Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.20: ‘For the West’ (BBC1, 26 May 1965)

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

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

02.20: For the West (BBC One, Wednesday 26 May 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Toby Robertson; Written by Michael Hastings; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram.

On a Saturday afternoon in March 2014, as part of that year’s AV Festival’s Postcolonial Cinema theme, I saw Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011), which concerned the historical legacies of Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in Elisabethsville on 17 January 1961. From memory, a sound documentary took a more conventional approach than Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), yet it left a similarly strong sense of unresolved injustices that deserved a reckoning.

Now, The Wednesday Play was not shown on Wednesday 19 May as usual, due to the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final, in which West Ham United beat TSV 1860 Munich 2-0 at Wembley Stadium. Z Cars was shown, but moved to a 9:30 pm start, within TWP’s customary time slot.

The next Saturday, a Daily Mail article by Brian Dean claimed ‘Drama producers have been warned against unnecessary blasphemy and sex in television protests’, following ‘protests after the screening’ of For the West – ‘which showed atrocities in the Congo’ – without detailing whether any actual pre-screening had actually taken place (22 May 1965, p. 9). This followed a turbulent civil war between the conservative, pro-Western Congo government and Simba rebels, sharing Lumumba’s more left-wing ideals.

L to R: Gordon Gostelow as Morris Stone, Nigel Stock as Captain Bill Nicholson and Edwin Richfield as Stuart Strouse

Ken Hankins noted that writer Michael Hastings has been inspired by Peter Watkins’s Culloden (1964), on TV six months earlier, which he saw as a ‘turning point for TV drama’ and intended For the West to be ‘an attempt in that direction’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 22 May 1965, p. 3). The following synopsis indicates there wasn’t a primary focus on the Congolese pro-Patrice Lumumba side:

“For the West” is set in the war-ravaged Congo, concentrating on the mercenaries who hire out their battle skills for hard cash and the journalists who report their activities. (ibid.)

Nigel Stock is noted as taking the lead role, as ‘a tough mercenary Captain Bill Nicholson – a far cry from his characterisation as the gentle, always obliging Dr. Watson in the recent Sherlock Holmes series’ (ibid.). He had of course also had an excellent role as a fascinatingly unstable character in Alun Richards’s Wales-set Wednesday Play, The Big Breaker (1964).

Nigel Stock, a really key Wednesday Play actor!

Ken Irwin in the Daily Mirror noted Hastings’s attempt to do ‘something completely different in the drama field’, quoting the writer’s claim: ‘It’s not a play, but a protest – a report, if you like, about the Congo’ (26 May 1965, p. 16). Hastings explains there is ‘no plot, as such. It is based more on a series of events, presented in a documentary style’, tackling ‘the life and thinking of modern-day mercenaries’ and three Western journalists ‘each determined to send back the best and most sensational pictures to their European papers’ (ibid.). Irwin indicates there’s an unethical rush for ‘”scoop”‘ pictures and ‘exclusive information’ and notes the BBC call it a ‘tough play’, himself then terming it ‘completely realistic’ (ibid.). Zena Walker is a ‘civilian’ caught up in a ‘tragedy’ of a war situation (ibid.) and ‘stranded in a rebel area’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 26 May 1965, p. 13).

The same preview details Hastings’s recent stage success, The World’s Baby, and affirms that the Congo’s story is ‘every bit as grotesque’ as Culloden‘s (ibid.). The Radio Times had clarified the setting was ‘present-day Congo rent by civil war and political chaos’:

White mercenary forces are about to attack rebel, pro-Lumumbist troops. It is a violent, ugly, and explosive situation. Into it come three European photographer-journalists – Morris Stone, John Moss, and Stuart Strouse – determined to satisfy their editors’ demands for a real scoop, zealous to bring back news ‘for the West.’ (22 May 1965, p. 40)

The article indicates the journalists care more for ‘Their precious camera equipment’ than for their own safety; civilians are caught in the middle of the mercenaries and rebels, while ‘there is the grotesque spectacle of African children aping their elders ‘playing at soldiers.” (ibid.).

Indicating a progressive intent, Hastings’s play ‘highlights events in Africa of which we in the West perhaps know too little – and perhaps do not want to know’, and is ‘the first major work for BBC-tv’ by a writer who recently won the Britannia Bronze Medal for The World’s Baby (ibid.).

Toby Robertson (1928-2012) had a solid acting screen credit as a Naval Officer in Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963), while moving between ITV and BBC as a director, including several Armchair Theatres and this was the first of four Wednesday Plays he directed.

Given the era, perhaps a cast with 36.8% Black actors is actually about as good as it could have been, though it’s noticeable how not one press article connected with For the West even mentions one of these actors, which indicates that the roles were seen as minor. Ghana-born Kwesi Kay (1940- ), Jamaica-born Roy Stewart (1925-2008) and Willie Jonah (1935-2023) all had substantial careers, the latter Sierra Leone born actor even appearing in a 2020 Doctor Who episode and in Conclave (2024). Yemi Goodman Ajibade (1929-2013), from Nigeria, had appeared in notable scenes in 3 Clear Sundays, and would work, much later, with Stephen Frears on Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and in a Silent Witness serial (2007).

Other very familiar names appearing included Freddie Zones, Declan Mulholland, John Stratton, Edwin Richfield, Julian Glover and John Castle, a good many of whom appeared in Doctor Who over the decades.

Some of the play’s studio creation is evoked by a later Observer story reporting how its ‘Congo jungle’, seen on screen, was transported in the back of a van from Hampton, Middlesex: ‘The palm trees, bamboo thickets and jungle grass were hired for the day from a firm called Greenery Ltd.’, which is said to regularly ask as ‘Mother Nature’ for many varied BBC and ITV programmes (30 May 1965, p. 23).

Audience size: 4.46 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 29.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon / International Amateur Boxing / Newsroom), ITV (British Song Contest; Final / Wrestling).

Audience Reaction Index: 51%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: Largely a poor reaction from press reviewers, especially London ones. The audience, while highly divided in typical style for a controversy-eliciting Wednesday Play, were I’d say rather more favourable than the journos were.

Barry Norman felt its dramatic impact was less than Cassius Clay’s recent knockout of Sonny Liston, seeing it as a fit subject for drama but feeling Hastings had overegged his commentary:

But war and violence, murder and rape, beatings and cannibalism are sufficient unto themselves. To come across as things which merit a curt nod of disapproval, they don’t need the kind of hysterical treatment Mr. Hastings gave them (Daily Mail, 27 May 1965, p. 3).

Norman saw the play as nihilistically given to portraying all as ‘monsters’: the mercenaries were ‘homicidal villains’, the Africans were ‘mindless savages’ and the journalists ‘inhuman sensation-mongers’ (ibid.). He felt ‘Maybe in the Congo they were and are. But for reasonable dramatic balance the play needed one or two people who could show pity, and therefore, deserve to receive it’; instead, all characters hated each other and Hastings hated them all! (ibid.). Norman’s view here seems uncannily predict what Garnett, Loach and Sanford would do with ensuring audience identification with characters in Cathy Come Home (1966). Norman felt that caricatured characterisation led to sheer disbelief in the play, and didn’t care whether ‘the events he chronicled – notably the delaying of the execution of three African boys so that the journalists could fetch their cameras – actually happened’ (ibid.).

Mary Crozier felt that a ‘horrific’ play was somewhat ‘disappointing’ as it was ‘confusing’ – especially the journalists’ role in the play – but termed it ‘a compelling piece of television, showing yet once again that horror can prove a winner on the screen’, with Stock giving an especially good performance (Guardian, 27 May 1965, p. 9).

John Holmstrom called it a ‘contemptible piece […] about beastliness in the Congo’, claiming it embodied the ‘callous opportunism’ it was claiming to attack, and found it ‘hard to decide whether it was meant as satire or melodrama’ (New Statesman, 4 June 1965, p. 892). Similarly, J.B. in the Daily Telegraph called it a ‘travesty’ full of historical ‘error’, a distortion of ‘the revolt in the Congo which was ended two months ago by the guns of hired white soldiers’ (27 May 1965, p. 21). They felt it ‘failed to make drama’, describing the cameras incident as ‘based in a minor true incident’ wherein ‘Congolese troops some months ago were about to kill captured rebels who had committed murder and paused for two minutes for a Belgian photographer’ (ibid.).

This incident ‘became a peg on which to hang a series of artificial conflicts between caricature characters’; J.B. felt Zena Walker’s was the only ‘convincing portrayal’, with Stock doing what we could with ‘an impossible figure’ (ibid.). A damning review ended with not-so-coded anti-Lumumbist politics wielded:

But this was a play which said nothing and did considerable disservice to an African country now struggling towards civilisation. (ibid.).

Directly below this review, a P.J.K. detailed an entirely unspecified number of telephone protests against the play for being ‘false’, or ‘too violent and sadistic; the BBC’s reply is given:

Any serious play on this subject is bound to have considerable impact on some people, but we feel there was a strong moral justification for this production (ibid.).

This bandwagon was inevitably joined by the Daily Express, reporting Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV campaign had demanded the resignation of Sir Hugh Greene as BBC DG simply over this play being broadcast (28 May 1965, p. 11). The paper, exaggerating the CUTV organisation’s actual committed strength by claiming they were ‘365,000’ strong, reported that from her Claverley, Shropshire home, Whitehouse had written to Harold Wilson to ask for Sir Hugh’s resignation.

*Daily Mirror* headline here, reporting the same story

Her bigotry – unchallenged by that perennial champion of the powerful, the Express – is clear in this highly partial intervention:

“We have asked him if it is a policy of the Government to allow the television screen to be used for propagating obscenity, the technique of violence and racial hatred at a time when the Government is making pronouncements on the need for racial understandingly [sic].”

She claimed the play portrayed the Congo mercenaries as totally sadistic and self-interested, without a trace of the bravery “which saved many lives in the Congo” and without taking into account the atrocities committed by the Simbas (ibid.).

At this point, it is worth clarifying that, geopolitically, the US CIA and Belgian forces and other white mercenaries backed the conservative, pro-Western government headed by President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe. Whitehouse always placed being an anti-Communist Cold Warrior at the forefront of her identity – hypocritically, given her supposed Christian beliefs. Thus she here was predictably weighing in on the side of an anti-democratic, imposed regime. While Kasavubu had been the first President after independence from Belgium and initially worked with Patrice Lumumba’s left-wing nationalist and election-winning Congolese National Movement (MNC), he had participated in the conspiracy leading to Lumumba’s political assassination in 1961. Effectively, Kasavubu’s regime made Congo a puppet of the US and Belgium.

The Liverpool Daily Post clarified that the ‘Congolese charge d’affaires had made a representation to the BBC not to show For the West, as it was ‘inopportune’ to show atrocities committed by the mercenaries ‘at a time when his government is doing everything in its power to settle the situation within the country.’ (28 May 1965, p. 1). That this was a significant row is clear in how this made the front page of a local paper. The charge d’affaires, given the crisis-ridden Congo regime wasn’t even an internal government figure but an external foreign diplomat: almost certainly either the Belgian Harold d’Aspremont Lynden or American G. McMurtrie Godley.

Peter Knight noted the Clean Up TV campaign’s ‘absurd’ protest letter to the Foreign Office a week before it had even been shown, wisely anticipating some of the knee-jerk attacks TV shows like Brass Eye often received decades later; while Knight felt it was a ‘bad’ play, sensationalising and distorting, he knew that any complaints could only potentially be taken seriously provided people have watched the programme (Daily Telegraph, 31 May 1965, p. 17).

Television Today indicated that Whitehouse was stepping up her campaign by taking a petition with 375,000 signatures to the House of Commons on Thursday 3 June – there is a wearying quote from Whitehouse, ‘And this is only for the first instalment’ (3 June 1965, p. 11). Sadly true. The article goes into detail how she’d given up full-time employment at a secondary modern school to organise this campaign (ibid.).

Philip Purser claimed not to generally agree with the censorious anti-BBC campaigning, but felt fully in step with James Dance MP and others over For the West (Sunday Telegraph, 30 May 1965, p. 11). His account points up some of the flaws of the play in its representations:

In a rebel-attacked settlement an Englishwoman identified the headless body of her house-boy and beat off the advances of adolescents who, infected by the prevailing violence, were trying to assault her. A United Nations doctor shrugged the incident aside […] such absurd characters as the spluttering journalists, the mercenary soldier with the statutory homosexual tinge or the comic-strip, dark-glassed Swede.

‘I would have suspected any play which, purporting to be truthful, mixed studio shots with random newsreel footage’: this sounds exactly like what he said six years later about Clive Exton’s The Rainbirds (1971), and, in truth, Purser is right about that one’s wilful crassness (ibid.). Here, he critiques what he sees as the Belgian officer’s risible French-English dialogue – e.g. “Je propose that you and I work out something together….” – thus:

This sort of stuff wouldn’t have done for The Wizard at its most lurid. No dramatist capable of writing it, or actor capable of speaking it, or producer capable of passing it, can ever be taken seriously again’ (ibid.)

All this said, Purser ended by saying his ‘white flag’ to MPs Dance, Shepherd and Dempsey ‘goes back in the locker’ (ibid.).

Fellow Sunday reviewer Maurice Wiggin ‘wrinkled a nostril or two over the so-called “Wednesday Play”‘, which he professed to find ‘rather far from marvellous’ (Sunday Times, 30 May 1965, p. 20). Wiggin then noted that BBC2’s ‘excellent’ Late Night Line-Up afterwards had featured a Reuter’s journalist with experience in Congo discussing the play, who ‘did not think highly of it’, arguing then that the BBC should have sought his ‘or other expert advice before putting it on’ (ibid.).

In the regional press, an unnamed Derby Telegraph reviewer noted how the clashes during the Simba rebellion ‘have sullied the Congo’s name’ (27 May 1965, p. 4), (obviously far more than Belgian colonialism ever could…!). They complained that ‘The conduct of white mercenaries was depicted as being as reprehensible as that of the blacks’, indicating how Hastings’s negative liberal even-handedness would likely find opponents on both sides (ibid.). Their partiality comes into view: ‘The Derby missionaries who owe their lives to the mercenaries’ intervention may well have other views’ (ibid.).

B.L. in the Belfast Telegraph critiqued it along more typical lines as not being ‘a play’, but ‘a horrifying documentary about violence in the Congo’, finding its bleak universalism powerful: the mercenaries ‘are as violent, as unreasoning and as primitive in their sadism as the Africans to whom they feel superior’ (27 May 1965, p. 11). They felt Hastings’s attitude towards the Australian photographers was overly unclear, but also that ‘it would be cowardly to switch off’, overall, analogising the events depicted to a recent film about Belsen (ibid.). They admired ‘impeccable’ acting from Nigel Stock, ‘dedicated to his job, but despising everyone, friends as well as enemies’, and Zena Walker, ‘dazed by the horrors she had seen’ (ibid.).

While the row mostly over the play largely abated, Sydney Newman did issue a reminder to BBC producers that they exercise ‘good sense in the treatment of sex, religion and minorities. Standards, in some cases, had been slipping badly’ (Times, 23 June 1965, p. 8). In a conciliatory tone towards Whitehouse, Newman noted that ‘punchy’ speech could be provided in dramas while avoiding ‘Jesus’ and ‘bloody’ (ibid.). Ever a tenacious annoyance, Whitehouse attacked Greene again for omitting to mention the BBC’s obligation ‘not to offend against good taste and decency’ in a recent Listener article, ‘The BBC’s duty to society’; she had the further gall to claim to want to safeguard the BBC as ‘a democratic institution’ (ibid.). One that she solely wanted to reflect her and like-minded conservatives’ points of view on certain issues.

With viewers, there was a polarised reaction, but closer to that for PfT The Other Woman (1976), say, than several of the really disliked Wednesday Plays so far. About 40% applauded it, 35% disliked it, with 25% in the middle. Many felt that it brought home ‘the brutalities on both sides’, with a Cook/Supervisor congratulating a play which ‘tells the truth about race hatred’ (VR/65/284). A University Lecturer found it ‘a serious warning against complacency’, having ‘terrific impact’ (ibid.).

However, others assailed the characters: ‘it would be difficult to imagine a more odious collection’, who weren’t ‘normal’, with many seeing it as a ‘disgusting play’ riddled with ‘perverts and sadists’ (ibid.). Racist language veered into view with criticism of ‘the ape-like Major Buba’ (ibid.). A more impressed viewer reflected it had ‘made one think of the things that are happening while we go about our pleasant daily routine’ (ibid.). The realism of the acting was praised in making it all so shocking, with many feeling Zena Walker’s terror: the most praised performer (ibid.). While a few thought the jungle sets ‘too obviously artificial’, it was felt to be a convincing production, with the film inserts – presumably the newsreel – ‘adding to the feeling of authenticity’, very much unlike Purser’s opinion (ibid.).

Perhaps Peter Black’s claim that For the West was the start of a run of ‘wildly undisciplined’ Wednesday Plays had some truth to it – we’ll evidently see, at least with next week’s (Daily Mail, 24 June 1965, p. 3). However, while it would undoubtedly have unwise, rough edges in its representations, were we able to watch it now, I feel enabling an alternative view to conventional Cold War propaganda can only have been a good thing. Thus, definitely not for the last time, a flawed play deserved defending on democratic grounds, from Whitehouse’s censorious pitchfork-wielding mob.

I am not entirely sure whether this would actually be a dud, though, especially given the reasonable overall audience reaction and praise of the acting. Other Michael Hastings (1938-2011) works I’ve seen – chiefly, the PfT Murder Rap (1980) and Stars of the Roller State Disco (1984) are far from top drawer, but then they have certain considerable strengths too, and tapped into their times’ zeitgeist and pressure points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: *** / ****

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

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

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

The viewer spies O’Brien’s hidden brush!

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

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

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

Best Performance: PETER JEFFREY

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.91 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.3%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 76%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 66.6%

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

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

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 38.5%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top of the Pops, BBC One, 11 April 1985

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.04: ‘Fable’ (BBC1, 27 January 1965)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating *** / ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: THOMAS BAPTISTE

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

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

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

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.7%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 52%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 84.6%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen to that, Marjorie!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAY’S MINIATURES – S.01 E.10: J.G. Ballard – ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)

Photo (c) Fay Goodwin, The British Library Board

Welcome to the last episode of series 1 of May’s Miniatures. If you’ve enjoyed this series at all, please get in touch and suggest other stories or writers you’d like featured in a possible, if not probable, future series! Feel free to add comments on the posts that are on the May’s Britain blog.

Now, this final selection is a short story from one of my favourite writers. You don’t have to be Will to self-diagnose as a Ballardian. I love his work as it is sardonic, strange and taps into undercurrents of our human consciousness that most writers shy away from. Ballard’s work is like a literary equivalent to Max Ernst’s surrealist paintings but with an utterly matter of fact tone to its weirdness. You can’t help but hear his words resounding inside your head as if delivered by a BBC announcer from the Sixties, but who has unknowingly ingested some weird substance – and we’re not talking bleach!

He is not alarmed or moralistic about modernism, about the modern life of cars, motorways and consumerism, but nor is he Panglossian about it. He perceives troubling currents and subtly under plays them. This story is from later era Ballard. He was in his fourth decade as a writer, and wrote this soon after Margaret Thatcher’s pivotal Bruges Speech of 19 September 1988 which was critical in how the UK Conservative Party changed from being a pragmatically pro-European capitalist party to one torn between this and proto-Brexiting euroscepticism. This was published on 7 July 1989 in the Guardian newspaper, accompanied by a Steve Bell cartoon. This was four months before the restrictions between East Germany and West Germany were lifted, and the Berlin Wall took on new historical meaning. This story is incredibly prescient not just of events since 2016, but seems to parallel… In some ways… the, yes, cliché-alert…! strange times we are living in RIGHT NOW…!

Broadcast here on YouTube on Tuesday 11 August 2020:

This story brilliantly depicts cross-European middle class rebellion of leisure with a distinctive English iteration with seemingly divergent tendencies – green, feminist, sporty, Thatcherite. It observes the undercurrent beneath our cultural observance of the Protestant Work Ethic, which could apply on a much wider cross-class basis, given how beloved our holidays in Spain, Italy and Greece are to us.

More detailed thoughts to follow subsequently.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL – “Who started it? The British”

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL

TX: BBC1, Sundays, 9pm, 28/10/2018 – 02/12/2018 (six episodes)
w: Michael Lesslie & Claire Wilson; John le Carré (novel – 01/03/1983), d: Chan-wook Park, p: Laura Hastings-Smith, m: Yeong-wook Jo (The Ink Factory & AMC Networks & BBC & Endeavor Content)

Yep, us British, we started a lot. As well as apologising for our role in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, we should recall that we instigated the military-led coup against the democratically elected PM Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran which strengthened the monarchical rule of the shah and backed the dictatorship in Brunei in its inception in 1959, enabling it to stamp out democracy in that country too. Thus, we bear some historical responsibility for a country whose laws currently punish homosexuality with death by stoning.

Recent dramas, too, have portrayed the after-effects of the British involvements in history. The Little Drummer Girl is a rich, engrossing version of a JLC novel, previously and less sure-footedly adapted for film by director George Roy Hill in 1984. This is another drama that explores the tensions and dangers of leading a double-life and develops at leisure JLC’s J.L. Austin and Erving Goffman influenced preoccupation with the performativity of language. What’s more, Park, Lesslie & Wilson ambitiously create an even-handed portrayal of the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, sadly every bit as relevant in 2018 as in its late-1970s setting.

Florence Pugh is one of a formidable phalanx of women who head the casts in 2018/19’s BBC drama season. Insouciant, idealistic yet at times devil-may-care, her Charlie feels right in a way that Diane Keaton’s rendition of the part just didn’t. With the story crammed into a 130-minute duration, Keaton is forced to become more of a passive object and loses control with several instances of hysteria. Pugh neatly creates an intelligent and slightly hedonistic Charlie, who moves in left-wing circles not that far from the 1970s milieu of Howard Schuman’s Rock Follies (Thames, 1976-77). Charlie performs a radicalism that is perhaps only partially faked; her divided loyalties and angst cut a bit deeper than some of JLC’s more standard Cold War characters, with their ultimately hegemonic pro-deterrence Atlanticist stances – as identified by Toby Manning.

There is an attention to detail in the trappings of tradecraft – bugs such as a rigged-up radio – that evokes The Americans (2013-18), and this is much closer to that programme’s murky tone than to The Night Manager (2016). That significant Eminent Dragon-packed hit drama featured to an embarrassing extent in The Guardian and other publications’ lifestyle, fashion and holiday sections. The Little Drummer Girl’s inability to attract the same sort of ‘soft coverage’ was reflected in its lower ratings and, while Florence Pugh’s background is fairly elite – independent boarding school St Edward’s School in Oxford – she shares this with none of her fellow cast members. As well as Laurence Olivier, its alumni includes figures like newsreader Jon Snow and the late, defiantly anti-establishment art critic, novelist and broadcaster John Berger.

Naxos, Greece. Vini Reilly. Vistas. Bottles. Pebbles. Words.

Like Killing Eve, there’s a relish in selecting unfamiliar music tracks – presumably to most British ears – to signify a cosmopolitan connoisseur-ship absent in TNM and Bodyguard. This is part of how these programmes are attuned to different audiences. As well as vintage Greek disco and the like, there’s The Durutti Column’s ‘Sketch for Summer’, perhaps mildly anachronistic as a January 1980 release being played in the summer of 1979 when it was recorded, is nevertheless wonderfully evocative of euro-romanticist radicalism. Vini Reilly’s band’s very name alluded to both anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the Situationist International. Situationist theory enabled links between the 1960s-birthed ‘Psychedelic Left’ that Charles Shaar Murray was proud to be part of (as Mark Sinker’s A Hidden Landscape Once A Week details) and the Post Punk underground from 1978.

Unlike the film version, we are also shown Gadi Becker reading a book about Salvador Allende on the beach, notably in the same scene as we hear Reilly’s plangent music. Presumably such explicitly political touches would have been too close to the bone: the film was released in the UK in July 1985, not long before the Iran-Contra affair began. Referencing Allende implicitly anchors the TV version in justified left-wing outrage over the US backed coup against an elected socialist government in Chile in 1973.

From early in The Little Drummer Girl (d. George Roy Hill, 1984)

Hill is also much keener to show the Palestinians as a fearful ‘terrorist’ threat, using the iconography of the black balaclava used in so much 1970s-80s news footage. Park shows us proportionately much more of Khalil’s visage and other Palestinian faces. Park’s version is also repeatedly explicit in highlighting British culpability and, like detached BBC journalists in the Falklands War, ‘we’ are designated as ‘The British’: ‘The British always have the solution to other countries’ problems’, ‘The War of Independence, 1948. What do they call it? The Catastrophe. Or… Disaster. Who started all this? The British.’ It’s notable that the drama is set in 1979, a ‘theatre of the real’ that evokes the docudrama Death of a Princess (ATV, 1980) and Hanging Fire (BBC1, 1981) – controversial television addressing Saudi Arabia and Israel respectively, which JLC might have been aware of while writing his novel. Middle east controversies were definitely utmost in British news and culture of the early 1980s, along with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Over six episodes, Lesslie and Wilson are able to give much more time to the Israelis, the Palestinians and Charlie’s urban, left-wing drama milieu, who barely appear at all in the film. We also have more time given to the British intelligence establishment and its distrust of the Israelis, through Commander Picton (Charles Dance, evocative of two facets of 1980s ITV drama, having appeared in bothThe Professionals (LWT, 1977-83) and The Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984)). Like Killing Eve, this is a plush transnational drama, just as rooted in European signifiers; the eclectic soundtrack also includes the European Classical canon. The architecture includes not just the Parthenon but 1960s-70s brutalism which grounds us in ‘grim 1970s’ terrain, especially with the last episode’s associative use of it as a staged terrorist incident is manufactured by the British and Israelis.

Both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have a point from their own perspectives, rooted in historical circumstances; in this drama, both are shown to commit objectively bad, subjectively understandable acts. Which is maybe a bit much for complexity-averse British audiences in 2018. As well as its many incidental pleasures, this drama does far more to immerse us in unpalatable realities than the 1984 film version did.