April 1965, p. 2)

In common with several other previews, they emphasise ‘the beautiful, and willing, girls’ Henry meets (ibid.). The Radio Times noted how ‘Nowadays fewer ‘milords’ can afford the trip and yet more people seem to attempt it’ (15 April 1965, p. 37). People leave it to ‘pot luck’, the preview suggests, emphasising the dangers but also attractions of an ‘haphazard’, open adventure, which may involve various forms of transportation (ibid.). 

The plot revolves around callow Henry’s (David Hemmings) older European girlfriend Federika (Delphi Lawrence) ‘exercising the ancient charm of the femme fatale’, challenging him ‘to broaden his mind, enlarge his horizons – grow up, in short – by enduring the rigours of a Continental summer. He has to make his way to Athens where he will find awaiting him an even greater challenge from his enigmatic Federika’ (ibid.). He also agrees that they will meet again on 30 September at midnight, when they may sleep together properly at last, having lost his virginity with another woman.

Robert G. Archer in the Rochdale Observer called it a ‘comedy drama’ (21 April 1965, p. 5), but the Wolverhampton Express and Star‘s Bill Smith thought it sounded ‘peculiar’ and asks, cynically, ‘Is it, I wonder, too much to hope that I shall not be sighing later on tonight for more plays like James O’Connor’s “Three Clear Sundays,” on BBC-1 a week or two ago?’ (21 April 1965, p. 11).

Writer Alan Seymour (1927-2015) was a gay Australian playwright whose most famous play was about contested attitudes concerning Anzac Day, The One Day of the Year (1958). He worked as script editor and producer at the BBC (1974-81), also subsequently adapting many literary works for TV, like John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1984) and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles (1988-90), which I saw as a child. He worked as script editor on five incredibly varied Plays for Today, including Donal and Sally (1978) and Even Solomon (1979). Rather more incongruously I feel, he produced Jim Allen’s Willie’s Last Stand (1982) which explored sclerotic Northern working-class masculinity.

Brian Parker here directed a second Wednesday Play, after Moving On. This is a less overwhelmingly male-centric play. Eric Rogers composes a fairly light musical soundtrack, off the back of Carry On Cleo (1964) and many other mainly film underscores.

This play, happily, exists in the archives, though isn’t widely available.

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

I liked this. David Hemmings was relatable, he felt like certain people I’ve known. Henry learns, shifts deftly between joy and cynicism about people and life and finally back again. Seymour’s play cleverly diagnoses an ironic kind of universal petty national chauvinism that transcends national borders. As the excellent BFI archivist Lisa Kerrigan discerns, it exposes ‘the hypocrisies and absurdities of national pride’. Kerrigan notes the allusions to Fellini and how Hemmings would soon go onto star in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966).

Australia is represented through a boringly cynical driver man who decries the wonders of Athens, in a wonderful scene and Moya (Janice Dinnen), who is highly instinctive and shrewdly feminist. Europe figures as a talismanic legend and force that wills Henry into his unusual adventure. While autumn-winter 1964 saw several European authors’ texts adapted as Wednesdays Plays, and Horror of Darkness featured a European character, this marks by far the most topical engagement yet with European and English identities. Few Plays for Today would go so deep into the Continent as this does: Thicker Than Water (1980), The Executioner (1980), The Cause (1981) and Aliens (1982) do the most, though more widely domestic decor, as in The Piano and several house party plays, bore unmistakable European influences, as did a significant singsong at a party in The Good Time Girls (1981).

While one or two do play their real nationalities, Katherine Schofield, Kevin Stoney, Deirdre Turner and Jonathan Burn – and perhaps many more of the cast – play various continental Europeans reasonably well, accent-wise, even if Lisa Kerrigan’s criticism of some accents seems fair. Burn was to play a Spaniard in Derek Lister’s 1981 PfT The Cause. It’s impossible to reach a wholly satisfactory answer to the complexities surrounding essentialist identitarian authentic or open, chameleon-like casting, but this is a somewhat better advent than Moving On for the latter, I’d say… It’s a play with a ludic, paradoxical humour to it. Thus, actors playing outside their own direct experience seems to support the play’s own attack on the ‘97%’ who do retreat into insular bordered identities.

Hemmings himself speaks in a now-stiff seeming RP accent, but is clearly much looser and more laid-back than average for his times, speaking in Americanisms which themselves feel like pop cosmopolitan: “Zowie!”, “voom voom” and “Wham!” The others he especially gets on with are the beautiful Danish Karin, and the Italian film director Marcello. At the end, he doesn’t recall Karin’s name, subtly implying an under-the-radar gay subtext. This is affirmed more overtly in how, late into his Grand Tour, Henry repeats a reference to young men being able to make money a certain way when in Rome. There’s something in how Henry relishes doing a working-class job in a fish market and Marcello’s Visconti-like romantic Communism and aristocratic self-loathing, which suggests the play is a coded gay paean to crossing class boundaries and getting with the workers. There’s definite mockery of supposedly universal bourgeois self-cultivation alongside the wonderfully detailed satire of many insular nationalisms.

In 1965, Britain – aided by the Beatles – joined America, Australia and Italy as those cultures perceived to be most vigorous, when Fellini was a common reference point in the sitcom Steptoe and Son, and also when sexually liberated Denmark was on the way to becoming Mary Whitehouse’s bete noire. Seymour gets in what I take to be an overt dig at predators’ exploitation of loosening mores by having Henry’s very first hitch-hiking encounter be with a driver who speaks creepily of picking up “girls”. His accent is English. Seymour also gets in a relevant attack on German nationalism reproducing itself in the young. We take the side of the French barmaid in the Strasbourg beer hall argument.

Ultimately, though, this play is squarely on the side of intercultural exchange and cosmopolitan fun. It’s salutary to be aware how the actor playing Maria at the Rome party, Bettine Le Beau, escaped, when a child, from Vichy France’s concentration camp Camp de Gurs near the Spanish border. Maria represents the continent’s modern stylishness in her silvery dress. While she’s a symbol compared to Karin and Moya, the sexual openness of the Rome party seems an incalculable advance from Nazism, fascism and their collaborators.

Formally, Auto-Stop builds on the John McGrath-Troy Kennedy Martin visual inventory by using photo montages which show the journeys or simply famous places. As, while I’d imagined this as an all filmed piece, clearly it couldn’t have been in 1965. It’s all studio on VT, barring these montages. While not as showy or grandiose as Richard Wilmot’s sets in The Interior Decorator, Eileen Diss does a strong minimalist job – anticipating the Gerald Savory-ethos for Churchill’s People (1974-75) – in conveying many varied places very cheaply. She’s aided by strong sound design. Clearly, anyone used to filmic realism might well scoff watching in 2025, but I doubt viewers in 1965 batted an eyelid.

Brian Parker does a grand job at making this about the people and their relationships through the words and the simple, profound central idea. Seymour’s accessible storytelling, with a Jules Verne-like grand simplicity in its spatial and temporal focus, is itself a joy. Its assured mix of entertainment and clear moral and intellectual messaging makes me forgive certain limitations or holes. For example, the situation with the letter in Athens left me none the wiser, being dealt with unclearly, or even cursorily.

Best Performance: KEVIN STONEY

David Hemmings is very good here, as garrulous and palpably changing due to his experiences. Katherine Schofield and Janice Dinnen make the most of reasonably strong parts, especially Dinnen.

But I have to give the award to Kevin Stoney, who isn’t in this for long but makes a great impression as the rich Italian film director and generous party host Marcello, who is quite clearly signified as gay and expresses overtly Communist views. Like Peter Jeffrey, Stoney is invariably a magnetic TV actor, able to invest solid hokum with intriguing gravitas – as in his Doctor Who role as the malevolent, suave tech-gent Tobias Vaughn in ‘The Invasion’ (1968). Here, he absolutely nails a richly etched thumbnail from Alan Seymour, enacting the role with deft flamboyance.

Marcello feels like a benignly presiding Lord of Misrule symbolising the whole carnivalesque spirit of the 1960s, somehow. Clearly, this would have ruffled feathers back in 1965 and probably still would now, given the absurdly unfeeling ‘anti-woke’ idiots who want to turn back the clock on all progress and social consciousness.

Best line: “It’s good to see so many strangers that they are no longer strange…”

There were loads of excellent, quotably philosophical lines in this, but this one especially gets to the core of Seymour’s play.

Audience size: 8.42 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 53.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Open Grave / Enquiry / Jazz 625: Thelonious Monk Quartet), ITV (Carroll Calling / A Camera in China – with Robert Kee / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 14.3%

Reception: In contrast to my own extensive review, the play received frankly scant coverage from London critics, though slightly more from their regional counterparts. Both camps had mixed views, expressing a range of conservative and liberal attitudes, though by and large, it was a more muted equivalent of The Interior Decorator‘s mixed press reception. The audience was also divided, but it was notably large, and notably more appreciative of it than Jack Russell’s play, tapping into a fresh modern zeitgeist with its zesty picaresque narrative.

Clive Barnes – who missed out Hungary from the list of countries Henry visits – praised David Hemmings’s ‘finely gangling’ performance but found the play as ‘green’ as Henry in ‘many’ aspects (Daily Express, 22 April 1965, p. 4). While Barnes felt the play ‘entertaining’, seeing Parker’s direction had ‘a certain style’, he found the journey towards its ‘fine’ moral – ‘that all men are born foreign, but should forget it and cultivate the international bit’ – was ‘pretty longwinded’ and tedious (ibid.).

This all does beg the question, though: how much time has the Express ever spent trying to advance the play’s values, that Barnes so rightly termed ‘fine’?

Interestingly, Lyn Lockwood seemed to enjoy it as much, if not more, than Barnes, praising Hemmings as ‘likeable’ and Dinnen’s ‘attractive’ performance within an ‘entertaining’ affair, which may broaden the minds of ‘staid parents’, letting them know ‘their trail-blazing Henrys are safer on the Continent with the female of the species’ (Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1965, p. 21). Such tentative worldly liberalism is undermined by Lockwood’s casually homophobic parting shot: ‘Kevin Stoney contributed an excellent cameo as the type of Roman citizen every normal young explorer should avoid.’ (ibid.)

Outside London, R.S. noted how ‘a colleague’ loved ‘a superbly written and produced piece of the type we see too rarely these days where ‘moral points were made without there being any moralising’ – an accurate and perceptive point (Birmingham Evening Mail and Despatch, 22 April 1965, p. 3). In contrast, N.G.P. found this ‘gentle travelogue’ with ‘very pretty actresses’ would have been better as a ‘picturesque novel’ or radio play, lacking the drama ‘one was […] always expecting’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 22 April 1965, p. 5). They loved Terry Scully’s ‘splendid’ performance in Z Cars rather more than this tale of Henry discovering ‘that the greatest deterrent to enduring peace is racial pride’ (ibid.).

Some bod called ‘Touchstone’ disliked ‘rather tired moral philosophising on past German atrocities and on intolerances inbred by so-called racial pride’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 24 April 1965, p. 5). This crusty chump, thus far so far-right Muskian/AfD, goes on, hilariously, veering into Mary Whitehouse territory:

Young Henry […] undertook a not-so-grand version of the Grand Tour, broadening his innocent mind, not by following the cultural guide book to famous places and faces of old, but by bumping into such seedy characters as one may meet if one is careless of Continental ways, and by toying with the affections of a succession of easily obliging girls – in these days he might have accomplished as much on the beach at Brighton. (ibid.)

Touchstone did end by admitting ‘it was not without amusement or point’ and liked how it ‘was certainly much lighter fare than the BBC have been dishing up in their Wednesday Plays of late’ (ibid.).

John Tilley felt that The Wednesday Play’s ‘new ways of presenting drama on television’ were becoming rigid orthodoxy (Newcastle Journal, 24 April 1965, p. 9). Tilley found it ‘very entertaining’ but unoriginal, perceptively citing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and McGrath and Kennedy Martin’s Diary of a Young Man (1964) as its ‘genealogy’, where stills are used to save the expense of using film: ‘No device has been more quickly absorbed into the repertoire of the up-to-date B.B.C. producer, and we got a big helping of it on “Auto-Stop.”‘ (ibid.)

Tilley noted how, unlike Diary‘s ‘Hartlepudlian grappling with the mysteries of crime and big business in London’, Henry was a ‘public school boy’, while finding it ‘extremely entertaining’, unpredictable in its rambling plot and liking ‘the vein of erotic suggestion which ran through the script’ (ibid.).

Subsequent responses indicated it became pigeonholed by more staid critics as a ‘kinky’ play. In a Kenneth Baily article we’ve previously mentioned, a ‘People’s Viewing Panel’ assailed The Interior Decorator for its ‘whimsy’, and Auto-Stop was more mildly rebuked as being one of a group of eight plays which ‘could be better’ (People, 2 May 1965, p. 4). Ken Irwin made a blinkered conservative attack on Horror of Darkness and Auto-Stop wherein he noted that – shock horror:

there were some astonishing scenes of couples cuddling and kissing at a party in Rome… scenes which, a few years ago, would never have been allowed on the screen.

There was also a short sequence in which one man asked another in sign language if he were a homosexual. (Daily Mirror, 24 April 1965, p. 15).

Irwin’s moralistic ire was shared, predictably, by Mary Whitehouse and John Barnett of the newly-formed National Viewers and Listeners’ Association, who asked Mr. Robinson, the Minister of Health to see a rescreening of the play (Times, 29 April 1965, p. 8). While Whitehouse’s response is not as overtly homophobic as Irwin’s comments, it clearly encompasses such feelings:

It is our considered opinion that this play could do nothing but propagate and stimulate promiscuity and that such plays undermine the moral, mental and physical health of the country.

We are asking the Minister to use his influence to ensure that our homes are not subjected to the onslaught of such demonstrations. (ibid.)

While it is equally naive to claim that media forms have no substantive influence on us, this from the NVLA is a rather simple-minded view that TV dramas function as instructional ‘demonstrations’ which people automatically follow.

Now, where did the larger range of viewers actually stand? They were mixed, edging towards positive, with an RI score two above the Wednesday Play’s 1965 average, and more than double what The Interior Decorator had attained. Many did find it pointless, meandering or ‘very suggestive and with no story to it’ (VR/65/211). However, ‘a substantial minority’ watched it with ‘considerable enjoyment’, liking an ‘original’, ‘different’, ‘modern’ and ”with it” play which was ‘frank and realistic’ (ibid.) A student was said to be ‘in sympathy with the play’ from the off, ‘possibly due to a little self-identification with the student Harry’ (ibid.). An income tax inspector shared this view, claiming the play was ‘gorgeous, new and naughty’, though some disliked the inclusion of the concentration camp images, though saw the moral ‘of the German portrayal’ as ‘very good’ (ibid.).

Performances were largely admired, with the exceptions of the odd dubious accent. Kevin Stoney’s ‘fine cameo’ was acclaimed as the ‘charming but dubious’ Marcello (ibid.). Typically, there was some critique of the fast moving stills and excessive number of scenes moving between too many different countries and varied tones (ibid.). However, a driver summed up the somewhat larger favourable response:

It never lagged at any time, and (from one who has travelled Europe) the atmosphere was captured perfectly. (ibid.)

A planned repeat of the play, along with Three Clear Sundays and Up the Junction, was due to be repeated in summer 1966, with the BBC explanation – convincingly or otherwise – being that this tentative original list could be replaced by the World Cup and the international horse show (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1966, p. 17). The play did however surface within the US NET Playhouse strand in 1968: the copy I watched even contains its title sequence alongside the usual Wednesday Play one. Lisa Kerrigan notes that this play was rediscovered alongside many other TV dramas at the Library of Congress in 2010.

I’m delighted they found it, as this is one that stands up as both fascinating historical artefact and, well, a good freewheeling TV play with an ever-relevant cosmopolitan core.

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 – 02.15: ‘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)

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.

02.14: 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).

Rita Webb as Britannia Lee

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.).

Finnuala O’Shannon as Rosa

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)

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.

02.13: 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.

Leo Genn, getting on, a tad…

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.).

Barbara Murray

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.).

Barbara Murray and ‘Oscar’

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)

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.

02.12: 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)

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.

02.11: 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)

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.

02.10: 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)

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.

02.09: 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

Barry Foster, again! In space!

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.🙂