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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover of the Camera Script, courtesy of John Cook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 44.4%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 49%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 42.9%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanley Baxter as a ‘madman’, apparently…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

[vi] Ibid. p. 144.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[xvii] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[xxiv] Ibid. p. 25.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The RT continues thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.0%

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

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

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

Audience Reaction Index: 48%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46.2%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashes to Ashes

Rating * 1/2 / ****

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: TOBY ROBINS

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

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

Audience size: 8.42 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.7%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a fine domestic snapshot here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.05: ‘Dan, Dan, the Charity Man’ (BBC1, 3 February 1965)

02.05: Dan, Dan, the Charity Man (BBC One, Wednesday 3 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Don Taylor; Written by Hugh Whitemore; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Peter Seddon; Music by John Sebastian.

Writer Hugh Whitemore was an ex-actor – self-confessedly ‘terrible’ – who worked in the PR department of Rediffusion TV company, but whose first play was too experimental for them and then he went to the BBC (Observer, 27 February 1966, p. 22). After his career was over, director Don Taylor was in the 1990s a key polemicist in favour of theatrically influenced art of studio drama on video, and was critical of Sydney Newman’s general pro-film influence. Key BBC works Taylor is remembered for today include The Roses of Eyam (1973), about the plague in a Derbyshire village, and The Exorcism (1972) for the Dead of Night strand, a superb Marxist ghost story that I saw screened at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2011.

Dan, Dan, the Charity Man was first trailed as ‘a comedy with a twist’ (Television Today, 17 December 1964, p. 9), and then ‘q play about the men who bring gifts to the door to those who have enough vouchers and say the right words’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 30 January 1965, p. 10).

The Torbay Herald Express had a fuller outline of a play which

takes a close look at one kind of advertising stunt – the quaintly dressed people who knock at the door and offer money or gifts.

Dan Sankey (Barry Foster) is an out-of-work actor who gets a job dressing up as a yokel and offering £5 grocery vouchers to further the sales of a new milk drink Vita-Moo. But soft-hearted Dan gets himself sacked by feeling sorry for one housewife and giving her all his vouchers – £500 worth. (30 January 1965, p. 4)

Script editor Roger Smith termed it a ‘riotous farce’, telling viewers, ‘be prepared for the unusual’; for example, characters moving in ‘slow motion like goldfish in a bowl’, while also emphasising Foster’s credentials in other media – the film King and Country (1964) and the Light Programme radio serial The Quarry (Radio Times, 30 January 1965, page unidentified).

Sankey referred to as becoming ‘a national figure beloved by housewives and worshipped by the supermarkets’, after being built up as a man of charity (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 3 February 1965, p. 2). The same preview notes Barry Foster as ‘one of the country’s most popular actors’ and how Don Taylor ‘used all the resources of the BBC film studios’ for this ‘unusual comedy’ (ibid.). Bill Smith notes how Dan has to come to terms with the question: ‘”How long can he stand the trickery and lack of humanity?”‘ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 3 February 1965, p. 11).

Image courtesy of the *Peterborough Evening Telegraph*.

The Daily Mirror adds further detail, noting how the play was recorded in summer 1964 and that Ernest Clark and Philip Locke play the two ad-men and Dora Reisser is the au pair girl Dan falls in love with (3 February 1965, p. 14). Wryly, Jack Bell notes how Barry Foster is currently out of work himself after a West End flop Maxibules, though Foster is quoted laughing: ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of having to take a job like Dan’s’ (ibid.).

The play’s cast was 73% male, and one of the three credited women’s parts in the Radio Times is a ‘Fat housewife’ (Madge Brindley), emphasising again the notably androcentric nature of the Wednesday Play at this juncture: this tendency which would be challenged subsequently by certain plays. Perhaps not too fine a feminist point should be applied here, though, given there is also a ‘Huge man’ billed, played by none other than Arthur Mullard!

Foster’s involvement here was clearly a continuation of the policy to use some recognisable actors to promote unfamiliar plays to the public. Coverage of Whitemore’s play indicates he had an image of a cheery everyman – comparable even to a Cribbins (?) – which sounds ideal casting for the role of Dan Sankey here. I mainly know Foster from Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), unquestionably a heartless film, but one where Foster is cast with and against his type to memorably disturbing effect.

L: Dan Sankey (Barry Foster), R: Pritchard (Ernest Clark). Photo courtesy of the *Leicester Mercury*

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton, a serial / Heavyweight Boxing – Chic Calderwood v Freddie Mack), ITV (America – The Dollar Poor (Intertel documentary) / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 44%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 50%

A lower figure than most, though certainly still higher than the overall average I’ve discerned for Play for Today between 1970-84.

Reception: Similarly mixed reaction to Fable for critics, but with some really ardent voices in support of it, especially outside London. One of the most divisive Wednesday Plays yet with audiences, with some minority support.

Gerald Larner liked how this was an exaggerated, surrealistic view of Britain and its refraction through adverts – which Don Taylor made into ‘a true television event’ (Guardian, 4 February 1965, p. 9). Larner expressed delight in the on-screen captions, characters directly addressing the viewer, an ‘instant vicar’ and even elements of a Granada-style documentary; though he did feel the ‘commercial holocaust’ finale was overlong (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood similarly admired a ‘highly entertaining […] excellent satire’, following the progress of Dan towards ‘becoming the idol of the supermarkets’, but felt that adverts themselves were self-satirising and that this play had too many ‘visual tricks’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 February 1965, p. 19). Despite these reservations, it was later noted by L. Marsland Gander that Lockwood had named Whitemore’s play as one of her six best of 1965 (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17).

Among the Sunday notices, Philip Purser felt it was the best Wednesday Play yet, ‘though still improvable’, critiquing Don Taylor’s ‘compulsion to seek out significance’ (Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 1965, p. 13). Purser did praise Foster’s performance and ‘Some very satisfying satire’ – chiefly the TV parson (Michael Barrington) and a comic emergency conference during the singing of ‘Abide With Me’, but felt the climax ‘laboured’, when it needed a higher level of fury; such a fantastical leap had only worked for him before in David Perry’s Armchair Theatre play, The Trouble with Our Ivy (1961) (ibid.). Maurice Richardson in the Observer admired the same satirical bits as Purser, but was a little disappointed at how the ‘take-offs of commercials missed the insidious flat fantasies of the originals’ (7 February 1965, p. 25).

Frederick Laws in The Listener liked an entertaining morality play: ‘It was made clear that were St Francis within anyone’s reach today, somebody would try to use him to sponsor a dog biscuit’ (11 February 1965, p. 239). Laws, himself its ideal audience, being an ‘an ex-copywriter, do-gooder, worrier about mass culture, agnostic and premature believer that television might be some use to simple men’, liked the technical tricks, but felt that the story wasn’t sufficiently coherent and did not believe that Dan could have been ‘so much deceived’, and felt the ending was overdone (ibid.)

In a critical piece on 1960s TV plays which looked back to the 1950s as ‘the golden age of British television drama, the Times‘ ‘Special Correspondent briefly mentioned Whitemore’s play as being part of the one slot which allows for ‘occasional experiment’ (20 February 1965, p. 6).

Reactions outside London seemed to have been proportionately more frequent and also warmer. F.C.G. in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph gave a review that’s a bracing rejoinder to the idea that TV critics just wanted straightforward naturalism, praising its freedom of camera, caricatured scenes and how ‘It had as much commentary as dialogue’ (4 February 1965, p. 2). They admired how this was a TV drama moving well beyond reproducing stage plays on screen, and ‘It wouldn’t have needed much revision to make it a commentary on salesmanship in the 1960’s’ (ibid.).

M.G. in the Liverpool Daily Post discerns a ‘tragi-comedy’ wherein the housewife ‘felt a failure because she couldn’t keep up with the adverts’ (4 February 1965, p. 3). Alongside praising Edward du Cann’s ‘excellent television debut’ appearance as Conservative Party chairman, the reviewer noted how the finale was of a ‘consumers’ hell, with housewives indoctrinated by slogans finally overcome by the commodities’ (ibid.).

Laurence Shelley in the Nantwich Chronicle described it as a satire which had ‘a thick layer of truth’, signifying that many people in 1965 had experience of door-to-door salesmen, while also relishing how it was having a pop at ITV:

one wonders why it took the B.B.C. so long to thumb its nose at the absurdities unloaded by the other TV service during its natural breaks (13 February 1965, p. 11).

Michael Beale in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle saw it as a ‘very serious farce’, satirising the ‘commercial promotion of a new food-drink’, also admiring sudden switches into silent cinema-like off-key piano, exaggerated make-up’ and ‘pandemonium’ at the end (4 February 1965, p. 2). Beale felt that Whitemore’s play ‘exposed the humbug behind the image-making trends, and showed the dangers that might arise when the image is broken and violence rushes in to fill the vacuum’, while acclaiming the cast beyond just Foster, naming Ernest Clark and Michael Barrington (ibid.).

John Tilley in the Newcastle Journal perceived it as a ‘condemnation of modern advertising methods’ of a kind only possible in a TV play, conveying how ‘decency and kindness are manipulated to market a product’ (4 February 1965, p. 5). Tilley valued the skilful presentation of how Dan, the ‘pop saint’, who gradually sees through the glib and ruthless advertising men, who were ‘magnificently portrayed’, exploiting a ‘futile aggressive instinct’ in people-turned-consumers (ibid.). Tilley saw it as a cautionary tale, which even the more responsible advertising workers should heed (ibid.).

North of the border, Peggie Phillips in The Scotsman noted an influence of the Great War TV documentary on drama here, finding its ‘near-Guernica final passages’ interesting, though felt them ‘too lingeringly held, too crowded for the black-and-white of the medium, and too gruesome, really (8 February 1965, p. 8).

‘Argus’ in Glasgow’s Daily Record praised a very funny play’s ‘admirable malice’ and quotes a ‘lovely line’ which is indeed good:

The sum total of my life is pathetic. Two years in drama school; eight years flogging around in rep. and three lines in ‘Compact’. (4 February 1965, p. 13)

However, this reviewer bemoaned how the fun stopped with a ‘cruel and unfair moralising’ ending at the expense of advertising – without which it would have been a ‘masterpiece’ (ibid.).

Steve Andrews in the Aberdeen Press and Journal found ‘advertising techniques and their effects on a gullible public’ to be a very good subject for a play, but was ‘overdone’ and its message ‘lost beneath a floodtide of exaggeration which reached almost Orwellian proportions’ (10 February 1965, page unclear). Andrews details a finale where ‘a group of women shoppers went berserk in a supermarket and started fighting among themselves’, regarding this as using the same bludgeoning methods of ‘indoctrination’ the play was purporting to condemn (ibid.).

E. McI. in the Belfast Telegraph admired Whitemore’s versatility: ‘Rollicking comedy, harsh realism and a near horrific climax were sensitively welded together in a piece which exposed the frailty of human nature’ (4 February 1965, p. 9). They saw Barry Foster as playing ‘warmly and feelingly’, with the play only marred by the other characters being less convincing, yet they end with a glowing endorsement:

Little by way of exploration has been done in the field of television drama. Mr. Whitemore was testing its full range and to a high degree of success (ibid.).

Part of this play’s relative acclaim is discernible in how it was repeated on BBC Two on 1 October 1965 at 8:20pm.

Viewers were far less positive than critics. While 35% gave it A/A+, 43% gave it C/C-, with a very high C- score of 24% (VR/65/63, BBC WAC). This play received by far the most indignant response of any Wednesday Play so far, with ‘A load of tripe!’ a typical response among this large group of sceptics (ibid.). Whitemore’s play was seen as flitting and incoherent, with strong agreement with most London critics about the climactic supermarket scene: ‘a shocking and ghastly ending’ (ibid.).

While many hated the ‘sidekicks’ at religion, a minority did appreciate a ‘brilliant’ and original satire which conveyed truths about life; with some comparing the finale’s ‘horror’ to Huxley’s Brave New World (ibid.). Foster, Clark and Berrington all received praise even if the vocal critics among the sample felt the cast’s talent was wasted on a play whose tone they fundamentally resented (ibid.). The production was praised, including its filmed inserts being ‘skilfully placed’, though some found the use of flashing still images irritating, alongside a general tiredness at Keystone Cops stuff, with ‘a substantial number’ feeling their inclusion was pointless gimmickry (ibid.).

Viewer letters to the press largely confirmed the generally negative public reaction. Mrs J. Valentine of Forfar wrote in with a review where it’s difficult to determine whether its tone is positive or negative:

B.B.C. really went to town with this one. It was like one long commercial, mixed up with film of the Keystone Cops – not to mention the free-for-all at the end (Sunday Mail, 7 February 1965, p. 16)

B.G. Champion of Manaton, Devon, wrote in to decry a waste of a promising premise and acting talent, ‘and good groceries’, with ‘A messy ending – in every sense of the word !’ (Sunday Mirror, 7 February 1965, p. 22). J.C. of Manchester 18 provided a distinctive perspective not seen anywhere else in the recorded press or public reactions, critiquing a ‘degrading’ play specifically as he felt there wasn’t ‘anything entertaining in the subject of mental illness’ (Manchester Evening News, 11 February 1965, p. 10).

Overall, no one heralds this, but I’m willing to wager that if it turned up, it would surprise a fair few people, similarly to how the Troughton Doctor Who story ‘Enemy of the World (1967-68)’ did when it was recovered. For me at least, this sounds like the most intriguing of the ‘lost’ plays we’ve covered thus far.

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 – 02.04: ‘Fable’ (BBC1, 27 January 1965)

In order to convey accurately the coverage of, and reaction to, the following play under analysis, some racially offensive language is quoted.

02.04: Fable (BBC One, Wednesday 27 January 1965) 9:35 – 10:50pm

Directed by Christopher Morahan; Written by John Hopkins; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Tony Abbott

How much worse off would we be if controversial, thought provoking and hard hitting plays such as “Fable” were banished from the screen altogether by some unseen Big Brother (Desmond McMullen, Belfast Telegraph, 29 January 1965, p. 7).

Our next Wednesday Play as far as I’m aware began an occasional trend in screen works which inverted established racial power hierarchies, being followed by BabaKiueria (1986), an Australian mockumentary, the Hollywood film White Man’s Burden (1995) and the BBC TV adaptation of Marjorie Blackman’s novels, Noughts + Crosses (2020). While further away narratively, Fable shared certain resonances with aspects of Black Like Me (1964), Planet of the Apes (1968), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) and The Brother from Another Planet (1984).

The first mention of Fable noted a ‘provocative’ plot, ‘about a Britain in which the white man is in a minority and subjected to the laws of apartheid’ (Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1964, p. 15). The same writer L. Marsland Gander pointed out the ‘unlucky’ original broadcast date of 20 January, due to the Leyton by-election, before a change was made (Daily Telegraph, 11 January 1965, p. 15).

Writer John Hopkins wrote the play in May 1964, after reading an article about South African legislation to move non-whites to reservations (Aberdeen Express and Journal, 13 January 1965, p. 7). Yet, annoyed by the postponed, Hopkins argues the play ‘is not political’ – never a convincing claim – while noting he was using irony, ‘a complex little weapon little used on television because we think our medium has to be written for the children to understand’ (ibid.). Setting the play in England enabled ‘the degredation of racial intolerance’ to be brought closest to us (ibid.).

Hopkins came from a London Grammar School background, studied English at Cambridge after doing National Service in 1950-51. He had been a prolific TV writer since 1957, including a prodigious number of Z Cars episodes, including ‘A Place of Safety’ (24 June 1964) which, as Sarita Malik highlights, focused on police racism (op. cit. p. 95). Fable was broadcast the same year two films were released with Hopkins screenplays: Two Left Feet and the third James Bond film, Thunderball. This was broadcast on his 34th birthday. There will be more on Hopkins later in The Wednesday Play story…

Director Christopher Morahan became closely associated with screen versions of plays or prose by varied, and at least somewhat canonical, writers like W. Somerset Maugham, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn, Peter Nichols, Harold Pinter and Anthony Powell, among others. Morahan became BBC Head of Plays 1973-76, thus playing a crucial distant enabling role in PfT’s solidly mainstream heyday when it adopted the Carl Davis piano-led ident and title images using actors’ faces from the upcoming plays. This approach marked, for many viewers, a welcome change from a play as bizarre and alienating as David Mercer’s The Bankrupt (1972), directed by Morahan! Much later he later directed Granada’s adaptation of Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (1984), which has been associated with an upturn in ‘Heritage’ screen representations.

On Sunday 24 January 1965, Winston Churchill died, an event often understandably seen as part of the transitional nature of a year which ended with Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court and The Wednesday Play Up the Junction being on BBC One concurrently. Churchill’s legacy is complex; many racist and classist utterances and actions when in power, but he was also a central galvanizing force leading our coalition government in the Second World War, who alongside the US, the Soviets, the French Resistance and troops from all around the world, defeated the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany.

In words about Churchill, Maurice Wiggin made a somewhat Canute-esque protest at how Britain was changing:

He lived on into the age of the anti-hero, and perhaps he almost lived right through it for it cannot go on for ever. It is an aberration, lying athwart the mainstream of British tradition like a shifting shoal. It is foreign to the native temper and it must give way. A nation does not nourish and renew itself on the cynicism and petty self-regard of tiny men (Sunday Times, 31 January 1965, p. 44).

Amid such tumult, the Radio Times promised that Fable would be ‘stark, explosive and contemporary’ play, startling not cosy, noting its pugnacious approach in contrast to ‘crusading coloured [six] hero’ Mark Fellowes’s sentimental liberal bromides (16 January 1965, p. 35). Hopkins is quoted:

We the whites have made the problem – that we are frightened of them for various reasons including the sexual challenge that we imagine they offer. It’s our problem and we’ve symbolised it – the fact that they are black and we are white. (ibid.)

Interviewed by Clifford Davis, 28 year-old actor Kenneth Gardiner, who plays a policeman, is concerned about viewers getting ‘the wrong idea’, given how the play is ‘quite realistic’ (Daily Mirror, 27 January 1965, p. 14). ‘This is the first time I have been called upon to act this type of role… I didn’t particularly enjoy it’, but he appreciated it as a ‘challenge’ (ibid.). Actor Carmen Munroe noted:

it was actually very frightening… because suddenly you were being asked to perform the sort of acts that were performed against you in real life (Malik op. cit. p. 95).

Martin Jackson’s Daily Express article reports a TV announcer saying, before Fable started,

We want to make it clear that Fable, as its title suggests, is in no way a forecast of what could happen in this country.

The author, in order to bring home what racial discrimination means, assumed a situation in which white people find themselves oppressed second-class citizens, living in fear and trembling of their coloured [sic] masters.

What you are going to see is a play against prejudice and intolerance (28 January 1965, p. 6)

Rating *** / ****

While it’s somewhat over-extended, not necessarily needing 75 minutes to convey its philosophical points, and for its sometimes slight drama to unfurl, Fable has an electric topicality, plugged into the grid of Britain’s collective unconscious at this time. A progressive vanguard across the world wanted to challenge Apartheid South Africa, and I’d argue John Hopkins takes a highly effective stance in using an allegorical morality play form to assail the racist authoritarianism of Apartheid rather than a worthy realistic mode. It feels infinitely better judged than Charles Wood’s Drums Along the Avon (1967), as witnessed by Sarita Malik’s praise of its ‘radical drama’ which challenged the social order, like the later Shoot the Messenger (BBC2, 2006), in comparison to Gavin Shaffer’s (2014) critique of the latter, Bristol-set Wednesday Play. [1]

Britain was far from in a position to be smug, as the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 revealed, and the ascendancy of politicians using racist rhetoric to their advantage like Tories Enoch Powell and Peter Griffiths. Hence, Hopkins’s play directly ruffled feathers by challenging racism with its narrative of an inversion in racial power dynamics: displaying Black policemen (like the one Rudolph Walker plays with frightening banality) treating an ordinary White couple as subhuman.

As Sarita Malik wisely discerned, Fable ‘took viewers on an imaginative voyage in order to remind them that racial discrimination is based on social and conceptual, rather than biological, differences that have manifest [sic] themselves politically’ (op. cit. p. 95). The play implicitly calls for people of all hues to go beyond rhetoric and put their bodies on the line in actively resisting tyranny.

In British screen history, this is vastly progressive for its time, in giving so many roles to Black actors which transcend stereotypes they were often used to. Thomas Baptiste plays the key role of Mark Fellowes, a writer of weighty, conscience-venting tomes, kept under the sort of comfortable house arrest familiar in Eastern Europe: the velvet prison. Hopkins exposes Fellowes’s cowardice and ultimate haplessness, with his wife ensuring their comfortable existence is not threatened by burning everything new that he writes about the horrendous Black-led regime.

This is an intimate video studio drama showing us art on the walls, a stair carpet, the litany of high-minded but irrelevant books Fellowes has written on his own book shelves. The film inserts deal in the kind of dank, urban imagery helpfully scattered throughout the then-recent Doctor Who serial, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, screened in November to December 1964. With the often extensive use of still photographs with a voice-over, it felt oddly like Chris Marker’s superb science fiction short film La Jetee (1962) infused usefully with some of the analytical insights of Stuart Hall et al’s Policing the Crisis (1977). Thus, however clumsy and dragged-out Fable can occasionally feel (random allusion to some odd link with Norway, just left hanging!), it will engage anyone interested in art and ideology.

This play feels rather in the lineage of certain, directly political entries of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, or, indeed, Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968). It is a dystopia in being basically a tilted version of the present, fusing aspects of South Africa and the UK, and aiming to change Viewers’ minds by upturning the familiar. It is an excellent example of subversive counter-theatre, broadcast into people’s homes, aiming to disconcert and jolt. I value its serious, challenging intent.

Appallingly, we aren’t in a world which has turned its back on this. After the disastrous, enabling actions of the Biden administration as regards Gaza in 2023-4, 2025 sees the USA turning towards a right-wing authoritarianism that will gradually progress down the path of fascism, steered by Elon Musk, a businessman and social media mogul whose own family history is rooted in the evils of Apartheid. This drama’s focus on ID cards, work permits and forced labour camps accesses fears of totalitarian, and illiberal democratic, regimes. Therefore, this is sadly the most significant play for today so far in our chronicles of The Wednesday Play.

The narrator’s final words indict societal inaction, complacency and ignorance towards racism, and it’s a somewhat more didactic variant on the final phase of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023).

Best Performance: THOMAS BAPTISTE

There is a fine range in the performances, including Ronald Lacey and Eileen Atkins, who are movingly fragile and theatrically emotive as a harassed and victimised White couple; the latter implied to have been brutally raped, but who is blamed in the media as a ‘prostitute’, in a significant echo of trends in real reporting.

But Thomas Baptiste is stunning as Mark Fellowes, capturing the veneer of sophistication and being ‘civilised’, while ultimately cleaving to the racism of his society. A licenced fool, whose writings do not reach anyone, least of all speak any truth to power, or crucially the powerless!
His forlorn awareness of his comfortable impotence is crushingly etched on his face at the end. He is in house arrest, in a velvet prison where his own wife is the shrewd, controlling warder.

Best Line/s: “The people should know what sort of lives they lead. It’s sordid, yes, but it’s the truth and the people must be told the truth… They’d rather not know. It is our duty to tell them. Prostitutes, pimps, murderers, living right among us now. We have to know. The people have to be told. Get some pictures…” (Editor, played by Leo Carera)

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton / Victor Borge / Newsroom & Weather), ITV (It’s Tarbuck / America on the Edge of Abundance, narrated by James Cameron)

Audience Reaction Index: 52%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 84.6%

Reception: A very mixed reception from London critics, with as many hating it as admiring it, but a generally warmer reception from critics outside the capital. Viewers in the large audience were highly polarised: this was the first such instance of a Wednesday Play generating strong, clashing views. This would become a hallmark that lasted pretty well into the Play for Today era; see, for instance, reactions to The Other Woman (1976). Relatively few were mixed, neutral or indifferent, understandably given the play!

In the Express, Martin Jackson notes how an ‘anonymous phone caller threatened that petrol bombs would set fire’ to the BBC Television Centre Studios at White City if the play was broadcast (op. cit.). Jackson notes the BBC claimed to have received protests but wouldn’t reveal how many; he himself rather misses the point by terming the regime ‘a Congo-style black dictatorship’ (ibid.).

The usual anonymous Times reviewer felt that while the theme was unoriginal, the inversion and use of news film ‘achieved an unusual degree of intensity’ (28 January 1965, p. 18). They discern Hopkins’s critique of Fellowes’s condescending liberalism, which is truly not an act of fellowship with the persecuted (ibid.). Much of the play’s success is down to Morahan expertly deploying ‘effective journalistic and documentary techniques’ (ibid.).

Mary Crozier approved of the decision to have postponed the play, given how ‘a thousand misunderstandings’ are possible with TV (Guardian, 28 January 1965, p. 9). Crozier admired ‘a powerful play’, impressively acted, especially by Eileen Atkins, feeling it would reinforce hatred of apartheid and ‘awaken conscience’ in other viewers (ibid.). Richard Sear mused that the play was weakened by just having one despairing white couple, but admired the ‘strong meat’ this parable offered, with Ronald Lacey ‘outstanding’ (Daily Mirror, 28 January 1965, p. 14). Sear also notes that ‘Even ITB received protests’! (ibid.)

Contrarily, Maurice Richardson reflected that, while its blunt message would get across to ‘less imaginative customers’, ‘as a play it was so inept that it came rather near to defeating its own ends’ and was not as disturbing as ‘it ought to have been’ (Observer, 31 January 1965, p. 24). Richardson described Fellowes as played ‘like a zombie’ and Len as a ‘total no-hoper’; in 2025 friendly mode, he bemoans, ‘There was nobody to identify with’ (ibid.).

Another Maurice, Wiggin, was even more scathing, bemoaning ‘wretched stuff’ which he perceived as ‘didactic propaganda’, which only Shaw ‘could get away with’ (Sunday Times, 31 January 1965, p. 44). He sees Hopkins as modishly influenced by James Baldwin in attacking liberalism (ibid.). Similarly, Philip Purser lamented a ‘tract play’, where character is ‘subjugated to Thesis’, like in J. B. Priestley’s Doomsday for Dyson (Sunday Telegraph, 31 January 1965, p. 13). Purser then makes a questionable reference to how reversing the usual roles in The Black and White Minstrel Show could have ‘made the point equally graphically’ (ibid.).

Similarly, John Holmstrom – himself a disturbing figure, by several accounts – attacked Fable‘s ‘hysterical bludgeoning’, ‘stereotypes’ and, pejoratively, as ‘melodramatic’ and not ‘real’ (New Statesman, 5 February 1965, p. 210). Patrick Skene Catling appreciated what Hopkins was trying to do, but regarded Fable‘s overall view of mankind as overly ‘despairing’ (Punch, 3 February 1965, p. 180). He felt Hopkins’s characters were symbols, rather than articulate people; this shifts into the questionable view that a single drama inherently needs to offer balance (ibid.). Catling has a touching EngLit veneration of the word:

the final message seems to be that in the battle for men’s [sic] minds, actions speak louder than words. Well, Hopkins, they don’t, and shame on you for trying to get people all worked up without explaining much better why. (ibid.)

Marjorie Norris liked its clear bluntness, but not how Hopkins ‘became so fascinated with the characters of Mark and his wife that he let them pull his story out of shape’ (Television Today, 4 February 1965, p. 14). However, Norris felt Ronald Lacey was moving and compelling, and grows in ‘acting stature every time I see him’ (ibid.).

Norris also, alone among reviewers, praised how the largely Black cast got to ‘act real men and women – good or bad, wicked or weak without being lumbered with the chip-on-the-shoulder or much-too-good-to-be-true roles they usually get’ (ibid.). She praises many by name, including Baptiste, Assoon, Carmen Munroe, Dan Jackson and Leo Carera and even advocates proto-colour blind casting:

In the light of this, it seems to me there is a strong case for occasionally taking an ordinary play and casting it entirely with coloured [sic] actors. If the acting were as good as this, the strangeness would be forgotten within minutes. (ibid.)

Amen to that, Marjorie!

Frederick Laws felt Thomas Baptiste played Fellowes ‘excellently’, but that the play was blunted by the announcer’s prefatory remarks, ‘some of the irony was over-sophisticated’ and, like Catling, questioned its attack on intellectual writers (The Listener, 11 February 1965, p. 239).

Reactions outside London were, by and large, more consistently positive. Geoffrey Lane felt it wasn’t dramatic enough in ‘recognisably British terms’, and, oddly, called for ‘fuller treatment’ of Mark Fellowes’s story – which, unquestionably, is given significant focus – alongside the rape accusations against Len (Birmingham Express and Star, 28 January 1965, p. 13). However, Linda Dyson rejoiced in a TV play that, ‘for once’, had ‘something to say’; noting its cleverness, while pointedly asking, ‘would the average viewer have felt the same sympathy for a Bantu family in unfamiliar surroundings?’ (The Birmingham Post, Midland Magazine supplement, 30 January 1965, p. IV). Dyson here identifies how Hopkins successfully got many British viewers to empathise through the inversion technique, which a ‘straight’ drama wouldn’t have done.

Reviews either side of the Pennines were good. N. G. extolled fine production and performances, which had an ‘impact’, pointing out ‘the lesson of human degradation visited on both colours in any battle for supremacy’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 28 January 1965, p. 3). Peter Quince appreciated a ‘vivid, powerful and quietly sickening piece of writing’, but also that it should really have been ‘a straight report, in dramatic form, of conditions in South Africa’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 30 January 1965, p. 4). Quince admired Baptiste’s ‘great skill’ and Lacey’s and Atkins’s ‘outstanding’ performances, which put the seal on ‘a formidable production, both technically and intellectually’ (ibid.).

Tom Gregg noted how ‘compelling’ it was in details like the forced labour camps in Scotland to redress overpopulation in the South East, and its portrayal of media manipulation (Runcorn Guardian, 4 February 1965, p. 6). However, Gregg did not feel it would work to lessen prejudice, or win converts from ‘those who believe in white supremacy and segregation’ and may even have the opposite effect to what Hopkins intended (ibid.). This is basically the Till Death Us Do Part argument: i.e. Alf Garnett being claimed as a hero against Speight’s intent.

Desmond McMullen acclaimed ‘a ferocious assault on the whole concept of apartheid’, with writing ‘as taut as a hawser knot’; its dramatic points ‘were driven home with brutal precision’ by Hopkins, who ‘is none the worse’ for retaining some of the ‘dust of Newtown’ (op. cit.).

Audiences were highly divided, with 38% of the BBC sample giving it A/A+, 34% the low C/C- scores, and 28% being in the middle (BBC WAC, VR/65/50). Many did ‘genuinely misinterpret’, clearly not bothering to listen to the prefatory BBC announcement in feeling fearful that ‘the tables could be turned’ (ibid.). Those against Fable generally expressed an ’emotional repugnance’ combined with feelings Hopkins overstated his case.

The slightly larger more favourable group praised its honesty in dealing with the problem of racism; one viewer perceptively notes how ‘It made me realise that “coloured” [sic] can mean any colour and that to think of black people as in any way different from white people in their basic virtues and vices is the first step on the road to apartheid.’ (ibid.). I appreciate how several found the production ‘jumpy’, with the editing, changes of scenes and newsreels confusing or distracting (ibid.). As usual, acting was praised, with Atkins, Lacey and Baptiste singled out (ibid.).

Two letters in the press matched the more positive group of viewers. In the Sunday Mirror a Mrs A. Goring of Brixham, Devon, praised Fable as ‘a blow beneath the belt’, well outside ‘the syrupy run of TV plays’; stark newsreel further aided what was ‘television at its seating best’ (31 January 1965, p. 22). Maureen P. Morris of Usk in Monmouthshire, Wales, wrote to the Radio Times, finding Fable ‘thrilling and frightening’, linking it to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in prompting her ‘apprehension for the future’ and thus entirely missing Hopkins’s point (25 February 1965, page unclear).

In more unusual fallout from the play, Colonel Frederick Wagg, a retired Royal Artillery Officer wrote to the DPP as a common informer against the play, misunderstanding it as ‘likely to inflame racial hatred and prejudice’ (Guardian, 6 February 1965, p. 1). Wagg is noted as offering accommodation in properties he owns to nationals of Pakistan, India, Ceylon and the West Indies and having received ‘many threatening letters’ as a result; that he turned his fire on a play rather than these letter-writers says something about the time (ibid.).

This reflects the situation wherein Hopkins ‘was getting letters of protest before it was even shown’, due to the publicity around the postponement, which in itself generated ‘preconceived attitudes’; causing ‘surprise, one of the chief weapons at a playwright’s disposal’ to be ‘totally lost’ (Observer, 7 March 1965, p. 23).

Another, especially disturbing response was manifested in a letter that Thomas Baptiste received, which exuded the prevalent racism the play was challenging:

How dare you appear on our television screens, even as a friend or liberal. Get back to your country! Hideous ape! (Quoted in Malik op. cit., p. 95)

[1]. Sarita Malik, ‘Black British drama, losses and gains: the case of Shoot the Messenger‘, in: Sarita Malik and Darrell M. Newton (eds.), Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 95-6.

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.🙂

N.b. one curious anomaly is that extensive sequences of classical music are used throughout the play, but I’ve been unable to identify what these are. If you might have any more idea than Shazam and SoundHound, drop me a line!

— With thanks again to John Williams for sourcing much of the press coverage.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.03: ‘The Navigators’ (BBC1, 20 January 1965)

02.03: The Navigators (BBC One, Wednesday 20 January 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Vivian Matalon; Written by Julia Jones; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by: ??; Music: ??

Now, historically, the term ‘navigators’ meant the workers who carried out the arduous labour needed to establish Britain’s commercial canals, sometimes known as ‘navigations’; ‘navigators’ gave rise to the phrase ‘navvies’, sometimes used in a snobbish derogatory way.

An article notes that Jones got the idea for her ‘warm, human comedy’ from ‘watching navvies working outside her London home’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 20 January 1965, p. 2). The play, set in suburban Lancashire, features a middle-aged widow and ‘dowdy librarian’* Enid (Patience Collier), living with her unmarried daughter Alicia (Andree Melly). Outside a large hole is being dug in the road by workmen Fatty (Richard Pearson) and his mate, the huge ‘Vera’ (George Baker).

*(quoted from Michael Coveney, Guardian, 29 October 2015)

George Baker as ‘Vera’ (L) and Andree Melly as Alicia (R). Image from *Coventry Evening Telegraph*.

Fatty and Enid begin to fall in love with each other, abetted by Enid’s love of cooking, appreciated by Fatty, ‘a regular Billy Bunter’, in Bill Smith’s words (Express and Star, 20 January 1965, p. 11). However, Fatty goes too far, tries to dominate and makes a suggestion which results in disaster.

Coverage included focus on Julia Jones’s shift from acting to writing and how she thinks of her ideas while doing housework, writing up her ideas at home (Bristol Evening Post, 20 January 1965, p. 4). Judy Kirby’s interview with Jones includes her reflection that, “I wanted to show the narrowness that people impose on themselves. Even when they have a chance to get away they don’t take it” (ibid.).

Julia Jones (1923-2015) came from a modest Liverpool background, growing up in Everton, and had worked as an actor in the Theatre Workshop company, and after this – her first screenwriting credit – enjoyed a varied writing career, taking in several more Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today and even children’s dramas, adapted from literary sources into the 1990s. Michael Coveney’s obituary notes Jones’s sense of social injustice and how she wrote stories for the Daily Worker (op. cit.). Director Vivian Matalon (1929-2018) had a Jewish Manchester background and was involved in much acting and directing for stage and screen.

The Liverpool Echo included a picture of Jones (see above), listing her as a former Liverpool Playhouse actress and former pupil of Queen Mary High School who won a scholarship to RADA, while – in an age clearly before data protection – also identifying her parents as currently living at 16 Sefton Drive, Aintree Village (21 January 1965, p. 9).

The play was broadcast earlier than planned due to the postponement of the planned screening of John Hopkins’s Fable due to the Leyton by-election being the next day, Thursday 21 January 1965, and Fable‘s ‘explosive colour theme’ was seen as potentially influencing the by-election due to Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker being the Labour candidate (he had lost out to Tory Peter Griffiths’s racist campaign in Smethwick in the 1964 general election). Gordon Walker also lost in Leyton, a previously Labour seat, by 205 votes and finally resigned as a Minister, though he won Leyton comfortably in 1966 and 1970.

The lack of detail I’ve been able to glean regarding behind the scenes credits is mainly due to there being no Radio Times listing for The Navigators, with that week’s details being for the originally planned Fable…

I’d be interested to see how good The Navigators is… Jones’s Still Waters (1972) and Back of Beyond (1974) comprise an elemental yang and yin of PfT, though I felt the camera script of The Stretch (1973) was banal and underwhelmingly so at that, and her Miss Marple adaptation for BBC1 (1985) the least gripping of the opening trio. Interestingly, Richard Pearson figures in Jones’s Marple; he makes the most impression of the guest cast, giving a typically abrasive camp turn.

However, The Navigators is another play that does not exist in the archives, one of 14 in the 24 plays from January – June 1965 that we can’t now watch. (Incidentally, two of these 14 ‘lost’ plays do have clips that exist from them) It sounds in some ways like an anticipation of the domestic scenes from Arthur Hopcraft’s PfT The Reporters (1972).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / The Likely Lads: ‘The Suitor’ / Newsroom, Weather), ITV (Call in on Valentine / Circus, from Kelvin Hall, Glasgow / Soccer: Manchester United v. Everton)

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 67%

There was no New Statesman TV column this particular week, nor a Guardian TV review the following day.

Reception: By and large, a mixed, edging towards mildly positive, reaction, with critics and viewers in rare accord, with verdicts split within both camps.

In a punning, dismissive missive, Lyn Lockwood called it ‘homely fare [which] lay somewhat heavily on the stomach’, mocking dialogue that was too reliant on pauses and repetitions for her taste: ‘Somewhat indigestible, you must agree’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1965, p. 17). However, Peter Black saluted Jones’s first attempt as good: ‘a comedy about sex that was genuinely funny and sexual’ (Daily Mail, 21 January 1965, p. 3).

Maurice Wiggin was slightly more circumspect, liking Jones’s ‘terribly credible characters’, and her ‘acute feeling for […] The terror and nightmare, that may lurk behind the discreet suburban curtain’, though also discerned a ‘constructional naivety’ (Sunday Times, 24 January 1965, p. 42). While also writes pompously about a little of ‘the common speech’ going a long way, Wiggin distinguishes Jones’s writing from a certain new Midlands-set drama series:

Her people had the slight psychical distortion, the recognisable quiddity, which distinguish a real writer’s people from the mass-produced plastic figures of soap opera (the latest of which is that teatime mums’ marathon, Crossroads. Tripe on toast.

Bill Edmund felt it was acted and directed in a leaden way which made it come across like ‘a heavy, almost sinister drama’, when it should have been played like Walter Greenwood’s recent Thursday Theatre play The Cure for Love, to make him laugh (Television Today, 28 January 1965, p. 12). He noted how Fatty was ‘an unpleasant arrogant man’, who he felt could end up killing the trembling Enid; noting slow, portentous playing and Matalon’s emphasising of ‘Fatty’s sinister qualities by showing us closeups of his hands whenever he touched Enid’ (ibid.).

A Northerner himself, Edmund never wanted to hear Richard Pearson’s attempt at a Northern accent again (!), and disliked all the characters as they went back to their deservedly stodgy daily round’ (ibid.). He did praise Terence Woodfield and Tim Wylton for offering very brief lighter relief as George and Stewart (ibid.).

The Times‘ usual anonymous reviewer largely begged to differ, liking an ‘amusing, ill-natured play’ exploring the ‘bitter dependence’ between mother and daughter, ‘that is one of the most frightening of human relationships’ (21 January 1965, p. 17). They like Jones’s ‘sourly amused attitude to people’, and ‘the endless, mindless bickering’ between Enid and Alicia ‘had the ring of unpleasant truth’, though felt the production was overly literal (ibid.). Again, acting was admired with Pearson’s ‘fat, slow, lazy pirate [proving] a rich, comic study (ibid.).

Perfectly completing a definitive mixed reaction from London critics, Frederick Laws found it ‘beautifully managed’, with the navvies’ performances ‘excellent’ and admired the breakdown of romance and the ‘tragi-comic ending by which the daughter takes to over-eating as a cure for love’ (The Listener, 11 February 1965, p. 239).

Outside the capital, Michael Beale approved of a play that initially appeared ‘an artless little comedy’, but whose idea was original, ‘if not quite believable’, though its underlying construction was sound (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 21 January 1965, p. 2). Beale appreciated ‘beautifully drawn’ performances by Andree Melly and Patience Collier, though ended with a weary broadside against The Wednesday Play’s title sequence! :

But must we have the build-up to the Wednesday play? It looks and sounds like a certain newsreel. Why not go straight into the play, after introducing it by way of title? (ibid.)

Peter Quince noted how in contrast to Fable, Jones’s play ‘could not be held to frighten anyone’, though its excessive length bored him – ‘tediously slow and repetitive’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 23 January 1965, p. 5). Quince felt this a particular shame, as at 50 minutes it would have been ‘pleasant’ and he liked the acting very much – including Richard Pearson, ‘not normally one of my idols’ (ibid.).

Norman Phelps felt Jones’s ‘outstanding’ play was part of a fine upturn in the quality of TV plays which were increasingly ‘well worth settling down for’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 30 January 1965, p. 10). Enforcing the more positive reaction outside of London, Peter Forth in Bristol praised ‘natural’ dialogue in a kitchen sink drama which wasn’t aiming to be strictly ‘true-to-life’, and hoped to see more work from Jones (Western Daily Press, 21 January 1965, p. 7).

The audience was large, but fairly mixed, nudging towards positive. Many were disappointed by a play characterised by ‘glorified grossness’, a slow pace and a ‘tame’ ending (BBC Audience Research, VR/65/37). Nerves were touched, by bad language; some felt it was unpleasant and unrealistic:

‘how anyone could put up with such a show of bad table manners and rudeness from such as “Fatty” in their own house is unbelievable!’ (ibid.)

Others admired a ‘frank and homely’ play for its comedic truth (ibid.). There was widespread admiration for the acting, with some feeling Richard Pearson veered into caricature, but a Sales Manager’s comment indicated Pearson’s was a ‘telling’ performance: ‘we all could have cheerfully thrown him out’ (ibid.). Garden scenes were felt to be overly artificial, but detail and atmosphere were commended (ibid.).

Oddly, no mention is made anywhere of Kathleen Byron playing Miss Stewart; this was what I think is the first key Powell and Pressburger-Wednesday Play link in our story.

Overall, it seems to have established a pattern of contemporary Wednesday Plays which reached beyond the ITV competition: even if getting a mixed reaction compared with A Tap on the Shoulder, it was a fixture and on people’s radar now.

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 – 02.02: ‘Sir Jocelyn, the Minister Would Like A Word…’ (BBC1, 13 January 1965)

Directed by Stuart Burge; Written by Simon Raven; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Moira Tait; Music by Dudley Moore

This play appeared just three days after writer Simon Raven had another play on TV, The Gaming Book for ABC’s Armchair Theatre (ITV, 10/01/1965), which concerned a grammar-school educated subaltern’s impact on an army regiment in Germany. This domination of a week’s schedules by one playwright was not entirely uncommon: in December 1970, Colin Welland had two remarkable plays on the BBC and ITV in the same week, after his fine Armchair Theatre Say Goodnight to Grandma in late October. Raven was rather a diametrically opposed figure to Welland, and his employment was evidence of the BBC’s pluralism and that it would engage more conservative voices in drama, however endangered a species they have understandably tended to be within the humanistic Arts!

Raven’s BBC Wednesday Play concerned the ‘petty intrigues of university life’, with dons vying with politicians over what the priority should be when building a new college, with funds being low: a lecture hall or a chapel? (Leicester Mercury, January 1965, p. 16). Coverage indicates there was a typical generation gap theme of youth vs age.

The Leicester Mercury made much of Raven’s roots in the city, being the grandson of the late Mr. William Raven of Portland House, Leicester (ibid.). In a fascinating vignette, Charles Greville interviewed the 37-year-old writer in his bedsitter in a Deal boarding house: ‘An odd environment for a self-confessed Right-Wing reactionary with a taste for the high life’ (Daily Mail, 15 January 1965, p. 4). Raven, possessed of a ‘George Sanders drawl’, is exiled to Deal in Kent as his publisher Anthony Blond agreed to pay his debts if he lived at least 50 miles outside of London! (ibid.). Greville recounts that this Charterhouse-educated writer, also ex-military, earned about £6,000 in 1964 – equivalent to £155,000 today – and is working on the second novel in his Alms for Oblivion series and ‘nurtures a nostalgia’ for Edwardian England:

A self-possessed, but oddly melancholy man – chronicling a world before it disappears (ibid.).

The play generally received far less pre-broadcast publicity than A Tap on the Shoulder, perhaps indicating that its somewhat more rarified milieu was less likely to entice a large audience. Uncanny foreshadowing here of how Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby’s Play for Today about academics in a redbrick University The After Dinner Game (1975) followed a week after Philip Martin’s populist urban crime PfT Gangsters. (Both those plays are excellent with very different strengths and limitations)

Notably, the BBC gave this play more of a promotional push than O’Connor’s heist comedy, allocating not just a substantial Radio Times article to it, but featured in on the magazine’s cover, the first Wednesday Play to receive this accolade.

Raven’s play was billed in the Scotsman as a ‘comedy’ (13 January 1965, p. 16) and the Daily Mirror as a ‘COMEDY OF CUNNING’ (13 January 1965, p. 14). A Baroness Cleethorpe (Agnes Laughlan) is apparently a ‘Leftish life-peeress’ on the committee who is strongly anti-chapel and pro-electronic lecture theatre (Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1966, p. 13). Laughlan is one of very few women in a masculine ‘ivory tower’ environment; the cast also includes Michael Hordern and Alec McCowen, featured on the Radio Times cover, alongside James Maxwell, Colin Jeavons, Leonard Maguire, Gerald Cross, Christopher Benjamin, Derek Francis and Steven Berkoff, among others.

*George Howe as Torquil Flute and Agnes Laughlan as Baroness Cleethorpe. Image from* the Daily Telegraph (11 January 1965)

While I can’t truly assess it, with no copy in the archives and as I’ve yet to locate a script, but I wouldn’t quite say I feel that this play would match The After Dinner Game for ‘polished wit and sophisticated dialogue’, which Tony Aspler in the Radio Times claims for it (9 January 1965, p. 39). Aspler praises its ‘outspoken rakish style’, and ends with a direct quote from an unnamed character to demonstrate the ‘punch [Raven] packs here’:

The trouble with modern life, Sir Jocelyn, is that one’s sense of values is perverted. This is because in a democracy the people must be given what they want, and what the people want, for the most part, is nauseating rubbish (ibid.).

Perhaps in a sign that Not Only But Also… had not quite taken off just yet, little is made anywhere of Dudley Moore performing music for the play. Indeed, when I spoke to designer Moira Tait, she could not recall anything about this aspect, but recalls this black and white production as being recorded live at Riverside Studios and that Michael Hordern was very good in it (interviewed by the author, 11 December 2021).

Audience size: 3.96 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 24.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / The Likely Lads: ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ / Newsroom), ITV (It’s Tarbuck! / Professional Wrestling / The Entertainers)

Audience Reaction Index: 55%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 78%

Reception: So, did critics and/or public prefer a play from a melancholy bounder of a Tory to the previous week’s diamond geezer socialist murderer? Not really. The critical reaction was mixed, though there was a fair amount of praise, especially from outside London. A notable fraction of the viewing public took to it, but rather more didn’t, in a classic mixed reaction demonstrating this play found niche rather than widespread support.

One of the most positive critics, Peter Black in the Daily Mail, appreciated a Shavian comedy which exposed ‘ready-made’ attitudes and ‘left you more alert and interested than it found you’, having GBS’s ‘faculty for presenting different points of view with equal eloquence’ (14 January 1965, p. 3). However, Lyn Lockwood in the Daily Telegraph disliked a ‘loosely executed’ play with one of TV’s ‘ubiquitous commentator[s]’ – played by Alec McCowen – though she did admire the performances and how the outcome was uncertain ‘until the very last moment’ (14 January 1965, p. 18).

Mary Crozier in the Guardian found it ‘very amusing’ and invariably ‘fully armoured against every contemporary fallacy’, when satirizing a struggle between progressives and traditionalists (14 January 1965, p. 9). Unlike some reviewers, Crozier welcomed its larger than life cynicism and how a brilliant cast made it ‘as though Lord Snow’s solemn Corridors of Power were heard echoing with laughter and were cut down to size’ (ibid.). Contrarily, an anonymous reviewer in the Times perceived a merely ‘pleasant little comedy’, finding pleasure in Hordern’s performance, but felt the play lacked sufficient ‘intellectual toughness’ and passion, and ‘the sense of a real battle over real issues did not arise’ (14 January 1965, p.5).

Maurice Richardson in the Observer regarded neither of the week’s Raven plays as particularly successful, but felt both were more ‘interesting and entertaining than TV drama average’ (17 January 1965, p. 24). While liking Sir Jocelyn‘s characterisation, Richardson felt the plot and situation lacking, feeling too much like an absurd ‘skit on a C. P. Snow novel’, which would have benefited from ‘a faster, more stylised production’ (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times preferred Raven’s ITV play, finding Sir Jocelyn… a silly title, but a splendid idea, but poorly structured and ‘choppy’ with an ‘obtrusive’ omniscient narrator (17 January 1965, p. 44). He felt the satire went ‘way over the border of farce: a sort of Swizzlewick, M. A.’ and bemoaned how ‘Television is rapidly creating the most cynical electorate in history’ (ibid.). Wiggin had earlier mused, with unintentionally amusing portentousness:

Mr Raven’s line of thought is more sobering than most. If one may judge by these entertainments, he does not indiscriminately love the race that bore him; least of all the leading class of which he is by fortune and endowment a member. True, having not been born to it, he cannot but offer leadership [my emphasis], even if he can only offer to lead us out of complacency into perplexity, and perhaps despair. (ibid.)

Frederick Laws in the Listener found much to enjoy in a ‘reactionary’ comedy, and sensed Michael Hordern ‘enjoyed playing Sir Jocelyn thoroughly’ (21 January 1965, p. 117). However Laws felt it was too insubstantial fare: ‘An amusement of an hour and a quarter, but not a play.’ (ibid.). Laws pointedly did not discuss Raven’s other play, presumably as it was on ITV.

E. McI. in the Belfast Telegraph was more positive than most in London, finding its satire ‘penetrating’ and saw this play, ‘which shocked and entertained’, as constituting a ‘rarity’ in TV drama (14 January 1965, p. 9). C.V. in the Leicester Mercury regarded Raven’s comedy as ‘a feast of sophisticated wit’, which made three recent plays about Blackpool’s Golden Mile ‘seem like the mental meandering of a school Boy’ (14 January 1965, p. 9). A week later C.V. countered religious critics of Sir Jocelyn – who criticised its ‘heavy sarcasm’ about religion – by arguing religions are strong enough to withstand freedom of speech (21 January 1965, p. 13)

Peggie Philips in the Scotsman saw it as a ‘delightful urbane and sardonic play’, which nevertheless exposed the ‘selfish’ motives of the dons (14 January 1965, p. 14). It was ‘far superior to the general run’ and Philips praised Dudley Moore’s music as in ‘harmony’ with Raven’s writing and Agnes Lauchlan ‘as a Baroness in delicious baronial hats’ (ibid.). Similarly, N.G.P. in the Liverpool Daily Post praised ‘a fine and spirited flamboyance both in words and characters’ (14 January 1965, p. 3). While they do also go on to praise Stan Barstow’s far grittier Z Cars episode from the same night, they salute Raven in hallowed terms as ‘a television playwright who is not afraid of using the English language in an elegant, eloquent and witty manner.’ (ibid.).

Geoffrey Lane in the Wolverhampton Express and Star called it ‘smart, intelligent if superficial’, imagining Raven, like Moliere, having to explain ‘that he was attacking hypocrisy, not the true religion’ (14 January 1965, p. 13). Peter Quince in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner gave a mixed review which synthesised the whole press reaction: finding it amusing, but veering into ‘gross caricature’; he especially admired Michael Hordern’s ‘superb performance as the chairman who wanted (a) to do right; and (b) the O.M. [Order of Merit]’ (16 January 1965, p. 5).

There was a somewhat lukewarm reaction from an audience sample from what was projected as a fairly small audience compared with others we’ve analysed (BBC WAC, VR/65/24). Over a quarter were strongly critical, finding it excessively talk-driven and ‘a big yawn’ with a ‘thin and unconvincing’ theme (ibid.). Another third of the viewers liked getting a behind-the-scenes look at such University wranglings, but even these didn’t see it as amusing or realistic enough, and bemoaned ‘ludicrous’ characterisation’, or saw it as ‘a pale imitation’ of C. P. Snow’s The Masters (ibid.).

A few stuck up for the narration device as a successful update of the Greek Chorus (ibid.). A group comprising 40% of the sample thoroughly enjoyed an amusing, thought-provoking and ‘telling comment on the contemporary social scene’, with much truth ‘underlying the light-hearted, nonsensical badinage’ (ibid.). Acting was, as usual, largely praised, though Colin Jeavons’s architect’s illiteracy was felt to be unconvincing, and some ‘overplaying’ was censured (ibid.). While the production was seen as ‘competent’, an initial slowness, Moore’s ‘superfluous’ music and the (deliberate) artificiality of Moira Tait’s sets didn’t find favour, which it may be surmised was due to the setting being aesthetically unfamiliar to viewers (ibid.).

Letters to the press that reached print veered more to the positive. Patricia O’Mahony of Tunbridge Wells was delighted with a ‘humorous tilt at the windmills of the Establishment, wonderfully put over by Alec McCowen as the private secretary’ (Sunday Mirror, 17 January 1965, n.p.). Susan Ronnie of Bexhill-on-Sea agreed, finding it ‘brilliant’ and ‘scintiliating’, but A. L. Martin of Littlehampton decried a lot of ”jaw-jaw’, and not one character with a worth-while motive or thought!’ (Radio Times, 6 February 1965, n.p.).

As a coda, the theatre critic W. A. Darlington was critical of the published text of Sir Jocelyn…, finding it strained credulity, with the ‘full preposterousness’ of Mr Flute and his swaying of the Baroness (Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1966, p. 13). Notably, Darlington far preferred Ronald Millar’s recent staging of C. P. Snow’s superficially similar novel, The Masters (1950), acclaiming Snow as a ‘realist’ over Raven, a ‘satirist’ (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 – 02.01: ‘A Tap on the Shoulder’ (BBC1, 6 January 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), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.

02.01: A Tap on the Shoulder (BBC One, Wednesday 6 January 1965) 9:30 – 10:40pm

Directed by Kenneth Loach*; Written by James O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Stanley Myers

*Misspelled ‘Kenneth Leach’ in the BBC’s audience research report!

This play opened a new, perhaps even the first, series of The Wednesday Play. It concerns a group of criminals who conduct a gold bullion robbery from the Queen’s bond at a South Coast airport. It was written not just by a writer not just new to TV, but who possessed inside knowledge…

Indeed, the Daily Mail featured the BBC’s decision to employ Jimmy ‘Ginger’ O’Connor as a playwright as a front page story (2 December 1964, p. 1), including an interview with ‘the former barrow boy, thief and convicted murderer’ who had been given the death penalty in 1942 at the Old Bailey for the murder of rag merchant George Ambridge. O’Connor was reprieved from his execution by the Home Secretary and released from Dartmoor prison after spending ten years inside. O’Connor credits his wife Nemone Lethbridge, who gave up practicing at the bar for their marriage, as giving crucial encouragement to his writing career (ibid.).ven that initial preamble, feel free to watch the play here now:

Following this preamble, feel free to watch the play here now:

PlayForEver YouTube video posting of A Tap on the Shoulder (accessed: 5 January 2025)

L. Marsland Gander disapproved of this new series’ title of ‘Wednesday Playbeat’, feeling it too offbeat and fashionable, and a misnomer as he had been reassured by Newman, Michael Bakewell and new producer James MacTaggart that there would be little background music – presumably this strand title was quietly dropped… (Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1964, p. 15). The Belfast Telegraph also used this title on 26 December, for this new play series where ‘almost all will be about life to-day and the people in a society in the move’; with writers being given ‘freedom of action’ (p. 7). ‘Special theme music’ for The Wednesday Play called ‘Playbeat’ was heard for the first time in A Tap on the Shoulder, written by Mike Vickers and played by his group, Manfred Mann (Belfast Telegraph, 9 January 1965, p. 7). Sadly, the available copy is shorn of these titles.

Gander indicated some continuation of the casting policy of the autumn-winter 1964 Wednesday Plays, which he associated with ABC’s practice of casting star names in TV plays: he lists Lee Montague, Michael Hordern, George Baker, Andre Morell [misspelled ‘Melly’] and Richard Pearson (Telegraph op.cit.).

The play itself was trailed as part of Sydney Newman’s announcement that the BBC were avoiding ‘dustbin drama’ – ‘kitchen-sink plays, obsessed with sex and domestic problems’ – instead now favouring ‘plays with strong stories, having a “beginning, middle and ending.”‘ (Daily Mail, 11 December 1964, p. 3). Notably, Newman says that sordid or sexual material can’t be entirely excluded, but he empirically pins this down to be likely no more than 3% of the Plays department’s output (ibid.). Philip Purser saw this as ‘another try at a play series by the B.B.C.’, emphasising a break with the eight 1964 plays we assessed before Christmas (Sunday Telegraph, 3 January 1965, p. 11).

Rehearsals began on 18 December 1964 at the TV Centre, White City and O’Connor was pictured, holding his script, alongside scantily-clad actors Carmen Dene and Christine Rogers, in the Daily Mail (19 December 1964, p. 3). There’s an interesting comment in Fred Bellamy’s interview with Sydney Newman which sheds light on his populism:

Personally I don’t like too much talk in drama and I look forward very much for action, physical as well as psychological (Belfast Telegraph, op. cit.)

Series producer MacTaggart expressed his aims for the season:

It should make the viewer laugh, sit up and think, sit back and be entertained (quoted in The Express and Star, 6 January 1965, p. 13).

This was in the context of the BBC having ‘taken a frightful beating’ from ITV in terms of audience viewing figures in 1964 (Liverpool Echo, 6 January 1965, p. 2). MacTaggart and Newman’s strategy is interpreted as unabashedly populist by James Green: ‘Out are those arty-crafty plays with the non-story and indefinite endings.’ (ibid.) The BBC’s Hugh Greene era populist fightback was evident more widely in BBC TV drama; the same week, Maureen O’Brien debuted as Vicki in Doctor Who ‘The Rescue’, which I’ve written about for Stacey Smith?’s edited book Outside In Regenerates (2023). This was among Doctor Who’s most popular stories in its history.

Previews included much focus on O’Connor using his ‘knowledge of criminals’ (Sunday Mail, 3 January 1965, p. 17) and an article on the day of its broadcast headlined ‘Reprieved murderer turns playwright’ (Daily Mirror, 6 January 1965, p. 12). A Tap on the Shoulder was described as a ‘boisterous comedy-thriller’ focusing on criminals as ‘professionals”, not ‘unshaven villains on the dark fringes of society’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 6 January 1965, p. 2).

As you’ll have seen if you’ve watched the drama, they are so professional as to successfully make off with £2 million (in 1965 dosh) of gold bullion bars, ending up on the Riviera.

Rating: ** 3/4 / ****

(Aye, fair cop, Guv. It’s a nailed-on 7/10!)

His first Wednesday Play is the closest Ken Loach has got to making a heist film, if mainly shot on video in the studio. I don’t usually like the heist sub-genre, but this is a notably blunt play which juxtaposes legal and illegal criminality. It exposes the venal Archie’s underhanded acts to gain his advancement, with splenetic irony, but there is also a glee in how these working-class ‘professionals’ get away with it. There are, of course, echoes of the Great Train Robbery of 8 August 1963. It also feels like a left-wing inversion of Basil Dearden and Bryan Forbes’s The League of Gentlemen (1960).

It’s a play about class and this is regularly expressed in its language. Have a butcher’s. Taking a liberty. Nicker. Crumpet. Straightened. Yer nut. Yer loaf. You lemon. Caper. Chummy. Get out of it. A little natter. Not speaking The Queen’s English. You’re getting in a right Harry Tate [state]. Let’s get up there and have a go. This last example expresses the spirit of a play where a ragtag group transgresses. It’s rather like Loach’s much later feature-film The Angels’ Share (2012), though this group feels rather less identifiably underdog in nature, and are making illicit gains in an “affluent” society.

O’Connor’s play is notable for its carnivalesque, forceful working-class attitude, and it is clearly on the side of outright criminality. You feel you’re getting gritty voices from the streets, which are counter to “respectable” society and that, surely, much of the organised Labour Movement would disapprove of. This seems very much part of Ken Loach and Roger Smith’s instinctive alignment with outlaws and O’Connor significantly gives a few of the characters outspoken Revolutionary views.

The group wants to grab ‘the good life’ and raise themselves through illicit means; they have the cunning and guile to easily pull this off in a society where the establishment is clearly coded as out of touch in its Conservatism. These criminals are also aided by the emergent “enlightened” liberal mood of the 1960s, which enables and infuses this drama itself. While experiences of the Second World War hang over several of the characters, you feel they’re enjoying being able to move on. Some may move into property, others into hire purchase, when this is over, they reflect… The man whose house they’ve unwittingly used as a base, Sir Archibald Cooper (Lee Montague), ends up knighted and the prospective Conservative candidate for South Hampshire. He clearly benefits from a cosy relationship with the police and has Masonic connections.

This play centres on masculine worlds and attitudes in a way prevalent also in Play for Today’s first half (1970-77), typified by Peter Terson’s Art, Abe and Ern trilogy of 1972-74. Everyday homophobia is expressed neutrally, without any narrative coding to undermine it (it certainly figures less complexly than in O’Connor’s later Her Majesty’s Pleasure, 1973). The gang regard homosexuality as an upper-class establishment activity, associated with news stories like the Cambridge Spies, and it’s all part of the nation being in a right state, according to these underdog crooks: needs setting to rights with a Revolution. We are clearly meant to feel the group are committing more honest crimes than the Tory in the Hampshire country estate who advances hypocritical law-and-order discourses while railing against “these so-called enlightened times”.

Just as notably, we get barely any dialogue or character development for the few credited women actors here. Judith Smith does her best, and is sparky and worldly, but it’s a limited role to put it mildly. Lee Montague’s character’s wife is simply a dull, vulgar harridan, who we see once give a mouthful and then later hear her volleying abuse down the telephone line. Rose Hill gives it (im)proper welly and it’s a memorable turn, but the character is meagre. Bathing beauties stand silent at the end, flanking the men; implied to be part of the “good life” prize these rogues have won. Tony Garnett and Nell Dunn were much needed!

While it’s evidently not going to compete with Jonathan Glazer’s gangster film Sexy Beast (2000) in a million years, this seems a fairly ambitious and occasionally visually striking drama for its time. There’s good exterior filmed material in the fishing scenes and then quiet, deftly subdued – if not especially tense – scenes where the heist is enacted via boats carrying away the gold bullion from Southampton. These sequences would be better served by a restored print. Come on, BFI!

At the end, Stanley Myers’s stringed music feels oddly harried and ominous. They’ve all got away with the crime and it’s an upbeat ending from the group’s perspective, but this seems a very BBC move to have a questioning musical steer by Myers at this point. While we head light and jocular moments, wind instruments tootling away, perhaps they might be apprehended after all, due to their hubris in this scene?

Best Performance: GEORGE TOVEY

You might expect it to be Tony Selby, in the year of Saved on stage and Up the Junction. Lee Montague would really be the obvious choice. However, I’m actually going with George Tovey, who is wonderfully grizzled here as Patsy, to my ears at least, the furthest from the Queen’s lingo of them all! He later gave a fantastic performance as a lonely haunted man in the second Sapphire and Steel adventure in 1979. It’s genuinely tough to separate and single out anyone from this tight ensemble, so I just want to give Tovey a deserved shout-out.

Best line: “Do you realise that one of his sons could end up Prime Minister?” (Tim)

This line has an uncanny prescience, delivered by Tony Selby, about the nouveau riche Archie’s sons who he wants to put through Eton College.

Audience size: 8.91 million

The TAM ratings indicate 3.4 million homes for A Tap on the Shoulder, while Millie in Jamaica reached 6.66 million homes (Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1965, p. 13). This amounts to a somewhat lower figure of 7.48 million for O’Connor’s play against an estimated 14.52 million for the Millie Small programme.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.1% (ITV 53.9%)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace/The Likely Lads: ‘The Other Side of the Fence’), ITV (It’s Tarbuck/Millie in Jamaica/Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: [to be calculated!]

Reception: Considerable…! A mixed but largely positive reaction from the press, while a significant majority of viewers found this a refreshing and entertaining burst of vigorous real life.

Have a gander at the *Telegraph*‘s review heading

The anonymous Times reviewer admired a ‘cleverly timed story, told with documentary precision about rather dreary people’, feeling the thieves’ ‘technique’ kept it interesting and especially admired Lee Montague’s ‘colourful performance’ in enacting O’Connor’s comic characterisation (7 January 1965, p. 7).

In contrast, Philip Purser saw this as a ‘lamentable’ series opener, in the Graham Greene or Michael Frayn vein he clearly disapproves of, whose point about capitalism being crime he saw as being made far more ‘succinctly’ made in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) (Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 1965, p. 13). Purser saw the theft scene as lacking in tension and was bemused that MacTaggart and Smith felt this was ‘the best original script that had ever reached them’ (ibid.).

The crusty-sounding L. Marsland Gander was unhappy to see a play where crime paid, and interestingly assessed it as a depressing part of the television flow:

The regular evening news bulletin which immediately preceded it happened to be full of references to violent crime and thus came as a curtain-raiser. (Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1965, p. 18)

Despite his moralistic reservations, Gander felt the play had real ‘dramatic quality’, while admiring Montague’s performance and ‘subtly effective’ direction by ‘Philip Dudley’ [sic] (ibid.) He did find there was ‘overmuch thieves’ slang’ which he professed to not understand (ibid.). Gander later reported receiving ‘sharply critical’ reaction from his readers about the play’s ‘crudity’ (11 January 1965, p. 15). Gander seemed to have warmed to the play, however, seeing it as evidence of the new series’ ‘vitality’ with it’s smooth melding of filmed and studio videoed sequences – ’25 minutes of the 70 consisted of film shot partly at Byfleet and partly at Ealing’ – capturing the best of both worlds – cinema and theatre (ibid.).

Similarly mixed-towards-positive, Maurice Wiggin saw it as sometimes hilarious, at other times very awkward and clumsy in its social satire, with a ‘general effect […] of extreme cynicism’ created by O’Connor, who proved he ‘can obviously write very well’ (Sunday Times, 10 January 1965, p. 36).

Maurice Richardson found the Hunt Ball sequence a bit ‘preposterous’, but the play had ‘plenty of amateurish pristine zest’ and he liked how the crooks had a ‘curious veneer of slum sophistication’ which made them made more deeply real than ‘the average TV stock types’ (Observer, 10 January 1965, p. 24). He also rather approvingly expected the BBC Board of Governors to receive ‘a pained protest’ from Scotland Yard (ibid.).

New Listener reviewer Frederick Laws mused that O’Connor’s writing about the ‘county set’ revealed him as out of his depth, but enjoyed this play’s ‘cheerful nonsense’, professing it as better than ‘worthy dullness’ (21 January 1965, p. 117). Kari Anderson felt it was authentic and funny, and fulfilled the Wednesday Play’s ‘planners” aim for the strand to be ‘exciting, interesting and up to date’ (Television Today, 14 January 1965, p. 12). Anderson also made a more favourable cinematic comparison than Purser, to the blacklisted Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) (ibid.).

Anderson expressed understandable reservations about the ending scene set in the Mediterranean Riviera with the crooks lapping up their victory, seeing it as ‘false’ (ibid.). There is a shrewd observation of how the observant Black waiter (Harry Tracey) will likely report them and this underlining the play’s point about Archie as being the real crook (ibid.) – not something I’d picked up on first viewing. Montague again received praise, with Anderson wanting colour TV in order to see his ‘gorgeous country gentleman clothes’; as did Eileen Diss’s ‘exceptionally appropriate’ set designs (ibid.).

Tellingly indicating this play’s generally wide appeal, this is the first Wednesday Play where I’ve come across more reviews from outside London than in. Peggie Phillips in the Scotsman was disappointed in the ‘gifted’, formerly BBC Scotland-based James MacTaggart for presiding over a ‘routine’ production whose countryside scenes fell flat, and was bored by its cynicism:

It would be a pity if the MacTaggart touch were lost for the sake of beating up mass audiences for Wednesday night (11 January 1965, p. 4).

An avowedly Christian ‘Andrew’ in Esher News felt censorship needed considering that it ‘was hardly the play to put out at a time when concern was being expressed over the increase in violence in many of our cities’ (15 January 1965, p. 9).

Reviewers actually based in England’s varied cities and large towns felt differently. T.J.D. in the Leicester Mercury felt it a welcome ‘light relief after the stark realism of Z-Cars‘ and ‘relaxing’, in contrast to the police drama’s chilling and brutal scenes of ‘Bus Thuggery’, which they nevertheless praised as gripping (7 January 1965, p. 9). W.D.A. in the Liverpool Echo noted pointedly how ‘nobody was hurt’ in this play and, while finding the County set’s embrace of Archie unconvincing, they were entertained by its freshness; far more than the strand’s new title sequence:

Rather puzzling, however, was the pretentious long-winded visual introduction to the new Wednesday night series.

From the combination of missiles, riot troops, police dealing with sit-downers and racing car crashes I could only conclude that this was meant to indicate that – like a certain newspaper – the series is supposed to be born of the age we live in (7 January 1965, p. 2).

Jim Webber in the Bristol Evening Post was delighted at the lack of typical moralising, admiring Montague and Richard Shaw for his ‘menace’ (9 January 1965, p. 5). Webber also compared it to Rififi, which the BBC showed the next night in superlative scheduling! (ibid.) Laurence Shelley in the Crewe Chronicle used this play’s ‘disturbing’ theme of crime paying to have a dig at the Welfare State, admiring an instance of the BBC being ‘daring’ and ‘carefree’, producing its best satire since T.W.3 (16 January 1965, p. 9).

Capping off a largely very positive non-metroplitan reaction, Bill Smith in the Wolverhampton Express and Star revealed he would far rather have watched a second instalment of the ‘boisterous’ A Tap on the Shoulder than ITV’s ‘very unfunny’ comedy Tank of Fish, which even Milo O’Shea couldn’t save (19 January 1965, p. 13).

In terms of viewer reaction, rather more than usual appeared in the London press and they proportionately matched the BBC audience sample’s response. There were two very positive letters from viewers in the Scottish Sunday Mail (10 January 1965, p. 16), with T. Taylor from Falkirk finding it ‘terrific’, for throwing in ‘Everything but the kitchen sink’ and Mrs M. O. Smith from Leigh praising the acting and staging: ‘Crime, without violence, of course, has seldom been made to appear more attractive.’

In The Birmingham Post, a letter from Mrs. Lilian Jones of West Hagley, Worcestershire gave an archetypal NVLA style rallying cry – naming James Dance MP rather than Whitehouse (12. January 1965, p. 6). This was accompanied by a pompous attack on comfortable prisons, liberalism and ‘lethargy’ penned by someone calling themselves ‘Justice’ from Birmingham 33, which ends in a call, yes, to bring back the birch (ibid.).

The audience response was 9% above that of the 1964 plays we’ve covered. While 25-33% of the sample expressed an indignant, moralistic reaction, the vast majority found it entertaining and valued its topicality. For instance, a G.P.O. Engineer claimed it was a ‘dreadful comment on our way of life, but fair for all that’ (BBC ARR, 1 February 1965, VR/65/11).

There was praise of the ‘spicy, racy, natural and amusing’ action and ‘delightful characterisation’ with a teacher admiring their sauce and saying they ‘deserved to get away’ (ibid.). Viewers were also highly adept at spotting occasional flaws in the production like out-of-sync sound and visuals, but generally liked a slick and pacy production (ibid.).

— With massive thanks as ever to John Williams for facilitating access to much of the press coverage.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.08: ‘First Love’ (BBC1, 16 December 1964)

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

01.08: First Love (BBC One, 16 December 1964) 9:25 – 10:50pm

Directed by Mario Prizek; Written by Ivan Turgenev (novella – 1860), adapted by George Salverson; Produced by Mario Prizek; Designed by Nikolai Solovyov; Music by John Coulson.

This second CBC production in the first Wednesday Play run adapted a novella by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), classed in some press coverage as a ‘short story’. Ontario, Canada-born George Salverson (1916-2005) adapted Turgenev’s narrative, and would later write a CBC Play for Today, The Write-Off (1970).

It’s a second Wednesday Play to be set in 1800s Russia. It concerns a chance encounter in Moscow between Princess Zinaida (Heather Sears) and the younger Vladimir Rostov (Richard Monette); Rostov discovers the difference between infatuation and love.

Heather Sears and Richard Monette in *First Love* (1964)

There have been at least 5-10 different screen versions of First Love, including Paul Joyce and Derek Mahon’s Summer Lightning (1985) for Channel 4 and RTÉ. Turgenev had moderate liberal reformist politics, opposing more radical right or left currents, and was a Westerniser rather than a Slavophile, wanting modernisation of Russia, influenced by his ties to French writer Gustave Flaubert.

Several of the previews emphasised British actor Heather Sears (1935-1994) as the ‘star’ with mention of her appearance in ‘notable’ films like Room at the Top (1959) and Sons and Lovers (1960) (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 16 December 1964, p. 2). A fascinating link with cinema history goes unmentioned: set designer Nikolai Solovyov (1910-1976) had been art director on Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) decades earlier.

The day before, Peter Watkins’s Culloden was broadcast on BBC1, reaching 7.84 million viewers: who were impressed by its trenchant, immersive docudrama, gaining a 67 RI. Watkins and Culloden are crucial to analyse as part of 1960s cultural radicalism, alongside Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and Ken Loach in particular.

Like the previous CBC production and also their two plays shown in the Play for Today slot (1970-71), this could well exist in Canadian archives, but isn’t accessible to me to see, so I am only able to report on the reception.

Audience size: 5.88 million

The TAM rating of 3.12 million households equates to a probable 6.86 million (Television Today, 7 January 1965, p. 19), which is more in line with my expectation of higher TAM figures per se.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48% (ITV 52%)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Likely Lads: ‘Entente Cordiale’/Newsroom; Weather/Rostropovich & Richter Play Beethoven), ITV (It’s Tarbuck/Great Temples of the World 1 – San Marco/Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 55%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: [To be calculated later; lower than average!]

Reception: Fairly scant and mixed reaction from critics; audience very similarly mixed, for once!

Gerald Larner was bumptiously patriotic in decrying this ‘bad’ Canadian production, feeling cheated not to see a BBC-made play: ‘We see enough old films without switching on the Wednesday play’ (Guardian, 17 December 1964, p. 7). This was ‘an old-fashioned cinema-style film’ with cliched flashbacks, echoed whispers of youthful memory, ‘cigarette “ad” background music’ and double exposure of a moonlit garden (ibid.). Larner did appreciate Sears’s performance which captured Zinaida’s underlying ‘nastiness’ and sadism (ibid.)

Lyn Lockwood rather agreed, feeling the short story too slender for a 90 minute play, and a sub-passable production lacked atmosphere (Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1964, p. 15). She concluded that Sears and Monette ‘did their best with the sinful characters [but] it was unrewarding, uphill going all the way’ (ibid.).

Contrarily, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer admitted a ‘lyrical’ play, which kept its symbolism under control unlike Pale Horse, Pale Rider (17 December 1964, p. 14). They praised Monette’s ‘truthful and touching’ performance of the 16 year old boy within an ensemble which ‘maintained the proper elegant grace’ (ibid.). There’s an interesting point that so much “realist” writing from 19th century Russia conveys ‘a society destroying itself through the pursuit of personal satisfactions’, with ‘useless’ people ‘because they have no function’ (ibid.).

Conveying a definite 50/50 split in opinion, John Russell Taylor saw it as ‘a pleasant surprise, managing to evoke the atmosphere of Turgenev’s delicate story with great skill and style’ and appreciated how Sears was given scope to break away from the ‘pure English-rose characterisation’ she’d been stuck with since Room at the Top (The Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In the sole review I’ve located* from outside London, F.G. simply called it ‘an exceptional production’ with Sears being ‘admirably backed by the Canadian cast’ (Belfast Telegraph, 17 December 1964, p. 11).

The audience was somewhat lukewarm, as shown in a RI of 55, seven below the average for all TV dramas in the first half of 1964 and below most Wednesday Plays so far (BBC WAC, VR/64/673). About a third of viewers admired its sensitivity and poignancy, but rather more agreed with the British Council Officer for whom, ‘there was not quite enough meat in this one for my taste’ (ibid.).

While the acting and production were admired, with ‘period authenticity’ achieved, it was too slow paced for some, and

Several viewers indicated that plays of this kind (in their opinion, wordy, dreary and introspective, ‘typically Russian’ in fact) were decidedly less welcome on their screens than contemporary drama.

Reaching the end of our first run of Wednesday Plays, John Russell Taylor’s reflections on the single play itself are striking, in this his final column before handing over to Frederick Laws. Taylor, one of the more perceptive critics of a largely appreciative bunch, asks for more 50 minute and 120-150 minute plays, feeling the Wednesday Play’s 75 minute ‘average’ is ‘an awkward compromise (op. cit.). He argues there is ‘no substitute’ for individual plays, so is dismayed by their reduction in number since BBC2 started:

the fact remains that individual drama spits are the real growing-point of television, the goal for writers, directors, and across without which they are likely to be (and feel) deadeningly confined to routine and hack-work (ibid.)

Interestingly, Sydney Newman admitted to Allan Prior that there had been a shortage of plays due to studio space being used in summer 1964 for pre-recordings to stockpile series like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Finlay’s Casebook (Television Today, 10 December 1964, p. 11). When Prior presses Newman about losing the ‘top prestige drama hour’ Sunday play slot, he says it doesn’t matter, as Wednesday Plays will follow Z Cars and the news (ibid.). He claims he’s on the side and the writer and assures Prior that:

There’ll be no shortage of plays on BBC from now on. (ibid.)

He’d earlier promised 26 75-minute plays on every Wednesday night in the new year. Prior, of the Screen Writers’ Guild, ends with shrewd reflections:

I also believe that Sydney Newman is a better politician than most people give him credit for. He is not new to the Organisation ploy. He may get his way, yet.

We can only wait and see. (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. 🙂

*Many thanks go to John Williams for locating a good proportion of the press coverage for all nine plays discussed so far.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.07: ‘The July Plot’ (BBC1, 9 December 1964)

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

01.07: The July Plot (BBC One, Wednesday 9 December 1964) 9:25 – 11:00pm

Directed by Rudolph Cartier; Written by Roger Manvell, adapted from Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (book – 1964); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Richard Henry; Music uncredited.

Following Mr Douglas, we have another play concerning a curio, a notable footnote in history.

This biographical drama concerns the events of 20-21 July 1944 wherein Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg (John Carson) leads, in league with several Wehrmacht generals, an attempted military coup in Nazi Germany: to be spearheaded by an assassination of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself in Rastenburg, via a bomb planted in a briefcase by von Stauffenberg.

There have been many screen versions of the real life story of Operation Valkyrie – a rebellion sardonically named after Hitler’s favourite opera: the tally perhaps even reaches double figures. This feels like the most expansive Wednesday Play yet in terms of cast size and technical aesthetics: being, I assume, all shot on 16mm film. The main setting is the German War Office in Berlin.

There is a triumphant moment when von Stauffenberg appears in the War Office, and claims that Hitler is dead. Gradually, it becomes unclear whether this is actually so, and eventually the abortive coup is easily quelled. Crucially, the Generals seem to have greater support in Nazi outposts Prague and Paris than in Berlin itself. Several of the ringleaders are summarily executed by the Army, led by the human weathervane General Fromm (Joseph Furst).

The July Plot is adapted from Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel’s non-fiction book of the same title published by Bodley Head on the plot’s 20th anniversary: 20 July 1964 (Bookseller, 5 December 1964, p. 2218). Fraenkel (1897-1986), a Polish Jew, emigrated from Nazi Germany to live in England, and collaborated with Roger Manvell (1909-1987) on many books about Nazi war criminals. Manvell did Ministry of Information work in the Second World War and became a grandee in the overlapping worlds of the media industries and film and communications academia.

Austrian director Rudolph Cartier (1904-1994) also left Nazi Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, arriving in the UK in 1935 after a brief spell in the USA. Cartier’s mother was murdered in the Holocaust. He is best known for directing The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and its sequels and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), but Firebrand (1967) about the 1933 Reichstag fire, Fall of Eagles (1974) and Loyalties (1976), are also highly significant works.

Notably, this play is said to have been introduced by left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg, but, as with The Big Breaker‘s intro, this is not part of the copy I’ve been able to watch.

Rating *** / ****

This wasn’t one I was especially excited to rewatch – after seeing it back in Middlesbrough’s North East Film Archive in 2019 via a copy the BFI posted up North. However, its skilled dramatic pacing and direction meant its merits shone through and it held my attention. Rudolph Cartier keeps us close in on the action and on the faces and reactions of the conspirators as the time passes and the highs of a potential coup are gradually surpassed by the lows of what becomes a washout.

Cartier’s direction ensures this has the tautness and compulsion of a thriller, while also being insightful about the politics, history and human personalities involved. Film cameraman Ken Westbury stays close in on individual faces or perhaps three faces in a room. Notably, it feels just as confined to enclosed rooms as a video-taped studio drama tends to be: this was surely the only way to shoot this narrative and keep it tense, claustrophobic and focus on the human personalities.

Again, I’m gratified at the lack of manipulative musical underscoring here. After a bombastic opening piece of stock music (?) as von Stauffenberg approaches the Fuhrer, we are mercifully spared any telegraphing of our emotions.

We witness this half-baked paper revolution as it dissolves into failure, while also being somewhat ambivalent about their motives. There has been much debate by historians about whether von Stauffenberg was genuinely motivated by Catholic ideals or not. It seems likely that these Generals would never have been able to unseat Himmler, Goring and Goebbels and their varied power bases, even had they succeeded in eliminating Hitler. Their motives seem to be patriotic disgust at military defeats to the Soviet Union rather than necessarily any altruism – however much this drama tries to paint their action as a laudable attempt to save lives which were subsequently lost during the War’s final year.

This play especially conveys the importance of controlling the media: the Nazis, led by propagandist Goebbels consolidated their hold over the media in order to wield total power. The rebellious Generals here have a good plan on paper, but don’t have the organisation or the steadfast allies who will seize the airwaves. It all reminds me of an inverse scenario of scenes in the British-Canadian film Power Play (1978), based on geopolitical ‘realist’ Edward N. Luttwak’s 1968 strategy book Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook.

Emphasising the drama’s biographical nature, there’s a coup-de-documentary at the end when three surviving officers involved in the Operation Valkyrie rebellion are interviewed on camera in Munich by Heinrich Fraenkel in 1964. They each explain how they escaped being killed by the Nazi regime and there’s a concise explanation that the former Captain Fritsche is now a government official in Bonn, Lt. von Kleist is a publisher in Munich and Lt. von Hammerstein is Controller of Radio and Television Programmes in Hamburg. The rebels are now power brokers.

We also see a plaque commemorating the Generals’ rebellion: clearly, part of the West German state’s post-1945 attempt to distance itself from Nazism. Given the scale of the quiet acquiescence of the German people en masse, it is inevitable this fascinating instance of doomed heroism would be used to validate a patriotism for the West German state that is distant from Nazism.

This epilogue, alongside Cartier and Fraenkel’s personal investment in the story, gives this production perhaps more of a complex, thoughtful edge than certain other fictional feature films of this story. History is never over.

Best Performance: JOHN CARSON

Within a very solid ensemble, where character actors like Peter Copley and Cyril Luckham distinguish themselves as the conspirators and John Abineri is a textbook evil Nazi Colonel, it has to be John Carson, as von Stauffenberg.

He conveys the bravery of a man willing to put himself on the line, though not one brave enough to ensure the assassination definitely works through suicide bomb tactics. With his richly honeyed voice – James Mason in an aristocratic finishing school – Carson is ideal as the eye patch-wearing maverick.

Otto John, who was involved in the Generals’ conspiracy, praised Joseph Furst as the vacillating Fromm and attested to Carson’s ‘curious smile round the corner of [his] mouth – it was authentic Stauffenberg’ (Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 1964, p. 11)

Best line: “Hitler was dead, the sky was blue, the sea was warm, like the hand of God in our hair!” (von Stauffenberg)

A line from a raging, burly leather-jacketed conspirator who tries to distance himself from them, saying “All your conspiracy’s on paper” is perhaps the key line. But I do like von Stauffenberg’s boyish grandiosity and buoyant hubris here!

Audience size: 9.31 million

Television Today reports the TAM ‘homes viewing’ figures for this and other recent Wednesday Plays, which differ in their mode of calculation from the BBC’s viewing barometers. Mr Douglas reached 2.17 million homes, Malatesta 1.9 million, while this gripped 4.06 million homes (7 January 1965, p. 19). I was once advised that this should be roughly multiplied by 2.2 for any 1960s-70s broadcasts to come up with an estimated actual viewership number, i.e. an average of 2.2 people per home.

So, Mr Douglas and Malatesta‘s implied TAM audience sizes are 4.77 million and 4.18 million (130,000 and 720,000 lower than the BBC estimates), respectively. The July Plot’s TAM figure is 8.93 million people, 380,000 lower than the BBC number; mildly surprising, as I’ve been given to expect TAM figures to be higher in general. Maybe this applies more to ITV programmes?

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 54.3%

The audience size appears to be the highest so far, but this shade is slightly lower than that for A Crack in the Ice.

The opposition: BBC2 (Top Beat/Amateur Boxing/Soccer: Holland v. England), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Sharon – An account of a “divine healing campaign”/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 75%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 70%

Reception: This play was widely discussed by critics but they were, surprisingly to me at least, mixed-towards-negative, though this is much down to their previous nitpicking over ‘mixing fact and fiction’ and all that silliness. Viewers actually liked this more than any other Wednesday Play thus far…

L. Marsland Gander found it an uncomfortable hybrid ‘haunted by an air of unreality’ and was bemused by Driberg’s introduction (Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 19). Alan Stewart felt the dialogue more fitting to the British officers’ mess than the German High Command (Sunday Post, 13 December 1964, p. 12). T. C. Worsley simply felt it ‘dull’, ‘a sad shambles’ lacking in ‘any atmosphere of place or occasion’ (Financial Times, 16 December 1964, p. 20).

Contrastingly, Peter Black was engrossed in the historical what-ifs summoned by this tense play, which he called ‘stupendous’, inspiring ‘pity and awe’, and identified it as part of Festival, not The Wednesday Play (Daily Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3). He singled out Peter Copley’s performance as conveying ‘the heart of this event’ (ibid.). The Times‘ anonymous reviewer admired how its ‘honest recreation of events’ transcended its dramatic qualities, indeed making it a ‘historical dramatized documentary’, directed by Cartier in his ‘usual, and admirable, sweeping romantic style’ (10 December 1964, p. 15). While I agree almost entirely with anon’s verdict here, they seem somewhat naive about the Generals, calling them ‘a group of humane and honourable men’ (ibid.).

Philip Purser was critical of clunky exposition, and also how ‘theatrical experience’ undermined what was sometimes very ‘affecting’ material (Sunday Telegraph, 13 December 1964, p. 13). Maurice Richardson bemoaned a ‘stiff’ start, but felt it improved and was ‘satisfyingly compulsive’, especially liking Joseph Furst’s and Barry Keegan’s performances, though feeling Carson was too ‘naively boyish’ as Stauffenberg (Observer, 13 December 1964, p. 25). Also among the more positive responses was John Russell Taylor’s, who was engrossed in the facts and admired its ‘ring of authenticity’, noting how the incompetence of the conspirators’ incompetence at key moments is supported ‘by the documents’ (The Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In Belfast, E. McI. felt the year of research resulted in a successful play, though their review’s sign-off is deeply perplexing: ‘Even two decades after, the horrific magic of the name Hitler and the attempts to erase it are still newsworthy’ (Belfast Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 13). R.S. was more critical, feeling ‘few of the characters carried conviction or conveyed the tension inseparable from such an enterprise’, though felt the ending was stronger (Birmingham Evening Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3).

Peter Quince echoed Gander, and anticipated some later criticisms of docudrama, feeling fiction provides more dramatic license and a ‘dramatised documentary’ would also have worked better (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 12 December 1964, p. 5). This is rather stupid, as the play offers just this, as the Times review noted! (op. cit.). Laurence Shelley felt it lacked the ‘conviction of a straight forward documentary treatment’, and he liked the epilogue better than the rest (Chester Chronicle, 19 December 1964, p. 11).

The BBC audience research findings must have greatly cheered producer Peter Luke and Head of Drama Sydney Newman. A RI of 75 exceeded even the previous three weeks’ strong figures, with viewers generally finding it enthralling entertainment and deeply educational (BBC WAC, VR/64/659).

A cliched national stereotype is aired through a viewer’s claim that the plotters’ ‘indecision did not seem to tally with the accepted idea of German efficiency’ (ibid.). While a few found Driberg’s introduction ‘dull’ and not adding anything, ‘more’ welcomed it for ‘putting one in the mood’ for the subsequent drama (ibid.).

A few in the viewing sample were tired of war plays ‘in any shape or form’, but clearly most couldn’t get enough of this one, especially due to its masterly realism:

‘Rudolph Cartier reigns supreme in this Field’, summed up a housewife (ibid.)

Interestingly, The People newspaper’s own reception study saw those within a panel of 500 TV viewers who watched The July Plot award it an average of 8/10, outscoring that week’s Coronation Street (6/10) (20 December 1964, p. 4). A glowing letter from Mrs I. Hall of Northampton praised its ‘magnificent’ acting and her final comment, well: it’s safe to say that TV commissioners have been acting on it since, for series anyway: ‘True life stories always make the best plays, so let’s have more of them’ (Sunday Mirror, 13 December 1964, p. 22).

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. 🙂