The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
Directed by Christopher Morahan; Written by Henry de Montherlant (stage play – 1950), translated by Jonathan Griffin, adapted by Rosemary Hill; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Roger Andrews; Music by Richard Rodney Bennett
This is another historical play for the Wednesday slot, set in Italian Renaissance in the 15th or 16th century, according to different press articles. A freelance general Malatesta plans to murder Pope Paul. I gather this play has, more broadly, been seen as a Nietzschean tale of how the ‘superior’ man has a greater vulnerability than the ‘herd’ man: as represented in the fall of the immoral hero Malatesta.
Patrick Wymark as Malatesta (L), Cyril Shaps as his biographer Porcellio (R)
This play was written in 1943-44 and published in 1946, before being staged in 1950, opening on 19 December at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. This first production was directed by none other than Jean-Louis Barrault – of Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) and La Ronde (1950) fame – who also played Malatesta.
While artistic works can be detached to a degree from the lives of their creators, it’s safe to say that this play’s dramatist had a checkered character, to say the least. Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972) came from an aristocratic Parisian family and wrote some notably misogynistic works, and was a sometime bullfighter and pederast who sexually abused street boys and openly endorsed the Nazi German invasion of France in 1940, urged the French to adapt to it and opposed the Resistance.
The postwar world was so forgiving that this Nazi collaborator was… elected to lifetime membership in the Académie Française in 1960.
Where Mr. Douglas had featured character actors old and new, Malatesta returned to the general policy of enlisting current star name performers to bolster the public profile of discrete plays. Here, Patrick Wymark plays the ruthless titular general, and was primarily known for playing the tycoon John Wilder in Wilfred Greatorex’s The Plane Makers (ATV for ITV, 1963-65), which became the equally vastly successful The Power Game (1965-69). Newspapers took the bait, with most previews emphasising the Wymark Factor; the Rugeley Times notes he is playing ‘a man of power and evil’ (28 November 1964, p. 13). That fine screen actor Cyril Shaps plays ‘a man of learning’ (Daily Mirror, 2 December 1964, p. 18).
Philip Purser stood apart from this, emphasising instead ‘Henry de Montherlant (b. 1896)’ as ‘the Charles de Gaulle of contemporary drama’ with his dialogue having a ‘Gaullist sonority’, which he discerns in The Bachelors (Rediffusion), adapted from a de Montherlant novel (Sunday Telegraph, 29 November 1964, p. 13) and which appeared on ITV the same week as this.
In opposition to Malatesta, ITV had a Norman Swallow documentary about slum clearance in Oldham, The End of a Street centring on the varied human reactions to being removed from the place they were used to.
As this play was junked, we can’t see for ourselves whether the play has a winning ‘Gaullist sonority’ and Frenchness, is a solid, more concise advance on The Borgias or is merely a ripe individualist Nietzschean débâcle…
Audience size: 4.90 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 35.7%
The opposition: BBC2 (Inside the Movie Kingdom/Curtain of Fear – part 6), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/The End of a Street/Professional Wrestling from Beckenham, Kent)
Audience Reaction Index: 68%
Reviewed in publications consulted: 62.5%
Reception: Mixed towards good, with the style of play not being to all critics’ tastes, but finding favour with a slight majority and the acting, as usual, was largely praised.
The Times‘s anonymous reviewer was largely very positive, praising ‘a theatrically extravagant instalment of de Montherlant’s continuous, coldly admiring analysis of pride’ and ‘Mr. Wymark’s huge, colourful performance’, well balanced by John Glyn-Jones, ‘coolly impressive’ as the Pope (3 December 1964, p. 7). Lyn Lockwood said it was the best to date of three de Montherlant TV transfers in 1964, liking an ‘exciting play’, which gave Wymark ‘a splendid part’ and Glyn-Jones also stood out (Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1964, p. 19).
Maurice Richardson was less positive, finding it an odd pick as a TV play: ‘as difficult to get into as an apple-pie bed’; with Wymark ‘ill-at-ease’ and too ‘chubby’ as Malatesta and a total lack of action and incident in the play’s main body (Observer, 6 December 1964, p. 25). Similarly, John Russell Taylor found it ‘woefully lacking in drama’, with the ‘roaring’ Wymark and director Morahan having little ‘idea of building up some interior tension in the play to compensate for its lack of external action’ (Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).
In contrast, Philip Purser loved a play which confirmed de Montherlant’s ‘towering stature’ and which enhanced ‘the already considerable standing of the B.B.C.’s Wednesday series’ (Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 1964, p. 13). He praises all in the cast, especially Shaps and Edward Burnham as like ‘a pair of ageing critics under the heel of a dynamic new editor’, and he feels Wymark could assume the mantle of ‘special hero status’: i.e. heavyweight Olivier stakes (ibid.).
Outside London, A.B. in the Leicester Mercury was mixed, feeling Glyn-Jones was in keeping with the time but Wymark wasn’t enough of a ‘loathsome monster’ (3 December 1964, p. 13). Peggie Phillips expressed almost exactly the same perspective on the performances, adding that Patrick Troughton should have played Rimini, being ‘dark, spleenful and subtle’ (Scotsman, 7 December 1964, p. 8).
While some viewers found their encounter here with the Renaissance Italy era repellent and others were simply bored, generally the play received a very positive reaction from viewers, with great praise for Wymark and the ‘lavish’ settings and costumes (VR/64/642). A Textile Spinner ‘declared’ there was ‘no sense of this being a studio production at all”, which the BBC Audience Research Department saw as setting ‘the final seal of approval on a production of unusual quality’ (ibid.). This is an atypically opinionated anti-studio opinion to hear in this particular time period.
It’s notable how this and the previous two plays all scored in the 67-68 range, showing that the range of historical periods was working, even if the audience sizes for Mr. Douglas and Malatesta were notably smaller than for the contemporary The Big Breaker.
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. 🙂
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
01.05: Mr Douglas (BBC One, Wednesday 25 November 1964) 9:25 – 10:35pm
Directed by Gilchrist Calder; Written by John Prebble; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Peter Seddon
You’ve got the best costume designers from the theatre coming in, set designers, directors [who] were really, by that time realising that television could be a proper art form. They were realising the possibilities of it. As an actor, it was a rather special feeling: it’s always very exciting to work with people who really know their jobs, who are really expert, because it makes a marvellous atmosphere.
Claire Nielson, interview with author, 10 March 2021
This play has a straightforward enough, historically intriguing plot. In London, 1761, a mysterious garrulous, drunken man calling himself Mr Douglas (Michael Goodliffe) turns up and inveigles his way into the household of a wealthy merchant Mr Grant (Laurence Hardy), who has migrated from Scotland. The events take place on Coronation Day, 1761, as the Hanoverian George III takes the British throne. The Grant abode is based in the City of London, the capital’s historic financial centre. “Douglas” boasts of having cuckolded three men before in a previous location and goes onto cuckold the conscientious young James Nash (Gary Bond) who he describes as “good but dull”.
Douglas, after an unpleasant unreciprocated pass at Alison Grant (Claire Nielson) soon sleeps with Alison who consents sexually due to her romantic attachment to the Jacobite cause of 1745. She clearly takes to Douglas as a symbol more than as a man, even given his “big breaker” like worldly advantages over Nash. We learn, after early intimations, that Douglas is this mountebank’s created identity and he is really Charles Stuart, former Prince of Wales: “Bonnie Prince Charlie” himself.
Amid business difficulties with his ship, the doddering softie Grant is compelled by his formidably blunt battleaxe wife Mrs Grant (Jean Anderson) to report Charles’s presence to the authorities. James does this, but, in a rather neat conclusion, he returns without any authoritative nobleman to arrest Charlie. Thus, Charlie is humiliated by official indifference. As a new king is crowned, he is an irrelevant man of the past, lost to drink and regarded as a figure of “comedy”, not as a genuine threat, as Nash reports.
Mr. Douglas‘s writer John Prebble (1915-2004) must stand as perhaps the most significant figure behind history on screen in 1964, advising on BBC2’s Culloden and co-writing the screenplay for Zulu with director Cy Endfield, based on his original article ‘Slaughter in the Sun’ (1958) for the Lilliput magazine. This London born writer and journalist, who also spent many years in Canada, was also widely known for writing several popular Scottish history books, including about the Highland Clearances. Director Gilchrist Calder was to be a regular presence behind The Wednesday Play, helming a further 9 plays from 1965-70 and would later direct 8 episodes of When the Boat Comes In.
It is framed in press previews beforehand as a story ‘based on fact’ (e.g. Coventry Evening Telegraph, 25 November 1964, p. 2). The production clearly aims to appeal to authenticity through costume and set design in studio spaces. The scenes of “Douglas” witnessing the royal crowning in the streets, which might have been highly dramatic and visually striking, are simply recounted as occurring off screen, which implies BBC budgetary restrictions.
Rating ** 3/4 / ****
I find Mr. Douglas so deeply out of time a drama, in all senses. Watching it 60 years on, you feel an incredible distance from a sardonically melodramatic representation of a period 203 years before that. I enjoyed this for being so utterly different, even to the familiar patterns of recent period dramas.
Prebble’s script here is far from being uncritically romantic Scottish nationalist, as some have said of his books. Indeed, he seems to take relish in depicting Bonnie Prince Charlie’s desultory state sixteen years after the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion. He also satirises a rich family of Scottish migrants to London, whose patriarch is a merchant – fortunes are gained and lost via various ships, which is potentially, but not explicitly here, linked to the slave trade.
Alison may be said to embody the romantic Scottish nationalist position, but is shown to be naive, and surrenders her innocence to the worldly man she takes to be the Jacobite hero. She comes across as a blithe, passionate fool. Yet, interestingly, the song she sings, ‘Bonny Moor Hen’, carries resonances of class conflict and feels more in tune with subsequent Jacobinism associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution rather than past Jacobitism.
The play’s small cast of six works effectively; it deserves some credit for its 50:50 gender split. Like others in this Festival/Wednesday Play run, you feel like you fully get to know each character. There’s a steady, perhaps slightly faster editing pace than the average at this moment in TV history: the video studio sequences have a 9.6 ASL, to the brief film sequence’s 4.3.
I do feel that Prebble could have included more ideological depth, in exploring the sources of Grant’s wealth, and further addressing clashing sets of ideas: Catholicism vs. Protestantism, Jacobite traditionalism vs. Jacobin revolution. However, there is a richly theatrical flavour of Georgian London in its Hogarthian harshness and bawdiness.
I don’t quite feel director Gilchrist Calder makes this as visually interesting as it might have been; say, in comparison to A Crack in the Ice and In Camera. It does lack visual artistry and feels at times a worthy object of Troy Kennedy Martin’s scorn in his famous ‘Nats Go Home’s polemic (1964). Its short film sequence, fireworks and an alleyway encounter only slightly enliven the overall texture. The Donald McWhinnie directed version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1977) for BBC1 Play of the Month is rather more visually lively than this is.
One thing that strikes me so often in 1960s TV drama is middle-aged or older men repeatedly calling elder teenaged or grown women in their 20s “child”. We’ve been watching Season 2 of Doctor Who (1964-65) on BluRay and William Hartnell’s Doctor constantly calls Susan and Vicki this, conveying ingrained patriarchal assumptions. I know Alison is meant to be a callow innocent, but she is clearly an adult: indeed, Claire Nielson herself was nearly 27 when she gave birth to her daughter on 3 April 1964, ten days before the filmed sequence in Richmond Park was shot (interview with author, 10 March 2021). The majority of scenes were shot after this in the study. It indicates her subordinate power position within her home that she is called ‘child’, and notably her mother is harder on her than her father.
I agree with Claire Nielson that the production stands up well today. She feels the costume, production design and use of real paintings meant ‘it looked like the bloody 18th century, didn’t it?’ (ibid.) She puts this down to the influx to TV of skilled people from the theatre, alongside Prebble’s ‘daring’ script. (ibid.) Nielson recalls Alison as being a ‘very good part’ and Michael Goodliffe being a ‘very nice person’, but how frightened she was of him when in character as Charlie (ibid.).
Expressive finger-pointing gesture from Goodliffe!
Best Performance: JEAN ANDERSON
Margo Croan does well as servant Elspet, though it is a part coded as minor: being a potential sexual conquest of Charles, and her attraction is summarily dismissed by Mrs Grant. Claire Nielson has a hard job in playing Alison, a limited but crucial role. She imbues her with a convincing idealistic zeal and brilliantly incarnates a highly cosseted and gullible woman. Nielson is an excellent comedic player, and she knows when to underplay and when to enlarge. Her musical performance on a harpsichord and singing the folk song are excellent.
Gary Bond, also in Zulu as Private Cole and the arrogant teacher John Grant in Ted Kotcheff’s remarkable Wake in Fright (1971), has a headstrong force that toughens a part which could easily have been bland. Michael Goodliffe plays the wily, decaying Charlie with ripe, James Mason-esque relish, filling the screen and belting out choice lines with a roguish swagger. It’s a performance of volume very much in line with Gainsborough melodrama or Tod Slaughter horror. Laurence Hardy is splendidly weedy, dominated by his wife.
Indeed, I’m nominating Jean Anderson (1907-2001) this week for her performance as Mrs Grant. Anderson’s performance feels Wildean in its pithy, outspoken force, and fully earns Charles’s wry comment about the Grants’ marriage. I’m not at all surprised to see that this Eastbourne-born actor with Scottish roots was in James Broughton’s The Pleasure Garden (1955) and three Armchair Theatre plays (1961-71).
Best line: “Ha! Wine and brandy mature. Men decay… and rot…” (“Mr Douglas” to Alison)
I also rather like the bonny ‘un’s sourly realist takedown of heroism, when Alison proclaims that “He [Bonnie Prince Charlie] will come again…!” :
Like the Messiah, do you think […] in a paper hat, waving a wooden sword like a play hero with an army of dolls that spare your feelings by bleeding sawdust only…
Audience size: 4.90 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 34.5%
The opposition: BBC2 (International Soccer: England v. Rumania Under-23, second half of match played at Coventry/Curtain of Fear – serial, part 3), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Glad Rag Ball/Wrestling)
Audience Reaction Index: 67%
Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 75%
There were no TV reviews at all directly following this broadcast in the Times or the New Statesman.
Reception: The reception was one of the more starkly divided of the Wednesday Plays we’ve analysed so far.
Interestingly, Gerald Larner reflects on how viewers now want self-identification with characters in TV plays, being less interested in the ‘fate of kings’ (Guardian, 26 November 1964, p. 9). He found it ‘boring’ compared with ‘the scruffy and up to date or the smooth fantasy of the ad-man’s world’ (ibid.) Similarly, Peter Black felt it needed ‘a hotter level of drama than was offered’, being ‘a cool, mild, stylish piece, not interesting enough in its thoughtt [sic] to make up for it’s studied avoidance of the obviously romantic line.’ (Daily Mail, 26 November 1964, p. 3)
Lyn Lockwood diverged, finding the play a ‘fascinating’ speculative journey into past events where ‘by some strange urge to be present at the coronation of George III in 1761’ (Daily Telegraph, 26 November 1964, p. 19). She admired Nielson and Goodliffe as the ‘pockmarked lecher’; acclaiming ‘one of the best costume dramas I can remember seeing on the small screen’, with a ‘superbly ironic climax’ (ibid.)
Maurice Wiggin concurred about this ‘credible’ and ‘beguiling entertainment’, finding Goodliffe ‘superb as the middle-aged, brandy-sozzling, pock-marked, lecherous Charles, with flashes of his young charm and dash but no illusions about his own nature’ (Sunday Times, 29 November 1964, p. 44). Now, I’ve tended to far prefer the other Maurice’s (Richardson) reviews to Wiggin’s, but on this play I am, for once, somewhat less in agreement with Richardson, who called it ‘a total vacuum’, ‘a corny little costume piece’: ‘nearly one for the padded viewing-room’, though he produces one of the funniest endings to a review I’ve read:
The Prince, though commendably unbonny […] wooed the daughter of his unwilling Scots merchant host with all the elan of an exhausted hairdresser. He must never be allowed to come back again.
(Observer, 29 November 1964, p. 25)
John Russell Taylor shrewdly pinpoints the play’s weaknesses, seeing exiled Charlie as believable but the other characters as ‘pasteboard’, and, in contrast to his praise of Philip Saville in the same article:
Gilchrist Calder’s evocation of eighteenth-century London curiously wan and unconvincing, especially in its unfortunate excursions into the (very sparsely) crowded streets and in the absurd stock-shot interlude of some sort of military manoeuvres taking place, allegedly, in one of the London parks.
(The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915)
Outside London, there was a more positive consensus about the play’s merits. Norman Phelps only briefly mentions Mr. Douglas in implied favourable terms (Liverpool Echo, 28 November 1964, p. 8). Hastings Maguinness found it ‘sad, but entertaining’, loving how Goodliffe played Charlie as ‘an absolute degenerate’: shattering the ‘illusions’ of ‘whatever remnants of Jacobite supporters there may be in Northern Ireland’ (Belfast Telegraph, 28 November 1964, p. 8). Similarly, Peggie Philips in Edinburgh found this an ‘enjoyable anti-Jacobite entertainment’ with Goodliffe lacking finesse, but achieving ‘a wonderfully good facial resemblance to a sort of amalgam of eighteenth century Stuart portraits’ (Scotsman, 26 November 1964, p. 3).
As evident in its Reaction Index of 67, the play largely held strong appeal for its quite substantial audience, tapping into an existing taste for period drama, with most in the sample echoing the more positive critics’ praise of its credibility and truth (BBC Audience Research, VR/64/630). As with certain other plays, it was commended as a change from ”kinky’ modern plays’, being ‘message-free, beatnik-free and entertaining’. (ibid.) A few found it slow or disliked Charlie being debunked; amusingly, a librarian is quoted as saying, ‘It didn’t rouse me’. (ibid.) Mostly it was well enjoyed, with Goodliffe ‘a joy to watch’ and Jean Anderson ‘giving her usual sterling performance.’ (ibid.)
— With many thanks to Claire Nielson
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. 🙂
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
01.04: The Big Breaker (BBC One, Wednesday 18 November 1964) 9:25 – 10:55pm
Directed by Charles Jarrott; Written by Alun Richards (adapted from radio play – 1963); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Eileen Diss
We must make our private nightmares public.
Well, there are too many lies. Too many jokes. Too much cosiness. Too many cowards wanting to forget and fools to encourage them in high places.
Elvet (Nigel Stock)
This play concerns corrupt Councillor Wally Cross (Rupert Davies) in a South Wales valleys town, who is the self-styled character that gives the play its title. He makes romantic advances on his nephew Elvet’s (Nigel Stock) wife, Sybil (Daphne Slater). These older generations of the family are juxtaposed with young couple Josie (Meg Wynn Owen) and Nigel (Leonard Cracknell).
The play’s opening is textbook British New Wave. Industry indicated through a pit wheel. A young couple looking out over an entrenched townscape full of largely uniform housing stock. Chapel, steam trains… A sense of possibility and hope in the future, which may involve social mobility through moving out of places like this. “Unlike the Southern counties, we’ve got very long memories down here” concisely summarises the non-metropolitan attachment to history and traditions.
Mrs Cross (Daphne Slater) is a crisp RP combatant. She’s on the ball with noting how marshalling statistics was the new form of UK politics – clearly, referring to the ascendant Harold Wilson here. Dreams and ideals going to routine day to day administration. Changing the social order and making a new world and new people – he regrets that this was not achieved. Or it became too bureaucratic and utilitarian? “We’d got we wanted, but I was nowhere…” is a tellingly individualistic slice of dialogue.
Selfishness, he was never a peasant, but a rough background, easily becomes the capitalist, to paraphrase Lenin’s dictum about peasants becoming capitalists when given land. Wally as the grabbing grasping man who has come up from the “rough” interacting with a refined woman Sybil who can get on her “high horse”. It is clearly Lawrentian but also resembles a less histrionic antecedent of Bernard Hill and Frances de la Tour’s characters in Roy Kendall’s PfT Housewives’ Choice (1976). This feels less contrived than the confrontation in that play and does not involve its violence against property. Kendall’s more agitational approach fits the post-1973 oil crisis times, like John Osborne’s play for the National Theatre, Watch It Come Down (1975-76).
The vast, complex and clear two-handed scenes are deftly, unobtrusively directed by Charles Jarrott so that the words and performances are central. You feel like you know Wally and Sybil deeply after an extraordinarily well written and played near-15-minute scene (15:04-29:53).
Jarrott directed 34 plays for Armchair Theatre (1959-69) and then moved into feature-films, and eventually to US TV movies by the 1990s. It’s telling how Elvet, whose knowing cruelty is dissected by Sybil, suggests she takes a sedative. He had just suggested that they get married to help his political ambitions.
This is a great example of a play where you cannot compartmentalise the personal and political, or the private and public. Elvet sees his personal advancement in the public world as more important than domestic routines, love and security. That he’s played by Nigel Stock brings to mind the volatile masculine refusal at the heart of The Prisoner, but this is a Number Six still besotted with power systems, and manoeuvring for advancement within them, yet to challenge them.
Elvet outlines how corrupt the local Councillor Wally is, having taken a bribe for a building contract, so very much anticipating the Poulson Scandal. Elvet has “got him on toast!” due to possessing Wally’s fraudulent gains, leading to Sybil insightfully identifying how Elvet is only happy when he is hurting somebody.
We hear a Edith Piaf English recording of her 1956 song ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, which Wally puts on the record player in a somewhat self-satisfied and calculated manner. We hear the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ twice, near the start and end.
Cuckolded Elvet is riled by his uncle’s claim that he is adrift from life, which elicits his monologue to Willie Willis (Edward Evans) about how he throttled a bald-headed Japanese soldier during his Second World War service, which has haunted him ever since. He gives the aforementioned private nightmares public speech.
The final act is ‘One Year On’, with Wally having died three months after he’d gone off with Sybil, and perhaps given her some happiness, but this phase seems to figure as more of an interlude in her marriage to Elvet. At the end, the felled Breaker’s nephew is oddly revitalised by joining a discussion group and taking up carpentry, so that he potentially has lethal tools nearby at all times!
We end with the graver half of the young couple Nigel bemoaning the unusual turn of events, but Josie urges him simply to find humour in everything and not be too hard on the elders. Nigel has switched on a Mantovani orchestral light music tune on the vinyl record player. Pointedly, Josie replaces this with the Hollies’ version of Berry Gordy’s Motown song, ‘Do You Love Me’ (1964). In a fine, upbeat ending, Nige is wise enough to be won over and the couple start an impromptu dancefloor in their suburban home.
The play’s writer Alun Richards, born in Caerphilly in 1929 and raised in Pontypridd, was a naval officer turned probation officer, before becoming a Cardiff schoolteacher. Richards was known for depicting what he saw as unattractive masculine worlds; according to obituarist Dai Smith, ‘In Richards’ work, women are the pre-eminent truthtellers’ (Guardian, 2004). He stands as the first of many Wednesday Play and Play for Today dramatists to have been a teacher, and, like Raymond Williams, an adult education tutor at university.
In an interview, Richards outlined his approach with The Big Breaker. A writer must acquire ‘street empathy’ and be localised and accessible:
I hate most of what I see in the London theatre. I’m against the public being taken in. I’m against cruelty and obscurity. What cruelty there is in my play is placed in a pattern. […] I’m for writing plays on a contemporary theme in a conventional manner.’ (Observer, 25 July 1965, p. 18)
Dai Smith notes how Richards was far from a parochial writer, his focus on Wales containing universal insights. He could
see upwards into a social elite, as well as down. This duality, and its then uncovered existence in the literature of Wales, enormously excited Richards, and was the key to the power with which he flailed the social drift, the cultural illusions and the career hypocrisies of postwar Wales in his two finest pieces of work, the short-story collections Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1979). (Guardian, 2004 op cit.)
In his excellent biographical entry for Richards, Daryl Leeworthy refers to his novel Home to an Empty House (1973) as a ‘chorus-like masterpiece’.
The Big Breaker was, originally, a radio play broadcast on BBC Home Service on Saturday 30 September 1963 at 8:30pm, lasting 90 minutes, pretty much the same as the later TV version.
The TV play was recorded in May 1964, and mainly appears to have been multi camera studio, but does have a fair few bookending filmed inserts. Like most other plays I’ve discussed so far, there are is a central star figure who may have drawn the average viewer: following Williams, Fraser and Pinter here is Rupert Davies, part of Davies’s conscious desire to avoid typecasting as Maigret (Daily Mail, 6 January 1965, p.5). He had even appeared on Harry Worth’s comedy programme on 17 November.
Interviewed in the Daily Mirror, Davies extols the qualities of his Wednesday Play part as Wally Cross:
This is a potent play and Wally is very much a character of which Maigret would disapprove. Yet some people, like me, will admire the man’s honesty and frankness, even though they hate what he does.
(18 November 1964, p. 18)
There was a subsequent stage version at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry which opened on 27 July 1965. Benedict Anderson largely liked it. Joseph O’Conor was Wally, Gwen Cherrell was Sybil and Clive Swift ‘makes a good deal of the nephew [Elvet]. He has a way of pronouncing consonants as if he was plucking suction pads off the wall, and the sound adds to the general picture of tortured fanaticism.’ (Guardian, 28 July 1965, p. 7)
Rating: *** 1/2 / ****
I really enjoyed this. It bursts with the recognisable sort of life people would expect of the Wednesday Play-PfT banner, and represents South Wales in a more complex, full manner than any PfT I can think of, barring perhaps Dennis Potter’s Joe’s Ark (1974). The Big Breaker inaugurates this strand’s preoccupation with raw life, vigour, vitality: life as lived in contemporary Britain.
On first viewing early in my PhD, I picked up on its fatalistic view of society and politics, with Josie’s scorn for political parties and call to laugh at everything very much chiming with the New Left CND ethos (whose more serious side Nigel seems to embody). On this second viewing on Sunday 17 November, I discerned more its skilful, solid dramatic structure, vivid dialogue and wonderful acting.
I appreciated how Elvet is deepened as the play goes on, and the deft realism of the final act, a year on. It’s ultimately about Britain’s long-term emotional unbuttoning: opening up and loosening up. It also takes a mature, nuanced view of Wally, making me think of how T. Dan Smith wasn’t simply corrupt, but also significantly improved housing conditions, modernised Newcastle-upon-Tyne – with the majestic Civic Centre the beacon of this – and improved its Arts sector.
Back to the craft: well, this play reminds me in certain respects of Colin Welland’s Kisses At Fifty (1973) and Arthur Hopcraft’s Wednesday Love (1975) in focusing on characters feeling the ageing process who want to break from their routines, or unfulfilling marriages.
Daphne Slater is so good here
Watching this fascinating, assured mainstream-occupying play from sixty years ago, you feel the ways in which life was clearly far worse than it is now, but also certain ways in which it was better. A sense of life getting better for each generation is palpably present in the deftly drawn Nigel and Josie characters, who, for me, resemble the young couple in Julia Jones’s sublimely understated Still Waters (1972).
We’ve already got the sense of the Wednesday Play’s capacious ethos. This play’s worldly intelligence in a contemporary setting is precisely what Play for Today would reliably provide – in a large variety of gradations.
I’d say this play is quite often beautifully written, and it is always played for all its worth, and it makes me want to seek out more of Alun Richards’s writing, prose and TV alike.
Best Performance: Meg Wynn Owen
Now, this was a tough call.
Daphne Slater is tremendously brittle and steely, reminding me of Celia Johnson. Rupert Davies is a formidable windbag, who does some great barefoot dance moves to an exotic, overseas holiday-signifying piece of music, a sequence rightly extolled by Television Today‘s reviewer. Nigel Stock is layered as Elvet. He appears a contemptible schemer initially but then fully conveys how he is “damaged by the world”, and he isn’t exactly… wrong in exposing Wally’s corruption, even if his own motives aren’t unimpeachable.
However, Meg Wynn Owen just about wins out for me; as Josie, hers is a fiery common sense which comprehensibly demolishes the veneration of ideas above all else. I recalled her playing a largely antithetical role in Upstairs, Downstairs as one of the poshest of the upstairs lot. A character brilliantly written about by Helen Wheatley in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock’s edited book, ITV Cultures (2005). Here Owen plays Josie, young adult in a solidly middle-class household, in an upwardly mobile home, but her vivacious Welsh tones bring out Josie’s essential youthfulness.
Best line: “But the gap between what you know and what you don’t do… Amounts to a terrifying amount of cruelty.” (Sybil to Elvet)
Audience size: 7.35 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.4%
The opposition: BBC2 (Hollywood: The FabulousEra/Curtain of Fear serial – part 4/Newsroom & Weather), ITV (News/The Grafters/Professional Wrestling)
Audience Reaction Index: 68%
Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 43%
No reviews in The Times or The Spectator of any TV at all directly following this broadcast.
Reception: Fairly meagre, edging towards positive reaction from the critics. Audiences liked it more!
Lyn Lockwood found it ‘meaty stuff’, with strong plot and counterplot (Daily Telegraph, 19 November 1964, p. 19) Marjorie Norris is more reserved about the play, quite liking it but feeling too much is spelled out, and there are too many changes of emphases, but she loves the performances of Slater and Stock (TelevisionToday, 26 November 1964, p. 12). Norris admires designer Eileen Diss giving the house a ‘weighty ugliness’ (ibid.). John Russell Taylor notably saw it as the most interesting play of November, highlighting Jarrott’s skill as director and Nigel Stock, but also felt its final act unnecessary and not entirely successful (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915).
Outside London, Leicester Mercury reviewer A.B. interestingly notes a Goronwy Rees introduction to the play, emphasising the play’s avoidance of Stage Welshness, but found it ‘hard to believe’ characters and dialogue (19 November 1964, p. 9). In the Scotsman, Peggie Phillips was rather more positive, liking the acting and a ‘robust’ play, though saw it as ‘a far cry from the exotic standard set by Sartre and the Russian’ (23 November 1964, p. 4)
I don’t have time to fully dissect details from the audience research report yet, but it gained a high RI of 68% Exceeding any for The Wednesday Play so far. A testament to Alun Richards’s conventional and astute craft here, which has a kinship with Alun Owen’s work for Armchair Theatre.
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. 🙂
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
01.03: Pale Horse, Pale Rider (BBC One, Wednesday 11 November 1964)
Directed by Eric Till; Written by Fletcher Markle, adapted from Katherine Anne Porter (short novel – 1939); Produced by Eric Till; Script Editor: Doris Mosdell; Music by Harry Freedman
Again, due to personal circumstances, I haven’t had much time to research this one. However, the relative lack of material out there on it means I’ve been able to cover it quite fully…
Suffice to say, it’s another literary adaptation, and like The Write Off (1970) and Reddick (1971) in the Play for Today era, it was included in the Wednesday Play time slot and billed as such in the Radio Times. Like those two plays, the main difference from usual was that this was a Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) production, not made by the BBC.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider was adapted from a short novel by Katherine Anne Porter, published alongside Old Mortality and Noon Wine in 1939, after originally being in the Southern Review in Winter 1938. which Malcolm Bradbury saw as dealing with ‘the break-up of the old order of life in the American South’ (Guardian, 10 January 1964, p. 7). Bradbury sees the American Porter (1890-1980) as a strong writer on individuals in history, with keen perceptions of psychology and sociology. He sees ‘The Old Order’ as the best in the collection he was reviewing. Porter remains probably best known for a popular novel about romance and war, Ship of Fools (1962), which became a Stanley Kramer film in 1965.
Keir Dullea and Joan Hackett in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Again, this is a Wednesday Play which was rooted in history, its BBC audience research report indicating a First World War setting for a ‘story about a girl who catches influenza and is nursed in her delirium by a young army recruit’ (VR/64/600, BBC WAC). Miranda (Joan Hackett) is the ‘girl’ and Adam (Keir Dullea) the recuit. It lasted 85 minutes, starting at 9:40pm, much later than what would become the customary Wednesday Play slot, and 15 minutes later than most Plays for Today.
In terms of the context, it went out after a 10 minute ‘Budget Talk’ by a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, in Harold Wilson’s new Labour government. This followed a General Election where Labour got a vastly smaller majority than in 2024’s general election but a share of the vote that was over ten percent larger. The latter section of Pale Horse, Pale Rider went out against ITV’s Six Wonderful Girls, who apparently were Honor Blackman, Dora Bryan, Cleo Laine, Nadia Nerina, Adele Leigh and Millicent Martin. The previous programme was a Denis Mitchell documentary about how the variety show SWG was made… The Mirror records that Roy Knight, a Durham University lecturer appears in Mitchell’s documentary and ‘talks about the theory and practice of television’ (Ken Irwin, ‘Tonight’s View’, 11 December 1964, p. 18).
Adapter Fletcher Markle is highly notable as the creator of US single drama strand Studio One (CBS, 1948-58). English born director Eric Till became a veteran TV movie helmsman, also turning his hand to an Armchair Theatre play by Simon Raven in 1965 and British films like the James Heriot adaptation It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1976). These talents here combined to dramatise a story set in Denver, Colorado amid the influenza epidemic of 1918, whose title has roots in an African-American spiritual song.
There is some indication that, like the 1970-71 plays, this actually does exist in a Canadian archive, but is likely very expensive to see, and that’s before indeed you begin factoring in the travel and accommodation costs of such a voyage!
Rating: N/A.
Best Performance: N/A.
Best line: N/A.
Audience size: 4.41 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 40.9%
The opposition: BBC2 (Top Beat/Curtain of Fear – serial/Newsroom & Weather/Late Night Line-up), ITV (The DreamMachine/Six Wonderful Girls)
Audience Reaction Index: 54%
Reviewed in publications consulted: 33%
The Times didn’t even have a TV column the morning after this was on.
Reception: Fairly meagre, but goodish, with typical divisions, but rather a lot of admiration for its ambition.
Among the few critics to write about it was Maurice Richardson, who admired its ‘sincere’ attempt ‘to compete with cinema on its own ground’ (Observer, 15 November 1964, p. 24) While he felt there were ‘longueurs’, he praised Hackett’s sensitive performance, the period flavour and how ‘Some of the more ambitious effects, like the death-ride, came off better than I would have believed possible.’ (ibid.) Richardson definitely liked it far more than ‘the contrast between Knight’s eggheaded dogmatism [my emphasis] and showbiz modesty’ that Denis Mitchell’s documentary had revealed (ibid.).
Comparably, John Russell Taylor appreciated its mix of period realism with elaborate dream-sequences:
A refreshing reminder that television can, when it wishes, take wings into fantasy, even on a fairly limited budget, and a considerable tribute to the taste and ingenuity of the director […] Eric Till.
(Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915)
B.L. in the Belfast Telegraph found the play a reminder that it went out on Armistice Day and loved ‘one of the most poignant TV plays I have seen for some time’ (12 November 1964, p. 13). They admired the flashback sequences from Miranda’s perspective, conveying her delirium, while sagely noting that ‘Programmes of this calibre help to counteract the idea that all transatlantic television is limited to Westerns or crime-busting, like the Wednesday “Hong Kong” series on UTV.’ (ibid.)
While receiving a fairly minimal reaction, it clearly satisfied some critics deeply. When FirstLove was shown, the anonymous Times critic referred back to this play as ‘gentle, subtly refined and lyrical’, though saw it as letting its symbolism run out of control (17 December 1964, p. 14).
The audience size, while far below what the Wednesday Play would regularly attract in its heyday, is pretty good, I’d say, for a relatively late starting play at 9.40pm.
Audience reaction was slightly below In Camera overall, but less passionately polarised, I’d say. Feelings largely matched the sort of pejorative this-is-incomprehensible responses that many Plays for Today, especially in 1970-73, garnered. As usual, this sort of response saw the storytelling is weak or unclear, and the play’s theme is assailed by the phrase ‘morbid and dreary’.
Over an hour spent watching the most miserable events that anyone could imagine [my emphasis].
However, a reasonable number felt that it improved after a ‘dull, indeterminate opening sequence’ and some commended it for being different. Notably, 40% of the viewing sample were totally absorbed in the central relationship and there was praise of lead Joan Hackett for her ‘unusually sensitive and mobile face’. While some disliked the ambiguity of whether scenes were reality or dream, other viewers admired the play’s ‘Ingmar Bergman style’ fantasies and artistic camera-work.
Emphasising the play’s mixed yet hardly negligible impact, a reader wrote in to the Observer when the paper asked for the TV ‘item which they had best remembered over the years’:
I didn’t really like it but I can remember it in detail. It somehow managed to convey exactly the feelings one has in high fever.
(George Seddon (ed.), ,’That was gold, that was’, 14 March 1965, p. 23)
And there you have, well, a perennial summation of the Wednesday Play and Play for Today: not always to be enjoyed or ‘liked’, but invariably offering vivid realism.
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. 🙂
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
Due to personal circumstances, this post is incomplete, but it contains the core of my thoughts and some on the play’s reception.
01.02: In Camera (BBC One, Wednesday 4 November 1964)
Directed by Philip Saville; Written by Jean Paul Sartre (play – Huis clos, aka. No Exit, 1944), translated by Stuart Gilbert & adapted for TV by Philip Saville; Produced by ; Designed by Clifford Hatts
Now, this one is actually available to watch on YouTube, so no excuse, watch now, before reading on! :
Off-air video via the play’s screening on BBC Four in the early hours of Monday 28 June 2004
Inez (Jane Arden) is a lesbian postal clerk.
Estelle Rigault (Katherine Woodville) is from Paris, shallow, entitled.
Garcin (Harold Pinter) is a pacifist from Algiers, who stood up for his beliefs amid the Algerian War, and was executed as a result.
This is a primarily video-studio play, but with a few filmed inserts which have a cinema vérité look. At one moment, we hear a familiar track from Miles Davis’s A Kind of Blue (1959), engaging with popular modernist jazz from the Black Atlantic. Estelle and Inez dance to a tango by (I think) Emile Prud’homme Et Son Orchestre.
The play reflects on choice, willpower and acting in order to be. After a massive dramatic zoom-in, Garcin proclaims, “I was a man of action once… I’m dead and done with, a back number.” This associates with him with agonising protagonists Patrick McGoohan performed on TV, whether in Arden and Ibsen adaptations or The Prisoner (1967-68). He later reflects, “I chose the hardest way. A man is what he wills himself to be.” The play piercingly hones in here on our masculine culture’s dominant binary concepts of heroism and cowardice.
There are haunting, double-edged lines like Garcin’s “Men at least can keep their mouths shut.”
I enjoyed what I saw of BBC Four’s recent repeat of The Roads to Freedom (BBC2, 1970), David Turner’s expansive TV drama serial adaptation of Sartre’s trilogy of novels. It had a serious toughness and worldly humour, representing a fine encounter of French and British ideas, aesthetics and tones.
Sartre’s leftwards shift from “apolitical” individualism to non-party socialism, to revolutionary socialism to belief in anarchism and non-statist social movements fits the shifting trends from the 1930s-70s. His experience of German Nazi occupation and French colonialism influenced his emotional and intellectual progression towards a greater political Commitment, as encapsulated in his key late 1940s What Is Literature? Despite denunciations of bourgeois society he largely kept clear of Communism and seems in line with the New Left’s anti-Stalinist socialism with a human face.
There are also 1954 and 1962 film versions, and a 1985 TV version called Vicious Circle, directed by Kenneth Ives and featuring Omar Sharif as Garcin and Jeanne Moreau as Inez.
Rating: *** 1/2 / ****
In Camera is a largely but not totally talky piece, enlivened by Saville’s direction and the performances which enact Sartre’s ideas about action and talk and being. Saville mixes long claustrophobic takes, which are invariably close-ups, two-shots or intricate three-shots – centring on the actors’ faces.
We also see elliptical images from outside, which I’m assuming are memories. Harold Pinter can be a fine actor and he fits in well here, as a man who was called up to fight in the war, but executed for deserting, in a scene we see near the play’s opening.
As I take existentialism to concern making authentic individual decisions and actions, against group conformism, this play faces the fraught complications that inevitably come with other people. Here, this is exacerbated by the three’s enforced confinement with each other. There’s no rationalist optimism or fellow feeling but individual worlds clashing, with sexual attraction and repulsion featuring significantly.
There is a pessimistic coldness in the refusal to entertain the possibility that people might find accommodation with each others’ worlds. It’s colder than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot wherein for now Vladimir and Estragon do have each other. Here, the mention of torture and demonstration of psychological torture bring to mind Pinter’s later play One for the Road (theatre – Lyric Studio Hammersmith, 1984; TV for BBC2’s Summer Season, 1985), a chilling dissection of the language and acts of a totalitarian police state.
It seems well ahead of the general run of British TV, historically, in depicting an open lesbian character. The dead Inez expresses a relatable ennui and alienation amid modernity. While she would likely come across as incredibly haughty to many viewers today, she’s actually a more grounded and often wistful**, emotive presence than Estelle, who’s a spoiled, arrogant posho of the sort presumably familiar in many anti-super rich films today. Estelle’s utterly oblivious sense of her own superiority comes across in her voice and gestures and most pointedly in a line when she is insulting about lowly workers.
I enjoyed and was absorbed by this: its tight human close-ups being highly suited to the TV box in the corner of people’s living rooms. This viewing context enhances moments of jarring discordance, cuts to others outside who are in these people’s heads. Saville marshals them into several evocative framings and, periodically, we see their separate heads confined as the screen draws in with an effect resembling black curtains.
Clifford Hatts’s minimalist white sets also include abstract sculpture and art works, which convey this as more of an ambivalent critique of modernity than Sartre’s stage original, Huis clos.
Just as notably, the original – which I’m unfamiliar with, so please correct me if necessary – featured Garcin as a journalist whose avoidance of military service presumably in the Second World War is perceived more as an act of cowardice. Here, Saville’s TV version makes his stand a more heroic refusal: to be part of France’s colonialist war in Algeria, 1954-62. Sartre’s book of essays, Colonialism and Neocolonialism was published in France in February 1964, so there is some chance Saville and Arden read it…
Despite this, it still does not feel big-P political but rather an abstracted variant on what Raymond Williams termed ‘enclosed room’ TV dramas which explored interpersonal conflicts behind closed doors in domestic settings – with public affairs offstage. Thus, I’m sure this garnered some of the many viewers familiar with Armchair Theatre, which of course had included not just the crucial Alun Owen, but also Harold Pinter himself, a superb dramatist of everyday menace and absurdity.
There’s no surprise that director Philip Saville and his then-wife Jane Arden went to work on The Logic Game for BBC2’s experimental film slot, Six (9 January 1965). This is also an impressive and more eccentric work, which, I dare say, some viewers may find even tougher going than In Camera, but I’d urge people to give it a go!
**Unsurprising to see the luminous Jeanne Moreau cast in the role in 1985, who is utterly superb in Louis Malle’s existentialist crime thriller Lift to the Scaffold (1958), which has a specially composed Miles Davis underscore.
Best Performance: JANE ARDEN
While all three actors are good in the roles, it’s unquestionably got to be Jane Arden, a magnetic force. Her deep intelligence and seriousness comes across in her role of the transgressive lesbian “coward” Inez.
Her voice is powerful, modulated and a stiller, subtle centre against Katherine Woodville’s faster, more shrill delivery and greater movement as Estelle. A self-professed ‘bitch’ who calls Estelle likewise, Arden portrays a complex, intellectual lesbian, who states some of the more tangible messages of the play.
Arden’s voice is grandiloquent (listen to her sardonic pronunciation of “hero!” while languishing back on the bench). Her fringe itself is stark and transfixing and her tired eyes carry a depressive, compelling power. We fully believe we are with her in this eternal Hell of the enclosed room, in camera, with no exit.
Jane Arden, born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire in Wales in 1927 was a major figure in underground British theatre and filmmaking in her collaborations with Jack Bond, which IIRC began with the extraordinary documentary Dali in New York, where she brings a burning intelligence and to reveal Dali’s autocratic and misogynistic tendencies. Arden had studied at RADA in the 1940s, moving into film and TV acting and writing. Clearly, her ultra enunciated RP tones in this play come from her RADA training. I’m assuming she had at least something more of a Welsh accent growing up…I
I’m glad to say that this isn’t the last time we’ll encounter Jane Arden in this story, though it’s a matter of historical regret that she never wrote a Wednesday Play or Play for Today herself. That would have been something remarkable…
Best line: One line for this play…? Nah!
“Forget about the others…? How utterly absurd. I feel you in every pore… Silence clamours in my ears..You can nail up your mouth, you can cut your tongue out, but it doesn’t prevent you being there… Can you stop your thoughts? I can hear them ticking away like a clock: tick, tick, tick… And I’m sure that you can hear mine. It’s no good sulking on your seat. Every sound comes to me soiled because you’ve intercepted it on the way. You’ve even stolen my face. You know it and I don’t. And you’ve stolen her from me. Do you think she’d dare treat me as she does if we were alone?! I’ll never leave you in peace… That would suit your book too well. You’d go on sitting there, like a Yogi in a trance. Even if I didn’t see her, I’d feel her in my bones. Knowing that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress for your benefit. Throwing you smiles that you didn’t even see. Well, I won’t stand for that. I prefer to choose my Hell.” (Inez)
Of course, Garcin’s “Hell is other people” is crucial to the play, but you know that already, so I have opted for a great monologue that Jane Arden delivers with focused intensity, seen behind Harold Pinter, both faces in frame.
Also, “You can’t throttle thoughts with hands!” (Inez)
Audience size: 5.88 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.6%
The opposition: BBC2 (N/A), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Billy Fury Show/Wrestling)
BBC2 figures clearly weren’t being calculated or at least published, even internally, at this point.
Audience Reaction Index: 57%
Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 100%
This figure excludes the Daily Telegraph and New Statesman which did not have TV columns directly following this broadcast. John Williams, who has helped with cuttings, did not uncover any regional press reviews, interestingly.
Reception: The London press reaction was largely positive about most aspects of the play, especially the acting, with most but not all critiquing aspects of the visual style.
The Times‘ anonymous reviewer felt that Arden and Pinter’s characters ‘ground each other savagely away’, seeing Estelle as more an instrument to torture them, but finding Jonathan Harris ‘extremely menacing’ as the Valet (5 November 1964, p. 16). While they found the shots of outside the room/hell less effective, ‘the close groupings and limited movement in front of the camera reinforced the play’s thesis’ (ibid.)
Mary Crozier in the Guardian went even further in admiring a TV ‘event’ which had an appropriate intensity in conveying imprisonment and suffering (5 November 1964, p. 9). Crozier disliked the ‘dark shadows closing in on each side of the face of one of the speakers whenever he of she went into monologue’, and like the Times reviewer she (presumably) wrongly ascribed this to producer Peter Luke rather than director Saville (ibid). She was even more favourable towards the cast, finding Arden ‘very affecting’ (ibid.).
Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail stuck up for the play against the ‘droves’ who telephoned the BBC to grumble’ about In Camera, far preferring its moral seriousness to Frederick Knott’s play Write Me A Murder (BBC2), ‘which toys endlessly and boringly with murder, and not a soul complains’ (6 November 1964, p. 3). I’m impressed by Furlong’s disappointment at BBC2 failing to cater for ‘intelligent minorities’ here (ibid.). She was well ahead of, say, Chris Dunkley in 1982 with his reactionary broadsides against Channel 4.
Maurice Richardson in the Observer noted how the play had been recorded earlier in the year for Festival but held back, and was glad of this ‘glossily superior, genuinely compulsive viewing’ (8 November 1964, p. 25). He admired Pinter’s sensitivity and control and Catherine Woodville’s ‘correct suggestion of fathomless greed’, and the play having the ‘peculiar quality of a tragedy in which the purge is forever withheld’ (ibid.). Like most other reviewers, Richardson disapproved of the ‘totally egregious pseudo-cinematic capers’ which interrupted the actions, but felt that a great play survived these, and quite liked the set design being akin to a modern art gallery (ibid.). He felt this cliffhanger play made Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide 1964 election victory – an actual landslide, not like Biden in 2020 or Trump in 2024 – over Barry Goldwater seem an anticlimax (ibid.).
Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times dissented from the general consensus, finding Sartre’s philosophical insights ‘squalid’ and banal (8 November 1964, p. 44). There is a clear anti-intellectualism underlying Wiggin’s rhetoric:
I don’t know why they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to this bore: there isn’t a market gardener who has not done more for peace – simply by living his fruitful life, in decent silence. I don’t wonder that the gap between our ever-growing population of sensitive squealing intellectuals, and the multitude who do the world’s work – and live its abundant life.
Wiggin far preferred Knott’s BBC2 ‘entertainment’ Write Me a Murder. As we shall see, the audience, in their collective diversity, rejected Wiggin’s simple-minded binary perspective. The Sunday Times subsequently printed one bluff letter in support of Wiggin from Sussex and two correcting his misinterpretation of Sartre’s play and ‘message’: David Cooper in Oxford and the imperious Mrs Angela M. Aspinwall of WC1, London (15 November 1964, p. 10).
Marjorie Norris in Television Today was, largely, an outlier the opposite way to Wiggin, loving Saville’s three-dimensional visual direction and claiming it seemed Sartre’s play had been written for television, though even she found some fault with the fragmentary glimpses outside the room (12 November 1964, p. 12). Norris liked Hatts’s set design and found it ‘impossible to distinguish’ between the actors in their excellence, admiring Jane Arden’s ‘tortured eyes’ and Pinter as ‘a sensitive (and good looking) actor’ (ibid.). Norris faults a 30-second segment around 10:30pm where she heard a backstage ‘racket’ which shouldn’t have been there, but the quality of the acting forced her to ignore it (ibid.).
John Russell Taylor saw it as the ‘event of the month in drama’, acclaiming Saville as the ‘nearest thing we have – or are probably likely to get – to an Orson Welles of the small screen’, being fascinated to see whether he would succeed or fail (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915). While Taylor doesn’t especially like Sartre’s play – ‘intellectual grand guignol, ingeniously put together but terribly thin and mechanical once one sees how it works’ – he felt Saville did a ‘brilliant job’, even admiring most of the flashbacks, as they are so subliminal (ibid.). Taylor’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:
And it was, surely, a piece of self-discipline akin to genius on Philip Saville’s part to refrain until just before the end from doing the obvious, inevitable thing, shooting the three on their separate couches from immediately above, so that when at last the shot appeared it came with full dramatic force instead of looking like just another piece of applied technical bravura. (ibid.)
In line with all other critics bar the leaden Wiggin, Taylor extols the acting, highlighting both Arden and Pinter’s status as playwrights.
The BBC audience research report (VR/64/589) is a fascinating document which speaks to the emotional intelligence of a majority of viewers at the time, and their varied personal responses.
‘I am quite sure I shall never forget it, but I certainly didn’t like it.’ (Housewife)
‘Really way out. I just had to watch it. One could feel the torment of mind portrayed.’ (Caretaker [in the year of the Pinter film!])
‘Just like a cross-section of clients in my waiting-room. Quite brilliantly written to make the point that “hell is other people”.’ (Social Worker)
None of the comments reported suggest neutrality or indifference. These are strong reactions: 47% either A+/A in the ratings and 30% the lower C/C- ratings with just 23% in the middle with a B.
If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you. 🙂
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC drama series, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
01.01: A Crack in the Ice (BBC One, Wednesday 28 October 1964, 9:25pm – 10:50pm)
Directed by Ronald Eyre; Written by Ronald Eyre, dramatising Nikolai Leskov (short story – ‘The Sentry’, 1889), translated by David Magarshack; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Susan Spence; Music by Norman Kay.
Near the start of the play’s very mobile opening shot.
This first entry in the Wednesday Play, or at least which some think is the first (!), is a dramatisation of a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895).1 And, unlike Catch As Catch Can, this one exists, so I can write about my thoughts and feelings from an informed, inevitably partial way. For all plays I can watch – or read an existing script of – I adopt a reductive Halliwell’s Film Guide-esque rating system, which may nevertheless be useful to capture my responses in relation to critics and audiences.
Leskov’s original short story, dating from 1889, was first published in the UK in the early 1920s. It concerns what is, on the surface, a good deed, but which opens up a can of worms in the heavily stratified Tsarist Russia of 1839 under Nicholas I. Private Polkinoff (Derek Newark here) is a sentry in the imperial Russian Army, guarding the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. One night, a drunken Peasant (Ray Mort) unwisely walks across an iced-over lake and falls through a crack in the ice.
Polkinoff saves the unnamed Peasant, but, in doing so, deserts his post and, amid the recriminations, is incarcerated in solitary confinement. Lt. Col. Svinin (Bill Fraser) fears that the social disgrace of what he perceives as Polnikoff’s temporary desertion and neglect of his duty will mean the end of his regiment, given the autocratic Tsar Nicholas’s volatility and current preoccupation with maintaining high levels of security.
Duplicitous Lt. Kirov (Jack May) pretends that he instead performed the deed and brazenly walks away with a medal, saving the Ismailovsky Regiment’s skin, while the unfortunate Polnikoff remains confined for four days. Svinin is smugly delighted with the providential way things have turned out, yet cruelly insists that Polnikoff receive the birch 200 times, and forces his underling in the officer class Captain Miller (Jack Maxwell) to oversee this process.
A coda, ambiguously affirming the worldly here-and-now over lofty ideals, features Polnikoff larking around with his comrades and uninterested in the liberal Miller’s desire that he receives a due reward for his heroic good deed.
Rating: *** / ****
While A Crack in the Ice felt slightly overextended, I enjoyed what was a pungent and intellectually absorbing brew. There’s a clear indictment of arbitrary power and hierarchy that seems especially absurd when dramatised. Lt. Col. Svinin sets out the importance of rank late on: Tsar, General, Lt. Colonel, Captain, Private…
Leskov’s politics feel elliptical and carefully submerged in a philosophical tale which allows viewers to take different interpretations. We end with Postnikov happily enjoying the material things of life, simply glad to be alive, whereas the one man with a liberal conscience, Captain Miller, wants a fairer outcome. The strange labyrinthine muddle of Russia’s various institutions (army, police, church, monarchy) produces an outcome which isn’t exactly good, but nor is it as bad as it could have been…
Therefore, while John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (theatre – Royal Court, 1959; TV – Granada for ITV Play of the Week, 1961),John McGrath’s The Bofors Gun (theatre – 1966; film – 1968) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) all initially came to mind, it communicates more stoicism and ambiguity than those broadly anti-war pieces. Polkinoff, soundly played by Newark, ends up as either a paragon of grounded, materialistic common sense, or, a haplessly gullible and deferential pawn in powerful people’s game, depending on your perspective…
Director Ronald Eyre, one of many at the BBC in the 1960s-70s who moved seamlessly between theatre and television, opts for many facial close ups, filling the small screen. There are some deft filmed inserts, amid a mainly multicamera studio production on video-tape. We see an array of art works attributed to the enigmatic ‘Signum’2 which brilliantly add an extra dimension, steering our emotional responses and directing us to imagine a larger canvas than the BBC studio could offer.
Richard Hurndall gives a clear RP voice over, 19 years before some expert pineapple munching when playing the First Doctor in Doctor Who. Hurndall’s authoritative narrative voice initially has the ring of a BBC newsreader or a sponsored documentary voice-over, while being an attempt to retain some of Leskov’s literary flavour.
There’s more music than a typical contemporary realist studio-based Play for Today, but less, say, than Doctor Who of this era, perhaps implying that the military sounding tunes are necessary to anchor the audience in familiar ground. However, the relative silence keeps the focus on the words and, in a significant moment, the sound of Church bells. Production design is by one of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today’s most prolific designers, Susan Spence, who does a solid job in creating spaces which reek of rank and privilege.
Eyre’s experimentalism in superimposing Signum’s art (left) alongside the moving images of Pte. Postnikov (right).
Significantly, all 18 performers in the cast are male. That means that precisely no women performers have appeared in the two plays in our story so far. It is realistic for this narrative to be performed by a hermetically sealed masculine group, given its portrayal of presumably male dominated institutions at this time in Russia. While I’d personally liked to have seen some women as part of this story, with its piercing of the bubble of “heroism”, we can admire how this drama exposes the closed world of men in power and the ridiculousness of hierarchy and delusions of grandeur.
Best performance: BILL FRASER
There’s some great ornery harrumphing from the inimitable Michael Hordern as General Kokoshkin, but the honours have to go to Bill Fraser, here, who plays a stolid, preening and cantankerously cunning man, obsessed with his Regiment’s standing in Russia’s social pecking order, but even more preoccupied with his own status. He regards a portrait of himself near the start and later delivers a stern speech rebuking the liberal Captain Miller (James Maxwell), waffling about “Providence” and “the greatest good for the greatest number”, enabling Miller to chide his inconsistency in citing an English liberal philosopher. Suffice to say, Fraser nails Svinin’s pompous rhetoric, entitled inhabitation of his military uniform and clodhopping political manoeuvring. Fraser would play even greater parts in Trevor Griffiths’s Plays for Today All Good Men (1974) & Comedians (1979).
Best line: “Whatever is best for the country is true, whatever weakens it is a lie.” (Lt. Col. Svinin, speaking for many in 2024 too, sadly)
Audience size: 7.35 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: 55.6%
The opposition: BBC2 (Peter Nero – pianist-composer/Curtain of Fear – Victor Canning serial thriller/Newsroom), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Goldwater. Man of the West – report by John Freeman/Professional Wrestling)
Audience Reaction Index: 64%
Reviewed in publications consulted: 78%
Reception: This was heralded as a ‘Russian play for the intelligent’ (Liverpool Daily Press, 24 October 1964, p.6). Yet, in an interview for, significantly, the Mirror, Ronald Eyre drew links with Sid Colin’s sitcom The Army Game (Granada for ITV, 1957-61), which made Bill Fraser a household name through playing Sgt. Maj. Claude Snudge who marshalled a group of post-Second World War National Service recruits. Eyre is quoted: ‘Instead of just dealing with Bootsies and Snudges in a hut, this is the full Army Game from top to bottom – and it has a lot much punch’ (Jack Bell, Daily Mirror, 28 October 1964, p. 18). There’s also focus on how Fraser was cast after playing a sinister Nazi SS chief in a play at the Mermaid (ibid.).
After the play’s broadcast, Marjorie Norris admired its detail and techniques, the performances, Signum’s Picasso-like drawings and Spence’s designs of the Chief of Police’s quarters for their ‘Byzantine splendour’. However, she felt the actors were rarely ‘given a chance to act with each other’, and disliked the close ups and voice-overs of characters’ interior thoughts (Television Today, 5 November 1964, p. 14). More critical still was Lyn Lockwood, who thought it had several ‘excellent passages’ and strong performances, but found Eyre’s experimental approach ‘somewhat cumbersome’, leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination (Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1964, p. 19).
Signum art as used during Postnikov’s imagining that he will end up in Siberia.
However, the London press response was broadly favourable. An anonymous Times reviewer felt Bill Fraser ‘combined richness with restraint’ and admired Ray Mort’s ‘genuinely touching little performance’, while admiring Eyre’s adventurous and kinetic style and, again, Signum’s ‘sometimes sensationally vigorous’ drawings (29 October 1964, p. 5). John Russell Taylor found the play initially slow to get going, but felt it became ‘the best, most intelligent and gripping piece of television drama we have had for a long time’ (The Listener, 5 November 1964, p. 735). Taylor loved its particularity and universality, and how the interview between the liberal Captain and the bishop (Peter Madden) was ‘a model of civilized irony’, with both of them ‘right but according to completely incompatible standards’ (ibid.).
Philip Purser thoroughly enjoyed a ‘funny, ironic, consistently entertaining’ play which was ‘universally true in its description of officer-man relationships and particularly true in its depiction of emergent liberal humanism.’ (Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 1964, p. 13). A briefer mention by Kenneth Baily in The People claims it started the new series ‘so splendidly’ (1 November 1964, p. 4).
Even more fulsome were Maurice Richardson and John Holmstrom. The former found it ‘electrifying’, being delighted to see Leskov’s ‘satirical masterpiece’ on TV, with the key action scene ‘a surprisingly successful piece of cinematic realism’ and the acting ‘magnificent’ (Observer, 1 November 1964, p. 24). The latter thought it ‘remarkable’, with Hordern giving one of ‘his finest shaggy-vulture impersonations, an insanely awesome mass of throat-clearings, back-humpings and bouncings on the balls of the feet’ (New Statesman, 6 November 1964, p. 711). Presciently, Holmstrom acclaims Fraser’s ‘steadily growing depth and finesse’ and predicts that Fraser ‘will be seen in five or ten years’ time not as a comic but as one of our great straight actors.’ (ibid.)
In the regional press, A.A.S. in the Birmingham Evening Mail enjoyed it, emphasising Fraser’s ‘rich, wise and amusing’ performance’ (29 October 1964, p. 3). However, further up North, John Tilley was bored, finding the dialogue ‘poor in its attempt to illustrate the profound banality of the military mind’ (Newcastle Journal, 31 October 1964, p. 9).
In the USA, reviewer ‘Rich.’ was in line with the general positive consensus, feeling it was ‘obviously intended for the more thoughtful viewer, though not the longhair type’, which augured ‘well for the skein’ (Variety, 11 November 1964, p. 38). ‘If this series of adaptations and new works by established writers can keep to this standard BBC drama will deserve nosegays’ (ibid). Notably, Philip Purser had felt this play brought to ‘full maturity’ the policy of the previous Festival strand, considering the BBC’s likely abandonment of Festival next year ‘typical BBC hara-kiri’ (op. cit.).
The audience generally liked it, with its 64 RI higher than the average of 62 for TV drama in the first half of 1964. While there was criticism of the still images and, typically for a play of non-British origin, ‘Quite a number found the theme unpleasant and depressing’, more of the large audience commended ‘something different at last’ and ‘an intellectual treat’ (BBC audience research report, VR/64/571). A teacher gave a perceptive extended paean:
The BBC is to be congratulated on the choice of this play. It is a courageous expose of the issues that torment men and bedevil their lives. Greed, ambition, corruption in high places, the pitilessness of officialdom and the ineffectualness of liberalism against closed minds, self interest, fear and helpless ignorance were laid bare without cant or sentimentalism or even more surprisingly, without undue cynicism.
The general length and depth of the responses in this 1960s report far exceeds what I have been used to analysing in many of the 1970s-80s ones. However, I can’t help but feel that more people today would agree with the viewer who said, ‘I would forfeit the whole series of Perry Mason for one play of this calibre’? than this equally positive response from a Dental Surgery Assistant: ‘A pleasant change. No women! No sex! No kitchen sink! No long-haired youth or pop music, therefore to me – marvellous!’ (ibid.).
Overall, A Crack in the Ice was clearly a successful opening to a run of plays intangibly poised between the Festival and Wednesday Play modes. While not quite the scale of ratings success of the adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector (BBC TV, 9 February 1958)3, featuring Tony Hancock as Hlestakov, it did easily defeat ITV opposition: emphasising, again, the democratic wisdom of using established radio or TV stars to make European plays more palatable to a wide audience.4
If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you. 🙂
This is the first billed in the Radio Times as a ‘Wednesday Play’, so is good enough for me. However, clearly the concept and identity of the strand would fully be established in 1965 when Sydney Newman assigned the producer James MacTaggart to it. Clearly, A Crack in the Ice is more akin to Peter Luke’s previous stage adaptations for Festival (BBC1, 1963-64) ↩︎
See this Alan Bromly-directed version of The Government Inspector on YouTube here↩︎
See Billy Smart’s excellent journal article here for a full account of the BBC’s rhetoric in promoting Television World Theatre and Festival, and an account of critical and audience responses: ‘Drama for People ‘in the know’: Television World Theatre (BBC 1957-1959) and Festival (BBC 1963-1964)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37:1, pp. 34-48. ↩︎
The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC single drama strand, following ITV’s lead with Armchair Theatre (ABC & Thames, 1956-74) in amplifying working-class voices. Canadian migrant Sydney Newman, from a working-class background, spearheaded both initiatives. After completing a Ph.D. on The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (BBC1, 1970-84), I feel it’s an apt time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.
This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without full textual analysis.
Unofficial 01: Catch As Catch Can (BBC One, 30 September 1964)
Directed by David Benedictus; Written by Jean Anouilh (play: La Foire d’empoigne, 1962); Translated by Lucienne Hill
We start with a play of questionable status as a ‘Wednesday Play’, as such. The IMDb regards it as the first, but this enigmatic play wasn’t even scheduled in the Radio Times, let alone billed as a Wednesday Play. However, it was shown on Wednesday night at 9:45pm on BBC1, broadly speaking, in the slot that would become home.
This 80-minute TV play, set during the Hundred Days war (1815), was adapted from a French stage original by Jean Anouilh (1910-87), the major Bordeaux-born playwright, known for tragedies and comedies, and for being tangentially in touch with absurdist and existentialist currents. Under its French title, La Foire d’empoigne, it was first performed at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 20 October 1962, directed by the author and Roland Piétri. Anouilh famously adapted Sophocles’s Antigone (1944) and his plays Becket and The Waltz of the Torreadors were filmed in the 1960s.
It can tentatively be argued that Anouilh’s apparent earlier political ambiguity and non-alignment and later conservative disillusionment with post-War developments bears a strong relation to a loose grouping of far-from-committed Play for Today dramatists who exceeded the likes of Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths and John McGrath in number.
My main source of information about Catch As Catch Can are contemporary reviews in the Times, Sunday Times and the BBC’s magazine, the Listener. Notably, this play was a late replacement for Clive Exton’s The Bone Yard – which we’ll come to later. John Russell Taylor claimed that Exton’s play’s indefinite postponement was due to ‘some supposed similarity’ with a legal case concerning the police officer DS Harold Challenor (1922-2008) (‘Television of the Month: Drama’, The Listener, 8 October 1964, p. 561). Interestingly, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer’s comments indicate a clear expectation – already – that this time-slot would host the ‘sour’:
Those disappointed at the loss of Mr. Exton’s uproariously sour attention to our age were probably consoled by M. Anouilh’s no less sour, extremely polished theatricality
(Anon, ‘A NAPOLEONIC EMBROIDERY’, Times, 1 October 1964, p. 15)
This critic seems generally an Anouilh sceptic, disliking his ‘high-handed’ way in treating history as malleable putty, but admires this particular TV production. Typically for a TV critic, as Katie Crosson has shrewdly argued, they see sentimentality as a cardinal sin in plays: ‘this hides an enormous sentimentality behind a vigorously savage treatment of almost everybody except its noble hero, and salts the whole with wit.’ This suggests a courtly, cerebral rhetoric, matching Dickensian attitudes to the various characters.
Lucienne Hill’s translation is ‘stylish, epigrammatic’, helped also by ‘stylishly stagey acting’ (Times ibid.). In line with Richard Hewett’s (2017) historical findings about TV acting, actors’ stage training still remained a dominant influence on performances in 1964, despite the steady growth in scaled down playing. Notably, Kenneth Williams plays Napoleon here – ‘unlikely’ casting for the Times‘ critic – but he ‘gives a fine theatrical glitter’ to a ‘theatrical rascal’, while another major stage and cinema actor Robert Helpmann is a quieter and sardonic foil as Fouché. The Times critic also admires the performances of David Horne as King Louis XVIII and Simon Ward as ‘the young idealist in a corrupt world’.
Thiscritic admires the ‘touching sincerity’ in Ward’s performance and his avoidance of the temptation to send-up the role: this earnestness effectively counterpointed the sharp treatment of the other characters. Maurice Wiggin, the Sunday Times‘ trustily crusty critic of early Play for Today, felt this play ‘thin’, with the characters lacking in life except Horne as Louis, who ‘spoke the lines as if he had just thought of them: a ripe performance.’ (”Luvvable cockney sparrers”, Sunday Times, 4 October 1964, p. 44).
John Russell Taylor disagreed about the play, admiring its ‘elegance and glitter’, and the performances, finding Horne’s performance ‘much straighter’ than the ‘unashamedly theatrical’ Helpmann and Williams – who worked ‘rather well in the context’ (Listener op. cit.). For Taylor, Horne’s restraint unbalanced the play somewhat.
However, JRT liked how even this weaker Anouilh play made history ‘homey’ by ‘cutting the great down to relatively domestic proportions’: chiefly, by presenting the Hundred Days conflict as ‘the flimsy but sometimes diverting charade it is’. For me, this indicates it might just have been a forerunner of the bathetic Sellar and Yeatman-esque satire in Keith Dewhurst’s Churchill’s People instalment The Great Alfred (1975) and Mike Stott’s Play for Today Soldiers Talking, Cleanly (1978), whose earthy humour demystifies British army life.
Compared to many Wednesday Plays that await us, Catch As Catch Can‘s audience was fairly low, according to BBC Daily Viewing Barometer: with a 6.3% share of the UK population. It was notably less popular in London (4%) and more watched in the Midlands and Wales (9%) and Scotland and Northern Ireland (8% each).
Director David Benedictus (1938-2023) had a novel adapted by Francis Ford Coppola – You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) – and wrote an interesting sounding short film The Beach (1966), a TV musical for the 1926 General Strike’s sixtieth anniversary, What a Way to Run a Revolution (1986) and adapted C.A. Jones’s novel Little Sir Nicholas (1990) for TV. I watched this last period drama myself when a child. He had previously directed three episodes for Cold War anthology thriller strand Moonstrike (1963) and would return to The Wednesday Play.
It’s fascinating that our Wednesday Play story begins with the unlikely figure of Kenneth Williams, three years before playing Citizen Camembert in Carry on Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). Williams had appeared in Peter Brook’s film of The Beggar’s Opera (1953), TV versions of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and W. Somerset Maugham, and Orson Welles’s self-reflexive Moby Dick Rehearsed (1955), alongside Patrick McGoohan, based on the staged Moby Dick, so he was yet to be entirely pigeonholed. When I watched Carry on Nurse (1959), an affable film, Charles Hawtrey and Williams stood out as the most skilled comic performers, conveying great depths of idiosyncratic eccentricity.
Now, imagine Williams as Napoleon, no less; forgive me if I don’t quite trust the verdict of Mozza Wiggin… It’s our loss that we cannot watch this and judge for ourselves, sixty years to the day.
We can at least see Williams in role as Napoleon in this photo from the Listener, with Robert Helpmann (left).
Audience Size: 3.09 million
Share of overall TV viewing audience: N/A. (Don’t have BBC2 or ITV figures)
The opposition: BBC2 (The Danny Kaye Show), ITV (A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On / Professional Wrestling)
BBC Audience Reaction Index (RI %): N/A.
Reviewed in publications consulted: 60%
If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you. 🙂
Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.
The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)
He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)
Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.
Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t KnowYou Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).
Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.
While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall andRise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).
Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.
I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.
These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).
There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).
There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.
The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.
The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and ThisCountry (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).
The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?
There’s an astute reference to how much TheOffice (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).
The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.
Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.
It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.
Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.
As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, DanielBlake: none of this fitted to the individual.
Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.
It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”
Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.
Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.
The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.
Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.
To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.
This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.
Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to aKnave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.
Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.
Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.
Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?
There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.
The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.
I have just had a piece published here that makes the case for the BBC as a honest broker and guardian of pluralism, able to cut across binary divides of left/right, Leave/Remain, Labour/Tory and provide a public sphere for all. A subscription model – which is currently unfeasible, as it even its supporters admit – would destroy opportunities for intra-cultural communication and understanding in the UK.
Within the constraints of that piece, there was no space to include crucial additional arguments about the regions and nations of the UK and the reforms that the BBC is crying out for in terms of how it is governed. So, here they are, among other no doubt Utopian ramblings!
BBC PURPOSES #1: a political honest broker?
Firstly, what is the licence fee? Author of a Dictionary of Journalism, Tony Harcup (2014) defines it as the means ‘to fund the BBC as an independent entity’ and as a ‘mechanism to provide public funding for the main public service broadcaster without drawing on direct taxation or coming under the direct control of the government of the day.’
Much of the political left feels, erroneously, that it the BBC is directly controlled by the government of the day. However, its present animus is at least partly well-grounded: the BBC did little to challenge lies spread by the right-wing press, uncritically relaying untruths in how it reported the events of 9 December 2019 when Matt Hancock was reported as being “punched” by punched by a Labour protester who did not such thing. Tweets were deleted, but the memory remains, to paraphrase Metallica featuring Patti Smith… The BBC remains shackled by its own dependence on the government to renew the licence fee every ten years.
While it seems true that BBC may have not fully understood Brexit (1) and has displayed unconscious ‘Remain’ bias, claims that the BBC is biased towards the “liberal-left” do not bear close examination. For every Adam Curtis or Jonathan Meades documentary, there have been several David Starkey documentaries or cantankerous guest-spots and more than several hundred hours of John Humphrys… (2) The MoralMaze and Question Time panel composition repeatedly overemphasises right-wing commentators.
It takes chutzpah for the Cummingsite Tories to vandalise a BBC which has granted Brexit spokespeople significantly more airtime than the Green Party; a recent count gives Farage a total of nine more Question Time appearances than Greens’ Caroline Lucas MP, who has been repeatedly elected to the House of Commons since 2010. The BBC has done immeasurably more to popularise science than Cummings’s rambling blog missives. His boss Johnson should be grateful to the Corporation for how it popularised his performed “loveable buffoon” persona via no fewer than seven Have I Got News for You (BBC1) appearances.
As the likes of Steven Barnett and Andrew Curry (1994) and Tom Mills (2016) have documented, the Director-Generals Michael Checkland and John Birt remodelled the previous pluralistic, ‘One Nation’ paternalism of the BBC into a more market-driven, business-fixated neoliberal institution. It had a populist obsession with programmes’ headline ratings in place of their impacts. However, it remains a public institution which contains within it the potential to be fairer to those of all political views in Britain, whether nationalist, internationalist, left-wing, right-wing or liberal. Or even green, heaven forbid we fail to listen to a global scientific consensus.
Should we see any merits in a putative subscription model? Well, to reconcile differing levels of public commitment to the BBC, we might consider a system of levy payments for ‘public media’ after the recent German model. To try to accommodate the pro-subscription perspectives, maybe an element of gradation in payment could be considered, in addition to some reductions and inceases depending on council tax banding. For instance, BBC “partisans” could pay £35 a month, to get all BBC output and access to more archival material, encompassing iPlayer, BritBox, BBC Sounds and the incredible Box of Broadcasts, only available currently to University card holders. Then, BBC “objectors” could opt to pay £3.50 a month to get the basic channels: BBC1 and BBC2. BBC “fence-sitters” could keep paying the current £12 monthly rate to maintain access to iPlayer, all radio and TV channels and the unwieldy BBC Sounds.
I will leave whether this would work out financially to the BBC’s (understandably many) accountants – but it seems to me that it might be the only model that could feasibly accommodate an element of ‘choice’ but which might financially enable the BBC to maintain its current level of services and role as the national broadcaster. Even this reform would be made impractical by the fact that most homes have Freeview, and this model would require the sort of consistent broadband access across the UK which does not exist and is unlikely to for a long time. Ironic, considering how Labour was planning free universal broadband!
Better, surely, to maintain a straightforward, universally accessible utility. While certain rabid BBC critics may often shout the loudest, they just expose themselves as aggressive, cultural wreckers. The more intelligent of them may call themselves “sovereign consumers” but in their cussed individuality they seem not to grasp the concept and reality of the ‘public’, and thus do not appreciate a national broadcaster which can cater to myriad audiences. The whole of the public should be the BBC’s masters, not Tony Hall or successor, and certainly not Boris Johnson.
BBC PURPOSES #2: Education and Programming
Furthermore, the BBC also has a vastly important role in the field of education. I propose wider public access to existing services like Learning on Screen. The BBC should have a greater role in the classroom from secondary level upwards; why not, when it has produced not just BBC Bitesize but programming as responsible and challenging as The Ascent of Man (BBC2, 1973), Muslims Like Us (BBC2, 2016), its Open University output since the early 1970s and BBC Bristol’s Natural History Unit’s programmes with David Attenborough?
The last decade has seen big-hitting dramas like Line of Duty (2012- ) and Call the Midwife (2012- ), comedies of the calibre of Peter Kay’s Car Share (2015-18), Detectorists (2014-17) and Mum (2016-19); as well as the masterly, currently under-publicised anthology series Inside No. 9 (2014- ). Outstanding documentaries have included Liza Williams’s probing, corrective-to-history The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (2019), and one that Dominic Cummings might learn from: Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal (2019).
But, it is critical to get away from my own preferences – to see things not just from in terms of “me”, but the wider “we“. Clearly, others deeply value programmes that aren’t my cup of tea like Mrs Brown’s Boys, The One Show or Countryfile. I don’t begrudge them their pleasures. I will however assert that it is time that EastEnders be replaced with a soap opera that tackles social issues like Julia Smith’s creation used to, but also inject some much-needed humour? What about basing it in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a place more culturally aligned with Glasgow than London? The great Tyneside writer Tom Hadaway had a similar idea of a soap set around Newcastle’s Central Station in the 1990s, but his idea was regrettably not realized, as James Leggott (2016) has detailed.
Yes, it is vital to protect the BBC in Joan Bakewell and Nicholas Garnham (1970)’s characterisation of it as a pluralist church. So far, so Peter Hitchens. It is just as important that it be licensed to be in a composite of a Weimar cabaret venue and a national theatre: in which any ideas can be vigorously and sometimes irreverently contested. Still further, not quite so Peter Hitchens!
We need to learn from Jonathan Coe and Chris Morris’s wisecomments on the licensed fool nature of satire these days: it currently serves the right in politics for politicians as a whole to be denigrated. Satire that does not take into account fundamental truths about power is toothless and banal. Of course, all Chris Morrises and Peter Cooks need their Ken Dodds or Les Dawsons and, unfortunately, neither the BBC nor ITV has not done enough to sustain these national traditions of dissident satire and music hall.
All of us benefit when in drama and comedy all different ideologies are rigorously scrutinised and dramatised – an example from my PhD study would be Robin Chapman’s Play for Today – ‘Come the Revolution’ (broadcast 1 week before ‘Abigail’s Party’ in late October 1977). Play for Today has been lazily stereotyped by Dominic Sandbrook as constituting ‘left-wing propaganda’. Yet, Chapman’s play is a complex dissection of a small, left-wing company akin to Portable Theatre being infiltrated and taken over by a doctrinaire Workers’ Revolution Party-like hard left sect. To me, the play signifies that left-wing people should develop the legacy of Theatre Workshop and be cautionary about an agitprop theatre that is a means of power accumulation for sects. It is brilliantly written and has magnificent performances from Vivian Pickles and Kenneth Colley as a pair of smooth, culturally influential sectarians. I sense it is not the only PFT that, in the wake of the IMF and Winter of Discontent “crises”, anatomised the left…
BBC PURPOSES #3: SERVING A DIVERSITY OF NEEDS?
Some on the political right want to destroy broadcasting for all minority interests other than their own. What would they have to say if the political left aimed to end The Last Night of the Proms, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise, Royal family coverage and Test Match Special? I am only enamoured of the last of these, but can see that other people deeply value the others and they share the same country (, so I respect their traditional pleasures. More intelligent and emotionally sensitive Conservatives realise they should permit programmes and stations that younger or more left-wing people value. Football fans, regardless of their team allegiance, can surely agree that 5Live provides immeasurably richer coverage than Talk Sport?
Rather than the government – ironically led by an unelected bureaucrat – taking an axe to a century of accumulated wisdom, triumphs and failures, what about taking away the government’s power to renew or abolish the Royal Charter every ten years? What about placing the BBC on a permanent footing so that it is truly – and not quasi – autonomous from political interference? In addition, we should enact the Media Reform Coalition’s recent proposals that the BBC Board of Governors be comprised of 50% from those elected by staff and 50% from those elected by licence fee payers. It is surely better to democratise the BBC BOG rather than having most of them appointed directly by politicians in government or their appointees. It is about time that the Corporation’s Governors became a corpus reflective of the country at large, and not in the debt of government. It is encouraging that Rebecca Long-Bailey has endorsed these proposals: I await with interest what the other Labour leadership candidates have to say…
When the UK frays, the BBC gets caught in the crossfire; as with the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 when it came under heavy fire from the ‘Yes’ campaign for its perceived pro-Unionist coverage; a coverage inevitable given the ‘British’ third of the BBC’s name. The BBC is incredibly vulnerable now to claims that it just represents the two main national ‘capitals’: London and environs and the Unionist but ‘Remain’ voting stronghold of Edinburgh. It needs to show it cares just as much about the people of Belfast and Basingstoke, Glasgow and Liverpool.
OUR BBC’S FUTURE: SOME MODEST PROPOSALS
As Tom Hazeldine rightly argued in the New Left Review in 2017, much of the northern and midlands Brexit vote was down to resentment that investment and economic resources have been concentrated around London and the South East. Most northern and midlands towns and cities have proportionately lost out due to the Cameron-May governments’ economic policies of austerity. There is also much-documented English resentment at Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales having a degree of devolved autonomy and at the Barnett Formula. Now, the drive is rightly on for the BBC to broadcast more from and in the voices of the regions. We need to consign the sort of attacks that Steph McGovern received from those inside and outside the BBC who objected to her fine Teesside accent firmly in the past.
2027 is when the real battle over the Licence Fee will be won and lost; surely, democratic political parties must advocate a reformed, democratised BBC to consign Dominic Cummings’s elitist idea of a neutered, subscription-only BBC to the dustbin of history.
(1) Who has, though?! It could be argued that the government has a questionable grasp of the economic aspects of a No Deal Brexit, just as FBPE-rs have a doubtful grasp of the plurality of Brexiters’ positions: there are indeed thousands of personal private Brexits living in people’s minds across the country… The Yaxley-Lennon minority will be entirely unsavoury, but most will just be a quiet patriotism that does not necessarily want to Other minority groups. I want to hear from British Asian Leavers in Luton, Bradford or Slough, just like I’d want to hear from Remainers in the Brexit central of Lincolnshire… The media has had a role in creating prevalent visions of what ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ are like, based on partial readings of electoral geography; this is regrettable and yet another reason for improved public service broadcasting.
(2) In The Conversation blog piece, I link to John Humphrys without highlighting how he is now being paid to purvey his right-wing, traditionalist views within the pages of the Daily Mail.
(3) Some might say, like Guy Shrubsole, that they don’t share enough…
May's Britain... 