Category: Comedy

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 04.01: ‘The Boneyard’ (BBC1, 5 January 1966)

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 Wednesday Plays up to the end of 1965, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis. A selected number of plays from 1966-1970 will be covered.

04.01: The Boneyard (BBC One, Wednesday 5 January 1966) 9:05 – 10:00pm
Directed by James MacTaggart; Written by Clive Exton; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram; Music by Norman Kay

The story concerns a policeman whose devotion to duty makes him a man apart and an outcast in society (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 5 January 1966, p. 13).

SIR – After watching the Wednesday night play on BBC1 on Jan. 5 I slept on my wrath, anxiety and indeed unhappiness for several nights hoping that with reflection would come some understanding or excuse for showing the “Boneyard,” advertised as the first of a series of “comedies.”

No such enlightenment has come and my anger has fermented (Lady Laycock, letter to Daily Telegraph, 28 January 1966, p. 23).

We end (as a regular weekly blog series, anyway!) with where we began: Clive Exton’s The Boneyard being scheduled as a play on BBC One on a Wednesday. Originally, it was due to go out on 30 September 1964, but it was replaced at the last minute by the adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Catch as Catch Can: yep, the one featuring Kenneth Williams playing Napoleon Bonaparte.

Before its originally scheduled broadcast, Sydney Newman defended the decision to replace single plays on Sunday nights on populist grounds, noting how Dr. Finlay, Maigret and Z Cars simply drew bigger audiences so we’re better suited to the slot, a lesson US networks had learned earlier (Peterborough Evening News, 24 September 1964, 3). Single play enthusiast James Green was critical, wryly noting he didn’t want BBC executives claiming they had ‘no real interest in the size of audiences’ anymore, though he detailed how single plays were coming back in a new Wednesday slot, being hopeful considering ‘BBC drama has been disappointing for too long’ (ibid.).

In his preview of The Boneyard, Michael Gowers acclaimed writer Clive Exton as ‘one of the most original and exciting of television dramatists – and also one of the most controversial’, with a ‘brand of satire which cuts savagely and deep’ (Radio Times, 24 September 1964, p. 43). Gowers terms The Boneyard ‘a black comedy’, centring on PC Miller (Neil McCarthy), ‘a simple man with a sensuous wife and a puzzling preference for night duty’ (ibid.). It all sounds really quite intriguing:

The reasons for his secret nocturnal visits to the churchyard at once make him cuckold, buffoon, blasphemer, madman, and saint, and turn up in the process the dark side of human nature in the lecherous Inspector Potter (Colin Blakeley [sic]) and the rest of the characters who surround him. (ibid.).

Producer Peter Luke reflected deeply on Exton’s intent with the play: ‘What Clive is always sniping at are the crypto-fascist attitudes which lie behind much of what passes for ordinary, decent, conventional behaviour.’ (ibid.). Gowers details how Exton himself was currently in Venice, ‘writing the script for a film starring ex-Queen Soraya and the British actor Richard Harris’ (ibid.).

Douglas Marlborough reported how it had been dropped ‘because of the present inquiry into former Detective-Sergeant Harry Challenor […] A few hours before the play was due to be screened’ (Daily Mail, 1 October 1964, p. 11). Hampstead-dwelling Clive Exton, 34, was told by the BBC his ‘black comedy […] was being withdrawn for vaguely legal reasons’ (ibid.). For once, there was no playwright’s protest: Exton claimed the BBC ‘is quite right, but I hope they will show it eventually’ (ibid.). Marlborough reflected that the BBC legal department were wary due to ‘possible similarities’ in the TV play – written six months ago – with the Challenor affair (ibid.). The Observer reflected on Exton’s bad luck, his other black comedy The Trial of Dr. Fancy having been ‘in cold storage for two years’, likening Exton’s experiences to those of Johnny Speight over The Salesman – about a man who sells door-to-door psychiatry – and If There Weren’t Any Blacks You’d Have to Invent Them (4 October 1964, p. 23).

Further contextualising the decision not to show the play, Simon Farquhar reveals how Exton was unhappy with the original version, feeling MacTaggart’s approach had been too visually extravagant and busy when he visited the TV studio: ‘The play should have had this mundane background with startling things happening at the front. But they’d filled it with hundreds of little busts of Napoleon, it looked like Madame Tussauds! I didn’t know what to say’ (Exton quoted in: Simon Farquhar, Play for Today: The First Year 1970-71, Self-published: Lulu, 2021, p. 126). Exton also recalled attending a preview screening in Ealing and telling Sydney Newman in a car journey back to Television Centre: ‘you can’t put it out, you’ll ruin me’; while Newman defended the music, Farquhar implies this may have had an impact on the decision not to show The Boneyard in its original form (ibid.). Fascinatingly, Farquhar claims the original version still exists in the archives! (email to author, 6 January 2026).

Thus, the play was entirely remade, shot in autumn 1965, and eventually scheduled to be shown in the first of a new Wednesday Play series to be produced by Peter Luke, ironically directed by Luke’s predecessor as strand producer James MacTaggart. Adrian Mitchell trailed Exton’s play as ‘Essential viewing’ (Sunday Times, 2 January 1966, p. 33). The Radio Times billing indicated that Colin Blakely, originally Inspector Potter in the September 1964 billing, had been replaced by Nigel Davenport (1 January 1966, page unclear).

On 3 January, BBC Head of Plays Michael Bakewell had announced at a press conference at Broadcasting House that the new series of plays would start with The Boneyard, while also pointedly and relevantly noting how of the 9.5 million people who had watched the controversial’ Up the Junction, a mere 400 ‘registered their embarrassment’ (Guardian, 4 January 1966, p. 2).

Notably, Peter Luke is quoted that the new series will be ‘less class conscious and it will not have such an accent on the examination of proletarian mores kike ‘Up the Junction’ and ‘less politically concious [sic], like ‘Nigel Barton’, and that he hoped ‘that every play will be abundantly clear, and what it is about will be made manifest not only through the writing but also through the direction’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 4 January 1966, p. 1).

Luke’s rhetoric seems to promise a decidedly new, more conservative broom – at least in terms of form and content, seemingly trying to counter regular criticisms of The Wednesday Play for including jerky, modish visuals or for not having clear meanings. However, Luke did promise that plays ‘will not be cleaned up from the point of view of sexual content’, at the same press conference Bakewell spoke at (ibid.).

Previewing The Boneyard himself, Luke noted his ‘friendly takeover’ from MacTaggart, claiming this play ‘is indicative of the tendency of the 1966 season towards irony and humour’, while not mentioning it being a postponed play from 15 months before (Radio Times, 1 January 1966, page unclear). Luke claimed ‘humour is probably the nodal characteristics of the new series and we are offering it in every shape and size : black and broad, sweet and sour, tragical, comical, pastoral comical, etc.’, albeit with ‘serious’ themes and ‘strong’ stories, while hoping ‘none of the plays’ are ”earnest’ or pretentious’ (ibid.). Luke felt the writers had shaped the style of 1966 Wednesday Play: ‘self-mockery, wit, the spoken word, sophistication’, while terming Exton’s play a ‘grey’ rather than ‘blue’ comedy, set in a police station ‘where the most extraordinary things happen that neither Newtown nor Dock Green ever saw’ (ibid.).

This tantalising prospect of a play expanding beyond the limitations of drama series was matched by its representational equity. The play contained a cast of ten, according to its Radio Times billing, pleasingly split 50:50 gender wise (1 January 1966, page unclear). The Shropshire Star features two images from the play, one a close-up of Neil McCarthy’s angular features beneath a police helmet and another of him ‘on the receiving end of Marje Lawrence’s wifely anger’ (5 January 1966, p. 7). PC Miller’s decision to work continuously at night ‘arouses the suspicions of his wife and the mistrust of his colleagues’, who all ‘get involved in his persecution’ (ibid.).

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

This is impossible to rate in any rational way! It is quite simply one of the oddest single TV plays I have ever seen. It’s a mixture of the inexplicable, the risible and the inspired; its success for each viewer will depend on your own attitudes and beliefs.

On initial reflection, Clive Exton’s play felt a slight and fundamentally cynical satire. It does not seem to make any attempt to load the dice against the senior policemen. Inspector Potter (Nigel Davenport) basically performs an elaborate practical joke on PC Miller, while also implicitly bedding his attractive wife. That’s about it really. Miller’s colleagues are laddish men who aren’t being satirised with any great force or wit; while they aren’t exactly vindicated, they aren’t caught out in any way.

Whereas Miller ends up in sad turmoil, as he faces the crowd of women, his illusions shattered. The said practical joke is that, for weeks, during Miller’s curious nocturnal work shifts, spent in a boneyard, his superior puts on a deep commanding voice and pretends to be a statue of Jesus talking directly to Miller!

Exton’s play rather anticipates his oddball Play for Today folly, The Rainbirds (1971) in how it is a scattergun lark, with a seemingly deliberate lack of depth in the characterisation. As in that play, The Boneyard presents familiar attitudes and behaviours, while not wanting you to humanly identify with anyone who is on screen. One woman who wants to use Miller’s supposed connection with Christ to communicate with her dead child isn’t portrayed with the slightest empathy, but as an unnerved figure to be ridiculed. She tries to force her into the Millers’ home in a loaded representation of myopic fanaticism born of grief.

This has some quite lengthy filmed inserts, mainly in the ‘boneyard’, or graveyard itself. These sequences tend to be accompanied by Norman Kay’s ruminative underscore, which includes woodwinds, a drum and harpsichord. This music lends an air of bathetic absurdity to the proceedings, which, interpreted charitably, do perform an indictment of the police as a bunch of glib, cocky bullies led by an absolutely loathsome Inspector.

Best performance: NIGEL DAVENPORT

Neil McCarthy, rather than being in the Boneyard for illicit sexual encounters as his fellow policemen believe, gets embroiled as a credulous witness of prank ‘wisdom’. Marjie Lawrence isn’t given much to do, and is subjected to an objectifying skirt and legs-centric shot at one point.

I’d pondered singling out John Barron, already performing here as Superintendent Melchior in mock-sagacious tones and with a drive and pomposity anticipating his great regular turn as C.J. in David Nobbs’s The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (BBC, 1976-79). He is fine here, making a relatively small part count, enacting the clipped, non-self conscious voice of authority.

Overall, though, it really has to be Nigel Davenport, this week. Davenport performs smarmy, domineering and annoying with a bravura verve. This is an extraordinary turn which shatters pre-existing depictions of the police inspector and decades yet to come, revealing a freshly despicable exhibitionist, a larking bully. When left on his own in an early scene, he bursts into utterly maniacal laughter: a compelling televisual tableau shattering natural ism’s falsely glossy pane, breaking through a deeper, stranger mirror. Davenport is particularly well cast, performing a masquerade of nastiness in a way difficult to imagine Colin Blakely managing, given that Blakely tended to inflect most of his roles with an innate bluff kindness (at least as far as I have seen, and can recall!).

Best line: “It is written that the seagull does not need sandals” (Potter, pretending to be Jesus)

These are good too:

“Cause we’re prone to it, we have to guard against it, policeman’s melancholy… In constant contact as we are with society’s aberrations.” (Potter)

“Then did you caution this alleged voice that it if was some sort of joker, then it might be committing a breach of the peace?” (Melchior)

Audience size: 10 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: The Awful Truth (1937)), ITV (News / Hope and Keen: ‘Casablanca’ [comedy series]) / This England: 2 – ‘Plague Village’ (Eyam, Derbyshire)

Audience Reaction Index: 34%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: c.50%

Reception: The play was rather widely reviewed both in and outside of London. It achieved a notably more positive reaction from metropolitan critics, with several Arts luminaries extolling its utterly unique qualities. Non-London critics tended to side more with the groundswell of opinion against it from viewers, though an intrepid band of enthusiasts appreciated it highly. Such a sui generis play is bound to make a mockery of Reaction Index scores and the smaller number of forward-looking responses should not be ignored in a heady utilitarian veneration of the mean average data.

James Thomas welcomed the new Softly, Softly to TV, condemning its characterisation and ‘semi-documentary coppers’, who he noted ‘will never see a police station like the one in’ The Boneyard (Daily Express, 6 January 1966, p. 4). Thomas gave a ‘salute’ to this ‘hilarious play, delighted that The Wednesday Play ‘has decided at last to lean towards comedy’ (ibid.). The anonymous Times reviewer discerned that the play was concerned with ‘the organization, and not the actuality of police work’, such as which beats constables are assigned to (6 January 1966, p. 8). They felt that Miller’s wife leaving him and the vicar disbelieving him show Exton ‘rebuking the world’s materialism not mocking its religion’, and noted how the priest is a simplified but accurate presentation of ‘familiar’ views (ibid.). They also identified Exton’s grotesque characters and its ‘cynical funniness’, with ‘The nocturnal pursuit of Miller by lonely old women who take his experiences seriously was a beautifully judged piece of fantasy’ (ibid.). McCarthy convinced as the ‘solemn, tongue-tied and embarrassed’ Miller, while Davenport ‘became an oddly disturbing spirit of denial’ (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell self-mocked his own rational exegesis of the play by noting that its two most powerful images left ‘scorch-marks’, even being a televisual equivalent to theatre imagery in key plays by Brecht, Beckett and Arden:

One is the picture of a police constable opening his door to see the luminous faces of old women waiting beyond his gate for a revelation. The other is of a dapper police inspector, left alone in his vestry-like office, hurling himself into a dance routine like a maladroit Fred Astaire (Sunday Times, 9 January 1966, p. 22).

While Mitchell also liked Alun Richards’s Armchair Theatre play, Ready for the Glory – ironically featuring Colin Blakely, with a ‘Steptoe junior accent’ – he exulted most in The Boneyard: ‘It is a wonder that a vision as naked as Mr Exton’s can survive in a muddled, worried medium like television. His play, which should be repeated in a series of his plays, was as simple and mysterious as a glass of water’ (ibid.).

T.C. Worsley felt as exasperated at a play he noted as widely acclaimed but which to him was like ‘all modern sculpture, and especially sculpture in metal’ (The Financial Times, 12 January 1966, p. 20). I must admit my initial feelings were close to this crusty critic, who felt the ‘bone-headed beat-basher’ Miller’s predicament lacked either ‘humour, insight truth or even a modicum of interesting development’ (ibid.). On deeper reflection, I’d say I inched much closer to others’ more positive appraisals, able to perceive it as a daringly rare caustic depiction on TV of the police as an institution, with Miller and Potter coming across as pathetically gullible and smugly vindictive, respectively.

J.C. Trewin, usually a theatre critic, noted how Potter’s office resembles ‘a draughty Victorian Gothic Hall’: a useful description given how poor the visual quality was of the copy I had to watch! (The Listener, 13 January 1966, p. 73). Trewin loved how Exton portrayed Potter as ‘a vain, sneering exhibitionist who happens to be the police inspector’, acclaiming a ‘fierce little fantasy from which I shall recall an ultimate chase through the midnight street, the victim pursued by a gang of alarming women, prepared to be fanatically possessive believers and chasing their new idol ‘athwart the place of tombs’ (ibid.). Trewin praised ‘Uncommon television indeed’, and could not imagine the play in any other medium, also delighting in ‘the complex camera-work’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson referred back to The Boneyard when reviewing the latest Wednesday Play, A Man on Her Back, a William Sansom adaptation and ‘quite viewable, which was more you could say of’ Exton’s play, also branded ‘an intolerable imposition’ (The Observer, 16 January 1966, p. 25). R.G.G. Price was similarly disappointed: ‘The grotesque policemen who capered round a sincere, if dotty, cop who had heard a voice from a crucifix in a churchyard may have been making some statement about materialism; but I found the effect sub-T. F. Powys’ (Punch, 26 January 1966, p. 134). Price lamented missed opportunities: the ‘chorus of mourners who shadowed the visionary suggested there was a powerful televisual imagination unemployed’ (ibid.).

In a non-national press London Evening News and Star, James Green was angry at Programme Controller Huw Wheldon for allowing back-to-back ‘police dramas’ in the BBC One schedules: Softly, Softly and this (6 January 1966, p. 11). Nevertheless, Green grew to like Softly, Softly, though didn’t feel it yet had ‘the punch and character drawing’ of Z Cars, and was, like me, in several minds about The Boneyard, but from a different perspective: ‘A disquieting and vaguely embarrassing play which attracted, yet repelled still more’ (ibid.). Alan Frame was unamused by ‘a macabre little jaunt in and around the headstones and tombs that the B.B.C. in its dizzy post-Christmas madness thought fit to offer us as the Wednesday play’ (Belfast News Letter, 6 January 1966, p. 10). Like ‘some of the most exotic cocktails the light-headedness never came’; nor did Frame feel it had ‘a message’ – seemingly one of his expectations – other than not to join the police force! (ibid.).

Argus accurately grasped that Exton’s play was ‘a macabre affair clearly intended as an affront to the conventional mind’, while liking its setting and ‘intriguing’ plot (Glasgow Daily Record, 6 January 1966, p. 11). While he found the characters ‘impossible’, Argus countered that certain moments ‘almost added up to dramatic rapture’, with a ‘finely written’ script and a production marked by ‘a touch of genius’; concluding that it was ‘an unusually excellent play’ (ibid.). Contrarily, N.B. disliked ‘a piece of malicious nihilism’, which in its ending, with Miller wifeless and besieged by the ‘unhappy’ and ‘unprivileged’ women, made out his newfound Christian faith ‘to be hollow’ (Leicester Mercury, 6 January 1966, p. 20). N.B. was annoyed at an inconclusive ending as to whether Miller had actually been addressed by Christ, actually feeling that the play ‘stressed this’ was the case! (ibid.).

Also in the East Midlands, F.C.G. hated the play, feeling it was un-British ‘rubbish’, with ‘sick humour’, a ‘demented’ policeman and ‘the zaniest police inspector even the BBC has ever conjured up’ (Northampton Evening Telegraph, 6 January 1966, p. 2). This was another of ‘so many unfortunate excursions into off-beat drama’ from the BBC (ibid.). Slightly further south, perhaps in Northamptonshire, perhaps Cambridgeshire depending on the era (!), GTL in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph was left ‘wondering what it was all about’ (6 January 1966, p. 2). Aye, that old chestnut. They noted Potter’s obsession with sex and darts and how he even had a dart-board on the wall of his office, and was prone to doing soft shoe shuffles on tables (ibid.). GTL certainly far preferred Softly, Softly before it (ibid.).

K.H.H. also noted this was ‘police night’ on TV, feeling Exton had ‘overdid it’ with the mourning women and (apparently) ‘an inspector like nothing the Metropolitan Police ever saw in Nigel Davenport’s Inspector Potter, who was using the Constable’s nightly graveyard communion as a lever for lovemaking with the copper’s wife’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 6 January 1966, p. 4). They found it had some ‘shrewd observations about some of the clergy’, but ‘left a rather nasty taste’ (ibid.). As the Merseyside-set Z Cars had shifted to the Bristol-set Softly, Softly, so doth our coverage head south! A.H.R. Thomas was surprised ‘a play with such an unpromising title’ had ‘earned the peak viewing time’ (Bristol Evening Post, 8 January 1966, p. 5).

Peggie Phillips admitted not to having seen Exton’s play, but recounted receiving ‘letters of complaint’ about the play’s ‘sick jokes at the expense of the police’, at ‘a time when it is becoming a hazard to walk in city streets after dark’ (The Scotsman, 10 January 1966, p. 4). Tom Gregg found little humour ‘in this peculiar piece’, though regarded Nigel Davenport as ‘rollickingly magnificent’ and admitted it may not have any more meaning but being ‘a big joke whose point I was too obtuse to grasp!’ (Runcorn Guardian, 13 January 1966, p. 6).

A Mrs. Grace Hamlin of 35 Druid Hill, Bristol 9, wrote a letter excoriating the play for being ‘in the worst possible taste, even bordering on blasphemy’ (Bristol Evening Post, 8 January 1966, p. 16). Hamlin claimed that such a ‘scurrilous’ programme had caused her to discontinue her licence fee payment as a means of ‘protest’ (ibid.). Jessie Stephen, Acting Secretary of the Bristol Cosmo Group, 27 Chessel Street, Bedminster. Bristol 3, wrote to counter ‘self-appointed censors of what appears on our television screens’, like Hamlin (12 January 1966, p. 32). Stephen argued The Boneyard was ‘credible if a little macabre’ and ‘In its context it was neither blasphemous nor profane’, telling Mrs Hamlin that, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction as any psychiatrist could tell her’ (ibid.). Stephen righteously assailed the likes of Hamlin’s self-righteousness in demanding ‘to fix standards for the rest of us’, terming them ‘both impudent and intolerable’ (ibid.).

These busybodies seem to live in a cloud cuckooland of fairy tale existence which has no relation at all to life as it is lived by the great majority (ibid.).

Stephen quoted Robert Burns’s poem Holly Willie’s Prayer as a further corrective, while urging ‘more tolerance and less bigotry, more understanding and less interference in the pleasures of our fellow men’ (ibid.).

A Mrs. Elaine Harvey of 12 Bilbury Crescent, Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, responded to ‘Miss Jessie Stephen’ with an even more forthright endorsement of the play, terming it ‘riotously funny’ and enjoyable, while wryly correcting Stephen’s claim that ‘it raises a mirror to what is happening all around us, as I should not think the situation is all that common’ (18 January 1966, p. 27). While this is true and funny, the play does portray common real behaviours: adultery, bullying. Harvey offered ‘some advice to the ladies who objected’, cautioning them not to watch any play labelled a ‘black comedy’ ‘as it will surely raise your blood pressure’ (ibid.).

A world away from these two varied worldly Bristol women, came two moralistic, broad brush attacks in the North East-based Sunday Sun. A Mrs Elizabeth Sinclair of Parkhead Farm, Bishop Auckland, found The Boneyard the most ‘revolting’ thing she had ever seen on BBC TV (9 January 1966, p. 10). Sinclair claimed it was ‘degrading’ in how it ‘mocked at religion on television screens. No wonder we have a lot of mixed-up kids nowadays’ (ibid.). Above this in the same newspaper was another letter, signed simply: ‘MUST BE DRUNK (or I wouldn’t have watched it)’ (ibid.). This attacked the play as ‘utter drivel’, questioned the Inspector’s characterisation and saw it as a ‘sacrilege to the Church’ (ibid.).

A Mrs. Allison, Victoria-road, Oulton Broad, Lowestoft, Suffolk also found it ‘deplorable’ and ‘downright blasphemous’, though took a wordlier view than N.B. in perceiving Miller’s auditory graveyard visions as being ‘a practical joke by a police chief’ (Sunday Mirror, 9 January 1966, p. 22). Allison pre-echoed Nancy Banks-Smith’s review of Philip Martin’s Play for Today Gangsters (1975): ‘To call such a play a comedy makes one wonder who finds such bad taste enjoyable. A comedy ? A crime !’ (ibid.).

A P.H. Arnold of 154 Oldfield Road, Coventry, noted that they had complained to the BBC about the play, which presented the police with ‘no sense of decorum or standards of discipline […] All this on a night when much feeling existed in the police force over pay claim rejections !’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 22 January 1966, p. 8). Arnold claimed the portrayal of the vicar was also denigrating, as they were ‘unable to withstand materialistic attacks on mystical happenings’; showing he sided with N.B. in interpreting the visions as real (ibid.). Most interestingly, Arnold, elsewhere setting himself up as ‘a very ordinary man’, details how the BBC replied to his complaint: including ‘photographic copies of reviews all very favourable to the play’ (ibid.).

A Lady Angela Laycock of Doncaster wrote a letter, deeply troubled by the play’s irreverence and hard-edged nihilism:

Even in these days of popular sick humour how can anyone laugh at the tender performance given by Neil McCarthy standing bewildered at the feet of Christ crucified ? And even the most hardened and scornful of the irreligious can surely find no merriment in a woman crazed with grief at the death of her child. (op. cit.)

Laycock, in ‘advanced middle age’, noted how ‘almost all my friends of a very wide age group’ shared her ‘perplexity at TV drama’, personally reflecting she was not only ‘shaken’, but ‘frightened’, by The Boneyard (ibid.).

Showing a pretty full suite of conservative stances, Lady Laycock recounted primly responding to programmes ‘dealing sympathetically with homosexuality, lesbians, abortion, venereal disease and drug addiction’, but that this had affected her most of all: ‘being invited to laugh at the fundamental agony of men’s souls I can keep silent no longer’ (ibid.). She ended censoriously, cautioning against an amoral age where nothing was sacred:

Take care, BBC, or we may one day all be asked to split our sides at a farce called “The Goons in Buchenwald.”

While Lady Laycock’s specific attack on The Boneyard is misguided, it is at least a sincere human response and Daniel Rachel’s new book reveals a wilfully ahistorical flippancy towards Nazi symbols as a long-term cultural tendency in Britain.

The play received one of the lowest Reaction Indices we’ve seen: 34! (BBC WAC, VR/66/12). While a reasonable number of Plays for Today scored even lower, this was the second lowest of five Exton plays (other scores 26, 50, 47 and 56, with The Big Eat attaining the lowest) (ibid.). An Engineer hated it, desiring to ‘hear the comments of any member of the Police Force’, while a Printer derided ‘pure rubbish’ (ibid.). A Salesman, not reflecting at all on their own work, also attacked ‘A flippant story concerning a divine visitation, [which] even when a hoax, is in very questionable taste’ (ibid.).

The report indicated Exton’s play had touched on two extremely sensitive points for many in how it was perceived as ridiculing religion and the police, with the decision to use Christ as ‘a medium’ questioned when another figure could have been used (ibid.). Other comments can be summarised by key adjectives: ‘warped’, ‘disagreeable’ and ‘idiotic’ (ibid.). Even a group who liked it ‘fairly well’ felt its development was poor: it ‘dejenerated into farce […] a cross between a music-hall act and a witch hunt’ (ibid.).

A smaller group of enthusiasts loved its shift from jokey to sad, declaring the scene in the canteen where the lady kneels to Miller to have ‘pathos’ (ibid.). This group admired it’s ‘originality, oddity, ‘intriguing off-beat subject’ and ‘rich comedy’ (ibid.). A Housewife applauded it’s ‘novel’ and ‘amusing’ qualities yet also reflected that it was not a shift to ‘clean, non-kitchen sink plays’:

This was adulterous, sacrilegious and lushly immoral with that delightful, cruel Inspector being so bad and reaping all the rewards. Somebody surely will complain – not that I am. (ibid.)

While a Priest called the material ‘ghastly’, this above Housewife’s response seems the more telling of a certain quiet majority of appreciative Wednesday Play viewers. The acting of McCarthy and Davenport was admired, the latter as a ‘gem’ of a portrayal.

The crypto-fascist Davenport enacts is revealed in all their petty abuse of power and utterly lack of any sense of being unaccountable to anyone. Yep, Clive Exton’s flawed oddity The Boneyard is a play for 2026 and all that, while also being impossible to imagine being unleashed today on TV or via streaming services.

I personally would advocate for this play to be restored, remastered and released as part of a Wednesday Play box set anthologising its first year. It is crying out to be seen properly in a pristine, non-timecoded version. In line with the BFI’s three Play for Today sets, I propose these seven:

N.b. I am leaving out the six Wednesday Plays from 1965 previously released on DVD in the UK: Three Clear Sundays, Up the Junction, The End of Arthur’s Marriage, Alice (I think included on a release of Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, 1966, am I right?) and the two Nigel Barton plays.

1: The Boneyard (1964/66).

2: A Tap on the Shoulder (1965)

3: Fable (1965)

4: Horror of Darkness (1965)

5: Moving On (1965)

6: And Did Those Feet? (1965)

7: The Coming Out Party (1965)

Of course, I’d also really rather like A Crack in the Ice, In Camera, The July Plot and The Big Breaker among the late 1964 plays… And The Interior Decorator (1965) for another Jane Arden fix! Alan Seymour’s neglected pair Auto-Stop (1965) and The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (1965) would also be great, as would The Bond (1965) and Tomorrow, Just You Wait (1965).

But, these are the major ones we need first: all those by the key writers John Hopkins, James O’Connor, David Mercer and Clive Exton. It’s such a shame neither of Julia Jones’s 1965 Wednesday Plays exist.

Anyway, that’s it, for now. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please get in touch!

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.🙂

— With thanks to John Williams, as ever, for providing the copious press cuttings. Thanks also go to Simon Farquhar for identifying an oversight: the original version of this text had missed key facts about how the play changed between 1964 and 1966. I’m also grateful to Oliver Wake for clarifying the recording dates.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:11: ‘The Coming Out Party’ (BBC1, 22 December 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 Wednesday Plays up to the end of 1965, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis. A selected number of plays from 1966-1970 will be covered.

03.11: The Coming Out Party (BBC One, Wednesday 22 December 1965) 9:05 – 10:10pm
Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Jimmy O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Michael Wield; Music by Stanley Myers; Nemone Lethbridge (lyrics)

Story of a little boy’s search at Christmas (Daily Mail, 22 December 1965, p. 10).

TWELVE months and thirty-five plays ago, James MacTaggart, Roger Smith, Ken Trodd, and myself began one of the most exciting years of our lives. The freedom of the screen was ours and we were determined to use that freedom. We were bored with the conventional ways of making plays – and wanted to give a number of new writers, who had something to say about the world, a chance to say it without pulling any punches or going soft. But above all we wanted to try to entertain and stimulate a large audience (Tony Garnett, Radio Times, 16 December 1965, p. 33).

Criminals are still being manufactured by the social conditions in this country. The police become the natural enemy as do the dreary streets and the bad housing. It happened to me a long time ago, it’s still happening and it happens in my play (James O’Connor, quoted in The Kensington News & West London Times, 24 December 1965, p. 1).

Play for Today and its predecessor The Wednesday Play have an image of being “worthy” and even moralising, which is invariably totally wide of the mark. If anything, most writers and directors of this long-term project were careful to avoid moral judgements of individual people, though social environments and economic systems would often be scrutinised via a critical lens. Echoing Charles Dickens’s popular closeness to the people that Arnold Kettle observed (see David Craig ed., Marxists and Literature, London: Pelican, 1975), Tony Garnett, reflecting on the strand’s first year, told viewers: ‘You have usually been a lively audience – at times even a stormy one. But always encouragingly large’ (Garnett op. cit.).

Thus, James O’Connor’s The Coming Out Party is an entirely apt conclusion to a remarkable year, ending where The Wednesday Play began with an O’Connor play. The strand had thoroughly inherited Armchair Theatre’s mantle, enabled largely by the ABC strand’s former producer and now BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman and its own producer James MacTaggart. O’Connor’s play is a typically entertaining and revealing depiction of ‘rough’ working-class London life totally anathema to a certain section of Mail reading middle-class viewers, and perhaps also to “respectable” working-class viewers, but which clearly struck a chord more widely. This play is another which, like Hopkins’s, Mercer’s, Dunn’s and Potter’s work, was at the forefront in portraying new visions of Britain, a nation changing fast. Its twin approaches – a neo-realist fable-like quality and a populist joie de vivre – come across in Garnett’s summary:

It is almost Christmas, and a little boy begins a search – a sad search which leads him into trouble. But on the way there is a glorious knees-up comedy which should put us all in a Christmas spirit (op. cit.).

The Observer noted how Three Clear Sundays (1965) ‘broke viewing records’, and that The Coming Out Party ‘may do the same’ and that ‘Three more [O’Connor plays?] have been commissioned’ (19 December 1965, p. 19). Interviewing O’Connor, he emphasises how little he knew the Arts when he was in Dartmoor prison: “I’d never heard of Shakespeare – he could have been a horse”, and took a drama course by post from Ruskin College, Oxford and a job in the prison library (ibid.). Once out of what in this play is termed “Chokey”, O’Connor freelanced as a journalist, wrote some short stories and ‘did some “ghosting”‘; by 1965, he apparently lived in Bayswater, ‘in a large, opulently decorated flat, previously occupied by BBC chief Huw Wheldon’ (ibid.). O’Connor stated his two vices were drink and Greece, having a villa on Mykonos which was good for working; he is said to be ‘busy with the film script of the Great Train Robbery’ for, Garnett claimed, ‘a major Hollywood company’ (ibid.; op. cit.). The Shropshire Star noted that he was ‘building up a strong reputation’, and this play was ‘Set in the lively mix-up of London life that abounds on the slopes of Notting Hill’ (22 December 1965, p. 7).

A ‘warm-hearted comedy’ was trailed, featuring 12 year-old Dennis Golding (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 22 December 1965, p. 2), who ‘has never been in front of a camera before (Daily Record, 22 December 1965, p. 12). In a substantial Daily Mirror article by Clifford Davis about the play, it is termed a ‘crime play’, while Golding is said to be 13 and ‘son of an electrician’, part of a family of thirteen who live in Notting Hill (22 December 1965, p. 12). His character Scimpy was said to turn ‘shoplifter in the hope that he can join his parents in prison’ (ibid.). Apparently, O’Connor heard about Golding at a party and was so impressed by his acting potential that he took him to BBC TV Centre and Ken Loach auditioned him; O’Connor recalls he was such a natural that he ‘was reminding the rest of the cast of their lines’ (ibid.). O’Connor recalled his own shoplifting as a child, and it was noted how his wife Nemone Lethbridge gave up her legal career and wrote lyrics for the songs in this production (ibid.). There isn’t yet any sense of the challenge to O’Connor’s conviction for murder as a miscarriage of justice, as featured in a recent BBC Radio podcast here.

The O’Dells in one of their rare meetings!

The Christmas setting was often emphasised in previews, as was its Notting Dale – or Notting Hill Gate – London, setting, where author James O’Connor ‘was born and where he still lives’ (Peterborough Evening Post, 22 December 1965, p. 2).

In a happy pre-echo of the recent Channel 5 announcement in December 2025 of more new Plays for Today to come in 2026, the Radio Times emphasised in italics that ‘Another season of Wednesday Plays, produced by Peter Luke, will begin in the New Year‘ (op. cit.).

Rating: *** (-) / ****

The socially extensive slice-of-life play with an inconclusive conclusion is open-ended and that’s the point: that’s life, for most of us. The Coming Out Party is a fine example of this, depicting social behavioural cycles: recidivism, interlinked with disorderly, hedonistic behaviour. If this was the Bullingdon Club acting like this, it would have been socially permissible. As with A Tap on the Shoulder, there’s a sense that O’Connor is gleefully sending up “straight” values when the supposed “betters” within the societal hierarchy are disregarding any ethical rules in order to get, and remain, ahead. Alan Bleasdale later picked up the same thread in The Muscle Market (1981) and Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), in a more brutal era as Thatcher’s restoration kicked in, when survival humour became essential.

This play is interesting in how much it holds up the central married couple Rosie (Toni Palmer) and Ricketts (George Sewell) to be, if not celebrated, then certainly understood and empathised with. This is a bold move, given how easily their behaviour would have been perceived as ‘feckless’, say, or irresponsible by a large number of viewers. Indeed, there is a moral voice in your head when watching this which questions their behaviour, and O’Connor’s play is wise enough to depict how the boy Scimpy O’Dell (Dennis Golding) is headed himself towards just the same life of petty crime and limited horizons.

Conversely, the vigour of the portrayal of the community life around the pub is shown to be justification enough in itself for these cycles of behaviour. Prison doesn’t seem unduly onerous, and Ricketts tellingly says he isn’t worried about his son, as the “welfare” will provide for him. Yet the authorities – in the person of a young bouffant-haired implied bluestocking bureaucrat, or social worker – are intent on saving money and perhaps wisely want him in the custody of the family elders, as the least worst option.

The social worker

The Princess (Carol White) adds to this, noting that if Scrimpy gets sent to Borstal he will become ever more hardened. Sadly, his path now seems inexorably set.

The play feels like it is goading the moralists of right and left, with its brazenly amoral standpoint, and this is a strength and a limitation. While the tone is drastically different, there’s something of the scenario of a runaway child at large in London we see in William Trevor’s Play for Today Eleanor (1974). Barrie Keeffe’s Nipper (1977) is an altogether darker, more mordant imagining of this scenario, more directly indicting negligent parenting, and exploring many specific effects on the teenager, in a starkly melodramatic and maximalist manner.

While O’Connor’s play feels a touch more slight than these, and indeed for coming right after the Nigel Barton plays, the choral (and occasionally more modern sounding) music from Stanley Myers, with Nemone Lethbridge’s playground chant or carol-ljke lyrics, provides a unique choric element similar to that in Three Clear Sundays. This adds a kind of folkloric, anthropological feel, influenced by Iona and Peter Opie, to the already heady wry comedy of the narrative. For me, this is a somewhat more successful play, overall, than The End of Arthur’s Marriage (1965), as it enables a reading against the grain of O’Connor’s intent: ambivalently conveying how transitory hedonistic joy bound up with cyclical lives of crime and the ‘almost suffocating warmth’ of its particular working-class environment, to quote Dennis Potter.

Best performance: DENNIS GOLDING

Children smoking scene anticipates Nipper (1977)

Rita Webb, George Tovey, Wally Patch and the rest of the O’Connor/Loach repertory lot do a good job again in conveying an overpowering, loud hubbub of London, or even London Irish voices. The community itself is the formidable stuff of this play, so it seems almost perverse to try to single out an individual ‘best’ performance!

Webb, Toni Palmer, Hilda Barry, Carol White and Fanny Carby are a gallery of lively, varied women. George Sewell, following his memorable appearance in Up the Junction, has a kind of strangely crooked earnestness here, like a photocopy of the Tallyman’s acted persona to the punters in Dunn’s plays. Whether bursting into song in the boozer, enjoying a very brief sexual intimacy again with his wife, or musing on how he will definitely be going ‘straight’ and into the haulage industry, it’s a finely grained performance from an actor who feels like a ‘tache-less variant upon James Beck’s spiv Walker in Dad’s Army, enjoying life in Sixties London. Sewell was to play another right wrong ‘un of a father in Joyce Neary’s excellent, overlooked Play for Today Taking Leave (1974), a play in which his domestic wrongs and defenestration are given great emphasis!

Ultimately, it does have to be Dennis Golding, for a brilliantly subtle and plaintive performance, having the sort of reined in understatement Play for Today would often elicit from child actors.

Best line: “It’s just that, y’ know, all these people around him. Y’ know, it’s there from the beginning, innit? He doesn’t ask to be brought into this world. From the moment he’s speaking, what is he here?” (The Princess to Policeman about Scimpy)

Audience size: 10.69 million

The TAM Top 20 incorporated The Coming Out Party in joint nineteenth place, with 4.8 million households viewing: roughly equivalent to 10.56 million individual viewers, indicating little gulf at all between the two audience measurement systems (Television Today, 6 January 1966, p. 18). It didn’t appear in any of the regional Top Tens listed (ibid.).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 64.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (New Release [Arts magazine] / Vintage Years of Hollywood: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch [1934 film]), ITV (News / Hope & Keen [comedy series] / World Tonight Special: Peace on Earth – Vietnam)

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 28.6%

Reception: O’Connor’s play elicited a reasonably warm reception from most critics who assessed it, though not that many did! There was some interesting divergence of opinion which showed contesting visions of what The Wednesday Play should be. Viewers watched in their droves and there was a broad positivity in their reaction to the play, expressed – as ever – via an admiration for its realism.

Critic Peter Black felt O’Connor’s gifts ‘for sardonic comedy are being sadly pulled back by this compulsion to put across a false and sentimental philosophy’ (Daily Mail, 23 December 1965, p.3). He mused sceptically on ‘a pub stuffed with kindly crooks and Rita Webb’, termed Scimpy’s grandmother [played by Hilda Barry] ‘a kindly old fence’ (?!) and O’Connor’s ‘continuing thesis’ being ‘that honest folk are no more honest than crooks’ (ibid.). Black was dismayed to find himself agreeing with Mary Whitehouse, whom he termed ‘Big Sister’:

Big Sister will probably claim that its effect will be to encourage viewers to go out shoplifting and boozing. While I can’t agree that it could possibly influence any but imbeciles, I am exasperated to have to admit that it doesn’t do any good. (ibid.)

Lyn Lockwood found the play to be from the ‘same school of drama as that slice of life’, Up the Junction, also analogising it to a modern version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, ‘with strong undertones here and there of Damon Runyon’ (Daily Telegraph, 23 December 1965, p. 11). Lockwood noted how Scimpy was well on his way to ‘keeping the family tradition going’, being likely to end up ‘in the “nick”‘ himself (ibid.). She appreciated Ken Loach’s camerawork and ‘careful casting’ for giving the play ‘an unrehearsed look’, but distrusted O’Connor’s observation ‘through a glass sentimentally just on closing time’ – though did like Dennis Golding’s ‘present-day Tiny Tim’, Scimpy (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris noted the strand’s title sequence with ‘shots symbolising the vaunted up-to-the-minute qualities to be expected to follow’ and how Ken Loach was ‘the way-out wiz-kid if the documentary approach and the hand-held camera’ (Television Today, 30 December 1965, p. 10). Norris felt the play was as ‘sugary and sentimental as Little Lord Fauntleroy, nothing like as brutally realistic as East Lynne, with a band of crooks as lovably harmless as Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves’ (ibid.). She did enjoy it ‘all right’, finding it fun, but claimed it did not expose anything, stating she would give a ‘horse laugh’ to anyone claiming it ‘in any way posed a serious problem of the present day’ (ibid.).

As with some other critics, Norris noted the aesthetic appeal of Loach’s approach, but beneath this, felt it hard to believe in the characters’ ‘existence outside a musical comedy’ (ibid.). Thus, Norris liked its ‘vitality’, but felt it as ‘limp as a string of sausages […] as a play of social conscience’ – tellingly indicating this was now a core expectation of The Wednesday Play (ibid.). She mused that two ‘seemingly very real welfare officers discussed the boy with every sign of embarrassed awareness of the camera’, feeling most interest was aroused by Wally Patch, Alistair [sic] Williamson, Tommy Godfrey, Rita Webb, Dickie Owen, Fanny Carby, Toni Palmer and Alec Coleman, among the cast (ibid.).

Toni Palmer and Fanny Carby

She ended on Golding’s ‘natural talent’ and prophetically – with Kes (1969) on the horizon – about how Kenneth Loach ‘achieves wonders with juveniles’ (ibid.).

R.G.G. Price gave a bald, short review which seemed to synthesise many of the others’ points: ‘I also remember enjoying the acting’, in ‘a slightly sentimental piece about the inevitability of delinquency for the son of two rather jolly crooks’ (Punch, 5 January 1966, p. 28).

Outside London, N.B. loved the heightened aesthetic added to the neo-realism of the scenes of Scimpy on the streets: ‘He went in a quest. The magical freshness even of that world, through Scimpy’s eyes, was excellently conveyed. The voices of London schoolchildren singing carols were used to great element’ (Leicester Mercury, 23 December 1965, p. 14). They noted Golding’s natural performance and Cockney accent and ‘solemn courteous manner of speaking well observed’ by O’Connor, Big Al’s ‘patriarchal authority’ and Toni Palmer for giving Rosie ‘the right mixture of warmth, rumbustiousness and irresponsibility’ (ibid.). They also liked Inspector Brisby’s ‘fatherly, kind’ qualities as portrayed by Alister Williamson, and Loach’s smooth direction for making it a ‘good entertainment’ (ibid.).

W.D.A. admired how ‘The two strands of pathos and gusto were skilfully interwoven to make a memorable drama’ (Liverpool Echo, 23 December 1965, p. 2). In a very tellingly nuanced reading of an ultimately pleasurable text, they felt that despite the author’s ‘first-hand knowledge’, the play’s ‘hearts-of-gold image of the underworld seemed rather over-sentimentalised. But when a play is like a breath of fresh air you can forgive it much’ (ibid.).

Peggie Phillips was notably admiring of O’Connor’s play’s depths, perhaps especially in the context of the Christmas TV schedules offering a ‘diet of glossy idiocy’, including Ken Dodd making ‘stomach-turning gags like the corn-and-bunion gambit when our stomachs are seasonably queasy’ and the ‘not all that good’ Bruce Forsyth (The Scotsman, 27 December 1965, p. 7). Phillips felt The Coming Out Party had the ‘realism’ of Up the Junction in its ‘near documentary treatment of settings and characters’ and she regarded it as containing more ‘valuable social comment’ than Nell Dunn’s play. Phillips interpreted the play as reflecting ‘upon the plight of small children in the care of loving but feckless and criminal parents’ who are prone to a ‘maddening uselessness and egotism’ (ibid.).

Phillips was the only critic to note the ‘menacing aspect to the boy of the final lorry-hopping sequence’ (which also contains an irony in terms of Ricketts’s vague work aspirations) (ibid.). While I feel Phillips’s reading is slightly wish-fulfilment, texts are open to different meanings and clearly many will understandably react with concern as she did, and she reflects on the play’s ‘humanity, insight and wry humour’ (ibid.). I would say there is more of this than in Logue, Myers and Loach’s musical a month earlier. Phillips acclaimed Golding’s ‘natural brightness and innocence’ and how Palmer and Sewell ‘struck exactly the right note of affection and irresponsibility’ (ibid.). She added, in what must be an archetypal response to The Wednesday Play welcome to its makers:

This was a play to make social workers of us all [my emphasis] (ibid.).

A very large audience, clearly drawn to O’Connor’s work for its authentic autobiographical and entertaining elements, enjoyed it, by and large. An RI of 64 continued the appreciative responses following Potter’s Barton plays, with the majority enjoying its ‘mixture of ‘down-to-earth’ humour and pathos’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/715). Its truthfulness was commended, as was how it made ‘its point without moralizing’, featuring ‘real people with the right dialogue to match’ (ibid.). According with Peggie Phillips and my own readings, this human story left one thinking about it ‘long after seeing it; it had both a sad and a humorous touch without being morbid’ (ibid.).

While a few found it ‘too sordid, vulgar and unpleasant’, more accepted this is ‘part of the play’s veracity’, giving the viewer ‘plenty of insight into the behaviour of such people’ (ibid.). The moralistic minority rejected the play as not being their personal idea of ‘entertainment’; others complaining of dialogue in the noisy pub scenes being drowned out (ibid.). An especially virulent comment saw O’Connor’s play as ‘another load of muck which adds to the ego of this type of individual’, inflicted upon viewers like them (ibid.). However, nobody complained about the production itself and Dennis Golding was frequently regarded as ‘outstanding’ as Scimpy, among an ‘excellent’ cast who acted incredibly naturally (ibid.). If anything, the blending of the 16mm filmed inserts of street scenes and studio interiors was felt to be superior and more ‘authentic’ than Up the Junction, with no comments recorded about disjointed visuals or jarring shifts; this was seen as ‘completely ‘life-like” (ibid.).

A sole, touching news story emerged from this play: ‘TV-BOY GIVEN A GO-KART’ (The Kensington News & West London Times, op. cit.). In it, Golding from Barlby Road, North Kensington, was said to have ‘had a big Christmas surprise’, when writer Jimmy O’Connor called at his home and took him by taxi to Harrods store in Knightsbridge (ibid.). There he bought 4 ft. 4 ins. tall Dennis a £20 go-kart as a present to thank him for his ‘star performance’ in the play’; apparently, the writer saw him eagerly looking at the go-kart while filming and the ‘cast chipped in’ to buy it, keeping it a secret (ibid.). The article noted other local residents involved in the play: Rita Webb of Chepstow Road, and three other Notting Hill boys – Roy Thomas, Ted Peel and John Formosa – who were all also given gift vouchers (ibid.).

Overall, The Coming Out Party is another welcome shock of the new, which we can look back on from a distance as signifying a nation loosening up and viewers becoming more acquainted with, and aware of, the diverse types of people who lived in society. It signalled the tension in The Wednesday Play between earthy entertainment and social conscience, but also how these facets simply weren’t mutually exclusive. If you take the views expressed by Marjorie Norris, Peggie Phillips and the viewers together, you can observe how O’Connor’s play was generating very different thoughts and feelings. The dial had already been shifted by others among the 35 we’ve covered in 1965. Therefore, this one went without excessive controversy; despite what Black said, Whitehouse did not complain about it – or at least, the press did not disseminate her bleating. It marked how this sort of challenging, yet accessible, human drama was now established in prime time and could even run to a Christmas theme, while not sacrificing the strand’s trademark edge.

This sort of thing would be a fixture on BBC TV for the next two decades. Sentimental? Sometimes, but not in a dreary or obvious way. Socially extensive, in the way that Raymond Williams claimed drama was becoming more inclusively democratic? Invariably. This play is an implicit sardonic corrective to the conservative establishment’s obsession with privileged debutante balls, sometimes indeed known as ‘coming-out parties’.

This 1965 run has been remarkably diverse in terms of age and class, with women figuring better in the autumn and winter than before. While, regionally, it’s not quite as diverse as Play for Today would get due to Rose, Trodd, Maclaren, Zeiger and Parr, and London (and at times Oxford) dominates, what a marvellous range of London people we see…

Road safety poster at the cop shop subtly prefigures Scimpy getting on board the lorry…!

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

— Many, many thanks again to John Williams for supplying the press cuttings which have made these posts’ scope possible.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:10: ‘Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton’ (BBC1, 15 December 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 Wednesday Plays up to the end of 1965, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis. A selected number of plays from 1966-1970 will be covered.

03.10: Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (BBC One, Wednesday 15 December 1965) 9:45 – 11:05pm
Directed by Gareth Davies; Written by Dennis Potter; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editors: Rogert Smith and Tony Garnett; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram; Music by Ronnie Hazlehurst

Have you ever seen a party political broadcast that was even remotely honest? (Anne Barton)

It has long been recognised by politicians that undiscriminating cynicism about politicians is not in the public interest and leads to fascism. It may have been an unjust fear/suspicion this play would be thought cynical that delayed its production (Frederick Laws, see later citation)

Stand up Messrs McTaggert [sic], Smith, Trodd and Garnett and take a bow. (Michael Unger, see later citation)

The context of this play, set in the fictional West Barsetshire constituency, centring on the town of Barset, began well in advance of December 1965, and indeed Stand Up, Nigel Barton, covered here last week. Dennis Potter’s play, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton was commissioned – along with The Confidence Course – in July 1964, while still a TV critic and prospective Labour candidate for East Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire Mercury, 24 July 1964, p. 6). Exterior sequences were shot in Horsham (for market town atmosphere), Broadbridge Heath (for the council house estate) and actor Donald Hewlett’s home at Farthing Hill for fields, horses and riders, with the frontage of the Les Abbey getting office in the Carfax also used (West Sussex County Times, 23 April 1965, p. 6). This detailed article conveyed how the location shoot took four days and will ‘occupy no more than 10 minutes in the play’ (ibid.).

The studio sequences were shot on 12-14 April, while as W. Stephen Gilbert details, the budget ballooned to £13,611: a very high figure, which subsumed the budget for a whole other Wednesday Play slot (Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter. London: Sceptre, 1995, pp. 116, 119).

The anonymous Radio Times preview noted this was in ‘the world of politics’, but not Westminster, and the novelty of the play’s subject matter being dealt with in a comedy, and Potter’s use of his own experience (17 June 1965, p. 35). It previewed the narrative structure:

And as the dreary days pass, his will to do what every politician has to do gets weaker and weaker until he does what no politician can ever afford to do. (ibid.)

While the play had originally been mooted for a 6 May screening, it became fixed as 23 June instead. Potter was interviewed, noting how ‘People look on a candidate as roughly equivalent to a door-to-door salesman’ (The Gloucestershire Citizen, 19 June 1965, p. 7). The Peterborough Evening Telegraph trailed a ‘breezy farce’ (19 June 1965, page unclear); similarly, the Sunday Post previewed it as a *** / ***** proposition: ‘Potty politics! This is a farce about intrigues in rural elections’ (20 June 1965, p. 12).

Reports circulated that it had been taken off air ‘about three and a half hours before it was due to be shown’, with an existing play Colin Morris’s well-regarded With Love and Tears repeated in its place (The Birmingham Post, 24 June 1965, p. 1). The Daily Express reported that ‘the buzz at Broadcasting House was that the play’s theme of intrigue in rural politics might give offence to politicians’, and that Harold Wilson and Alec Douglas-Home were referred to in the play; while Potter was quoted as ‘very disappointed, but not surprised’ (24 June 1965, p. 7).

The Daily Mail reported that ‘three members of the script staff’ working on The Wednesday Play resigned in protest on 24 June at the decision to note show Potter’s play, but that they had withdrawn their resignations the same day after meeting Sydney Newman. Newman is quoted:

We fight all the time on a series like this. This squabble was of a serious kind. We aired the whole problem and an understanding has been reached. (25 June 1965, p. 9)

The Daily Mirror emphasised how in the script, Anne Barton ‘sneers: “What is your brave new society all about ? Harold being buddy-buddy with Lyndon Johnson, Polaris on the never-never”‘, also citing agent Jack’s dig at Sir Alec Douglas-Home (25 June 1965, p. 11).

For much of the play, Anne is more caustic than Nigel!

The Observer noted how producer James MacTaggart’s ‘jocular remark’ to Head of Plays Michael Bakewell that the play “had a go” at politicians led Bakewell to warn Newman, who, having recently made ‘soothing noise’ to Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV Campaign was alarmed and called in Head of Current Affairs, Paul Fox (27 June 1965, p. 18). Fox is said to have taken ‘the line that politicians should not be mocked and that the play was too accurate’! : a claim the newspaper mocked in the light of DG Greene’s recent claim that the BBC wanted to “talk about life as it really is”‘ (ibid.). Huw Wheldon was then called in, who congratulated Newman’s intervention, while Director of TV Kenneth Adam made the final call to order the play off (ibid.). The article further claimed that Potter was placated by Newman and told not to speak to the press, with a statement being put out blaming the withdrawal on unspecified production troubles, while story editor Roger Smith and his two assistants Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd handed in their resignations, which Newman refused to accept and were later withdrawn (ibid.).

While it was clearly something of a random case of bad luck or perfect storm timing, it’s hard not to feel that the postponement did a lot to increase Potter’s profile, already growing through his two books, journalism and other 1965 Wednesday Plays. The cause celebre element increased with Lord Ted Willis and Eric Paice of the Screenwriters’ Guild attacking the BBC’s ‘political censorship’, while Newman had drawn up a list of changes he wanted Potter to make (Daily Mail, 29 June 1965, p. 3). Potter’s prolific TV dramaturgy was to continue unabated, with Message for Posterity‘s commissioning for BBC Two confirmed (29 June 1965, p. 20).

Labour MP and future Arts minister Hugh Jenkins felt the BBC had ‘erred on the side of over-caution’ by taking off the play a few hours before it was due to be shown (Daily Telegraph, 1 July 1965, p. 27). Jenkins claimed: ‘The Director General should be told by the House that the BBC is perfectly at liberty to criticise us’ (Television Today, 8 July 1965, p. 9). John Woodforde claimed that the play had been taken off due to ‘the activities of campaigners’ (Sunday Telegraph, 4 July 1965, p. 11). Huw Wheldon, Controller of Programmes, flatly contradicted Woodforde, claiming Newman had watched it at the request of MacTaggart and had ‘decided it was not ready for transmission’, which Wheldon himself agreed with and ‘confirmed decision’: asserting there was no pressure whatsoever from ‘any source at all, other than Newman’s professional judgment and mine’ (Sunday Telegraph, 11 July 1965, p. 11).

The play was announced as given the go ahead after changes which purely involved Nigel and his agent Jack, ‘but 30 minutes of new dialogue have been recorded’, while Stand Up was announced too as Don’t Go Back, with its planned scheduling before Vote, Vote, Vote now clear (22 July 1965, p. 18).

The Stage‘s Light Entertainment column noted how Fred Berman, actor and toastmaster was ‘back in circulation’ following two months in hospital and would soon be seen as a toastmaster in Vote, Vote, Vote as well as in the new Frank Ifield film (18 November 1965, p. 3). The specific days the two plays were to be scheduled was clarified in the Birmingham Post (29 November 1965, p. 7).

The Sunday Post gave it a four-star rating (five was the maximum score, obtained by Play of the Month, The Joel Brand Story), trailing how Nigel’s ‘nerve cracks at a Council dinner and he causes a national scandal’ (12 December 1965, p. 12). The Daily Telegraph revealed that there had been three cuts to last week’s Stand Up: two references to sex and a different four-letter word to the one used by Kenneth Tynan that a comedian in the working men’s club used (13 December 1965, p. 17). Norman Hare reflected how even in the ‘course of about 30 seconds’ during Vote, Vote, Vote‘s trailer, there were ‘three different expressions that I doubt are ever heard in the Greene household – except, of course, from the TV set’ (ibid.). Manchester Evening News and Chronicle termed the play an ‘ironic farce about rural politics’ (15 December 1965, p. 2).

The Daily Record claimed the play was depicting ‘an important by-election’; while it isn’t as the result is never in doubt, and indeed we don’t even need to see the result, unlike in David Edgar’s Destiny (1978), its usage in this play has much symbolic significance, one of which being the unrepresentative nature of the First Past the Post system, with all such “safe” seats having a tranche of voters who will basically never have their views represented (15 December 1965, p. 18). Another preview mentioned Anne as Nigel’s ‘beautiful, well-bred wife’ and Nigel having established a career as a journalist, echoing Potter’s own post-university trajectory (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 15 December 1965, p. 3).

This time in the Radio Times, Tony Garnett introduced the play, reminding readers of Stand Up and quoting party agent Jack Hay’s wry lines about Barton being ‘A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one’ (9 December 1965, p. 41). The article had the same picture of Barton confronting the Tory candidate at the civic dinner as had appeared in the June edition. Garnett notes how Barton may be ‘a mere three weeks away from the comfortably padded benches of the Best Club in the World’, but that he ‘finds himself on every front page in a way he certainly had not planned’ (ibid.). The story editor also revealed this play ‘completes – for the time being at least – the vivid story of Nigel Barton, miner’s son, on the slippery ladder of success’ (ibid.).

Before my own review of the play… Potter expert Professor John Cook writes:

While Stand Up, Nigel Barton may have been the more sophisticated play structurally, it was the earlier-written but later-transmitted Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton that gained Potter the most decisive plaudits, winning him the Society for Film and Television Arts and the Screenwriters’ Guild awards for best TV play of 1965.

Certainly, there is a ‘zip’ to Vote, Vote, Vote which may be partly ascribed to the energy of the direction by Gareth Davies and to the performances (Keith Barron as Barton and
John Bailey as election agent Jack Hay are particular stand-outs). Yet it is also in the
way Potter, as writer, treats the audience as intelligent. Via the various conversations
and interactions of the main characters throughout the electoral campaign, the play
dramatises debates and tensions between idealism and pragmatism in party politics,
where there are no easy answers and where all sides may have something of a point.

It was a brilliant conceit by Potter to make Nigel’s election agent, Hay, the deeply cynical narrator. This distances us from the main character, Barton, providing us with a space and opportunity to judge him, while at the same time drawing the audience in as insider confidants and to a certain extent, accomplices with Hay. It is an extension of the cynical voice-over narrator Potter used in his immediate predecessor TV play (in terms of date of composition) The Confidence Course. This time, however, the narrator
is embodied and on-camera.

As an avid viewer of TV plus newspaper TV critic, Potter well understood that individuals who meet the camera’s gaze on television wield considerable authority and power – which is why, conventionally, the privilege of addressing the audience directly via TV tends to be reserved for newsreaders, reporters and presenters; the Royal Family and their Christmas messages, or politicians speaking to voters directly in party political broadcasts (PPBs). Potter later wrote his narrator device was intended to be a savage  parody of a PPB and could not believe his good fortune, when, on the night of the play’s eventual transmission, Vote, Vote, Vote was preceded by such a broadcast from then Conservative Party leader Edward Heath! On discovering this, Potter apparently spent some time on the telephone trying to persuade the BBC to go straight from Heath to the play itself with no intervening trails or title credits – but to no avail.[1]

The use of a cynical political operative as narrator continues to make the play feel very
modern to us today, not least because Potter’s device in Vote, Vote, Vote would later influence Andrew Davies’ acclaimed 1990 BBC TV adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ novel, House of Cards, through the cynical to-camera asides of Tory party schemer Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson). Twenty years later, this would be successfully retranslated into a US context for the hit series of the same name for Netflix (2013-2018) via the persona of Washington DC political operator, Frank Underwood, played by a pre-scandal Kevin Spacey.

Vote, Vote, Vote has other contemporary resonances too. The 1965 production captures well the growing disillusionment, sixty years ago, of sections of the progressive British Left with the then new Labour Government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson which had gained power at the October 1964 General Election with only the slimmest of majorities, following thirteen long years of Conservative rule. As Nigel’s ‘Hampstead socialist’ wife, Anne (Valerie Gearon), expresses her visceral disappointment to Nigel in Vote, Vote, Vote: ‘Labour colonial secretaries hobnobbing with corrupt old sheikhs. Labour defence secretaries paying for Polaris on the never never. Harold being buddy-buddy with Lyndon [US President Lyndon Johnson]… That’s your “signpost for the Sixties”’.

Rewatching the play in 2025 is to be struck by some of the similarities and parallels with the current UK political situation: not least, hopes and expectations following the election of a Labour Government after many years of Conservative rule quickly coming to be replaced with disappointment that nothing seems to have changed very much. There are other uncomfortable resonances too – when Nigel goes canvassing with his agent on the doorsteps and is asked by one woman what he is ‘going to do about the blacks’, we have disturbing echoes and parallels with the waves of anti-immigration
feeling circulating around certain quarters of UK society today. At one point, the play splices in 1920s newsreel footage of Oswald Mosley to remind that the future leader of the British fascists was once a rising star of the Labour Party. Warnings about the dangers of ‘man of the people’ populism may have felt relatively remote, even unlikely, to viewers watching in 1965. They feel less so now.

[TM: This all also presages how Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher were able to appeal to large sections of the working-class with their talk of “Rivers of Blood” in 1968 and being “swamped by an alien culture” in 1978, respectively]

Newsreel footage of Mosley is contrasted in the play with footage of the famous charismatic Welsh Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan, seen protesting at a 1956 rally in Trafalgar Square against the Conservative Government’s handling of the Suez Crisis. Throughout the play, Bevan is held up as the very apogee of socialist idealism against which modern party politics is found to be wanting. Indeed the name of Potter’s ‘working class hero’, Nigel Barton, is a lexical, and perhaps also literal, corruption of ‘Nye Bevan’. There may be ‘a lot of good’ in Nigel as his agent tells us but even his wife Ann acknowledges there is a ‘little bit of the charlatan’ in Nigel as well. To Hay, he is ‘a splendid candidate’ for the modern electoral process: ‘The sort of bloke I’d never buy a
second-hand car from’.

Here, the play dramatises and captures well the eternal dilemma of Labour Party politics from at least since the Second World War. From Bevan to Wilson; Foot to Blair; Corbyn to Starmer, Labour, throughout its history, has frequently oscillated between purist ‘Red Flag’ commitment to founding principles – which greatly appeals to the party grass-roots but often struggles to win wider traction and ultimate power with the so-
called ‘mainstream’ UK voters (and is largely crucified by a hostile media). Or, there have been the alternative attempts to go all-out for what Jack Hay calls in the play ‘the floating voter with his house, his car and his 2.8 children’. ‘Compromise, compromise. That’s the way for you to rise’, as Anne teases Nigel at one point. But at what cost all this compromising to win power if it threatens to betray the very goals and principles which led to one wishing to stand for office in the first place?

As has been well documented, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton ran into a censorship row when it was originally planned to air in June 1965.[2] During my PhD research into Potter’s work, I had the interesting experience of asking one of those BBC management ‘censors’, former Head of BBC TV Drama Group, Sydney Newman, precisely what he objected to about the original version of Vote, Vote, Vote. Here is what he had to say:

It posed a problem for me because it was about a Labour Party candidate… I was  terribly worried about this and I had some of it modified and maybe incurred the wrath of Potter… The word ‘censor’ is lousy but if you’re running a department, you’re making judgments. You can call those judgments ‘censorship’ or you can call them judgments. My judgment was that we would get into trouble if we alienated the Labour Party… I brought that to England with me, my Canadian puritanical stuff… And of course I never had it with [Potter] directly – I had the big fight with Jimmy [MacTaggart] and Jimmy defended Potter which was good and so
did the story editor [Roger Smith] defend Potter.[3]

Within his personal creative notebooks housed in the Dennis Potter Archive, Forest of Dean (https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/dennis-potter-archive) is the original intended ending for the play that provided such a focus for many of the BBC management objections. This original ending comes after the dissolve between Anne and Jack Hay and the separate prompting of both to Nigel that in order to get on in politics, he must learn to compromise and ‘become a dutiful party hack, ha ha’:

HAY: Never mind, Nigel. Never mind. You ought to have guessed that we’ve got things all buttoned up by now. We’re very proud of our traditions in this country, old mate.

(To audience)

Oh yes. You might care to know the result of the by-election. Well, what do you think? I mean, would you vote for a candidate who went like this to his opponent?

Barton gives the two-fingered salute to Hay, who roars with laughter.

BARTON: I’ll have the last laugh anyway. (To us). Because if you object to this play,[4] folks, the only thing you can do is WRITE TO YOUR MP (voice savage) And the best of British!

While not to condone the original censorship, Potter in the end was probably better-served by the requirement to change the conclusion to the version we now have. In the revised version, Nigel’s direct address to camera; his pausing over the word ‘privilege’ and his automaton-like rehearsal of the play’s title line, all make the same point as the original ending but much less explicitly so. Keith Barron’s performance and Gareth Davies’ direction, especially the latter’s rapid intercutting between Nigel’s face and the
big, bright yet meaningless campaign poster, now carry more of the weight of the meaning compared to the original ending and this is dramatically effective. Potter would later come to agree: the revised ending was probably ‘more powerful. But because it didn’t say it in one sentence [the BBC managers] could pick on, it was let through’ for transmission.[5]

Postponing broadcast until one week after Stand Up also did Potter, ultimately, a great favour. If, as Humphrey Carpenter has stated, scheduling the play after Stand Up, Nigel Barton helped ‘subtly soften the impact of Vote, Vote, Vote, presenting it as a second chapter of Nigel’s story rather than letting it stand alone as an anti-political tract’[6]; at the same time it helped create a sort of ‘mini-series event’ of linked plays that got Potter attention and made his work stand out from the normal televisual flow. In Vote, Vote, Vote, when Nigel discusses his time at Oxford or reminisces about his coalminer father, now the audience are able to have a greater context for understanding and sympathy, based on the fact they viewed the companion play the week before. The censorship row over Vote, Vote, Vote in June of 1965 had been well covered by the British press – with Potter astutely making sure he got his side of the story in first to his colleagues in Fleet Street before BBC management had a chance to respond; a pattern he would learn from and come to repeat throughout his career. As a consequence, there was somewhat of an air of expectation and anticipation in the press by the time Vote, Vote, Vote was eventually transmitted. All of this positioned Potter very well indeed for awards season early the following year.

As the writer himself would later recall, only then, as he was sitting at the awards tables,
did he begin to think we ‘could manage. We would be able to survive’.[7] With a wife and
three young children to support (including a baby, Robert, born earlier that year in March
1965), plus coping with a serious debilitating illness (severe psoriatic arthropathy) that
made regular employment difficult, Potter had given up a promising journalistic and political career to pursue the somewhat riskier venture of trying to make a name for himself as a television playwright; reliant, always, on being able to gain regular commissions to pay the bills and survive financially. But as 1965 drew to a close, he could look back at no fewer than four of his television scripts having been produced and transmitted within the space of a single year as Wednesday Plays: two of which would later come to be nominated for awards. And more commissions were on the way.

At one of the awards ceremonies he attended in the spring of 1966, after a toast was called for the various winners and nominees, Potter raised his champagne glass: ‘”You don’t toast yourself!” hissed a very big, very powerful TV executive… “No? [Potter] thought, “That is what you bloody think !”’[8]

[1] Dennis Potter, Introduction, The Nigel Barton Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p.17.
[2] For example, see accounys in Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography, London: Faber and Faber, 1998, pp.158-164; John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, rev 2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 37-9 and notes 57-59 in Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams (eds), Dennis Potter The Art of Invective Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94, London: Oberon Books, 2015, p.337.
[3] Sydney Newman, personal interview, recorded 28 February 1990, London. Cited in Cook 1998, p.38. Indeed The Wednesday Play’s first story editor Roger Smith – Potter’s closest friend from Oxford days who had also been best man at his wedding – resigned in protest at the censorship of his friend’s script.
Though as Smith freely admitted, he had been planning to quit anyway owing to the pressure of having to find and commission so many new play scripts for The Wednesday Play. Smith would be replaced by Tony Garnett, assisted by Kenith Trodd. Over the next few years, Smith would go on his own radical political journey away from Labour party politics, attending the May 1968 riots in Paris and joining the Socialist Labour League (the forerunner of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party).
[4] ‘Play’ was later changed to ‘documentary’ in the original version of the ending that went into initial production.
[5] Dennis Potter, interview, in Paul Madden (ed.), Complete Programme Notes for a Season of British Television Drama 1959-73. Held at the National Film Theatre 11 – 24 October 1976, London: British Film Institute, 1976, p.35.
[6] Carpenter, p.164.
[7] Cited in Carpenter, p.174.
[8] Ibid., p.174.

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

In its way, this is a similarly focused play to its predecessor in broadcast terms, Stand Up, Nigel Barton. However, clearly its vaulting ambition in tackling the political system and social organisations and processes behind politics will be harder to make humanly appealing.

Potter manages it by emphasising Barton’s inner and outer battles against the pervasive cynicism and settling for small victories within the system, as represented by his agent Jack Hay (John Bailey). You gradually grow to understand and respect Jack rather more, due to the play’s depiction of voters – some are themselves cynical about all parties, one housewife meekly and blandly relays his working-class, Labour voting husband’s racist attitudes, all in the old people’s home are totally oblivious. Earlier on, a chat with agent Jack depicts him noting how the racism of many voters cost them, pointedly signifying how certain Tory candidates in 1964, like Peter Griffiths, openly espoused racism. The play admirably confronts this context and dares, rightly, to blame the voters. This scapegoating segment of them, anyway.

This, combined with Barton’s wife Anne’s development into a more Machiavellian, even Lady Macbeth-like figure, seems to signify Potter feeling a resigned accommodation with Jack’s perspective is needed. Anne’s late shift is not necessarily her reneging on her left-wing beliefs, indeed she is inspired by how fired up Barton gets at the Civic dinner even, even mimicking his v-sign to the assembled dignatories. A third play, or a series even, with Anne herself standing or being the power behind the ‘throne’, could have been highly compelling. Surely, the Bartons moving to a Labour seat would have been crucial: you can imagine them becoming urban gentrifiers in London a few years down the line.

While this play feels a tad overextended, there is effective use of newsreel footage of an anti-Suez invasion speech by Nye Bevan, and later, Oswald Mosley in the early 1930s. The play’s deep political heft is further enforced by contrasting speeches by Cyril Luckham’s Tory candidate and Keith Barron’s Labour candidate at the Civic event: deeply contrasting, showing Barton speaking from the heart to shatter the rosy and complacent – and casually nasty and exclusive – vision of Britain the Tory espouses.

Potter creates mordantly funny scenes here. The one in the old people’s home has some of the perceptively surreal edge of certain scenes in The Singing Detective (1986).

The droll opening shows none of the fox hunting people in Lincolnshire being concerned in the slightest that the sitting Tory MP Harry (same name as Nigel’s father!) has dropped dead! All are far more concerned with the horse’s well-being, several of them even laughing at his demise! A more working-class voter later expresses concern for the fox…!

Potter’s gift for barbed comedy continues in his portrayal of Nigel’s wife Anne (Valerie Gearon), a delightfully haughty leftie, from a well-to-do background who is initially even more politically purist than him, concerned with matters like alienation and speaking the leftist lexicon very naturally. We don’t hear about when, how or why they got married, but clearly socialism has been the go-between for this pair! His Midlands/Northern mining background and her bourgeois “Hampstead socialism” seems symbolic of the fairly solid alliance of groups of voters tending to go for Labour throughout the next few decades, but gradually less so from the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike on, especially, and whose descendants seem close to total estrangement today.

This play didn’t quite feel as gripping, overall, as last week’s, perhaps because not all that much happens (I know this shouldn’t necessarily matter to a Beckett fan like myself!). But then the human encounters with voters I’ve mentioned are sharply drawn and the climactic Civic event is well etched, conveying the wretched Tory complacency and then Nigel’s articulate, heartfelt challenge but which seems doomed. I’d recalled the play as despairing and succumbing to the same cynicism Jack expresses, but perhaps Anne’s excitement at Nigel’s new honesty in taking on the establishment suggests a new opportunity? Albeit one where he would have to rein in his real passions in order to get elected, first…

So, overall, I liked the rather more open-ended implications in this play than I’d recalled from my previous viewing, probably 20 years ago when the 2Entertain DVD I own was released (or maybe via a BBC Four repeat)? It’s actually suggesting the way forward may be a form of ‘entryism’ before its time, with Anne and Nigel’s anti-establishment democratic socialism predating the Militant Tendency, or the Corbynite insurgency of 2015, though the particular tactics involved may cleave closer to Jack Hay’s way of doing things, at least initially…

Best performance: VALERIE GEARON

Keith Barron is again excellent, managing to be perhaps more likeable here even, and in his set piece speech, he seems to have fully achieved a full identification anew with his father’s values, and is not letting him down anymore. While it may have been vainglorious self-sabotage, it at least allows him to feel true to himself again, and gets Anne believing in him again, after both of them have clearly been utterly despondent at his bland, glad handling persona.

John Bailey is also brilliant, emotionally keeping the lid on, masking through cynical humour, but himself from a rather tougher social background than Nigel was. There’s a touch of the self-hating charlatan Archie Rice at times, but who is perhaps doing some incremental utilitarian good, though, actually, the remoteness of Labour having any chance of ever winning this particular seat makes his calculated approach absurdly quixotic. Cyril Luckham performs a Tory blowhard exceptionally well, destroying the myth that One Nation types were always dominant in their Heath-led era. His command of political “bromides” shows why he would be such ideal casting as a key character in LWT’s excellent dystopian serial, The Guardians (ITV, 1971).

But, oh, the accolade this week has to go to Valerie Gearon, a performer new to me. I thought Potter made Anne a character with far more depth than, say, Jill Blakeney, who Vickery Turner did a valiant job in interpreting. You can fully grasp why an idealistic, intelligent man like Nigel would fall for someone like the bookish and sophisticated Anne, who is the epitome of the progressive “modish” thinking of the 1960s, but who also feels superior to the practical realities of grassroots politics. Brainy Anne has read probably as many words about politics and society as whole estates worth of people who her husband canvasses.

Valerie Gearon makes you fully believe that bookish Anne is an analytical lover of Brechtian theatre, seeing through illusions, and that she most certainly has read Dennis Marsden and Brian Jackson’s Education and the Working Class pelican tome. Gearon has a wonderful array of wry facial expressions and the sort of gently sardonic, warm and knowing voice not too far away from Barbara Flynn as Jill Swinburne in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Trilogy (ITV, 1984-88). The absurdities of politics playing out and affecting people’s lives, including Nigel’s and her own, provokes many an Anne eye-roll, while her evidently well calibrated positions on every issue makes her a formidable equal partner in the home environment. A relationship unable to contain political discussion, argument and yet overall accord isn’t really going to last!

Best line: “You are more deeply upset by a bad review for a Brecht play than a Labour by-election defeat” (Nigel to Anne)

The following from Jack may be the deepest, cutting to the core of what Potter is communicating, but the above is just so funny and helps define Anne’s character just as we are seeing Gearon’s exquisitely detailed portrayal build.

“You may despite me. But don’t blame me. ‘Cos it’s all your fault. There’s a lot of good in him, a lot of good, but you’d never vote for a Nigel Barton in a million years…” (Jack)

“Rolling Stones gather no votes”: perhaps sometimes for the best, as some of the evidence in Daniel Rachel’s new book details, though they improved in the 1980s, as another new book Justin Lewis recounts!

Audience size: 7.87 million

The Financial Times carried a TAM Top 20 ratings feature, also revealing that Heath’s PPB was seen by 3.5 million homes on BBC and 5.65 million on ITV – a rough estimate in total of 20.13 million individual viewers (30 December 1965, p. 12). That would be utterly unthinkable today: despite what Potter’s play observed, people were still clearly paying relatively high levels of attention to leading politicians. 3.8 million homes tuned into Vote, Vote, Vote, inferring an 8.36 million audience according to TAM data (ibid.).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 69.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: Easy Living), ITV (Great Temples of the World: Chartres Cathedral / Wrestling)

Significantly, the play followed a Conservative Party Political Broadcast (9.30pm)! At some point in the play, the wrestling on TV is actually mentioned! Showing ITV’s kaleidoscopic variety of tones, the previous programme was a ‘reading’ of Chartres by Sir Kenneth Clark, no less.

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed or mentioned after broadcast in London press publications consulted: 71.4%

Reception: I am going to call this as the best received Wednesday Play by press critics of any we’ve covered so far, and it was received almost as well outside London as within it. There were some especially insightful reviews from Julian Holland, Adrian Mitchell, Patrick Skene Catling and Frederick Laws, who all thought a bit more deeply about the play than the average response. Viewers were largely very positive too, and there were many of them!

Lyn Lockwood did an abrupt about-turn, praising the play’s ‘wit, spontaneity and heart’, where usually The Wednesday Play did not in her view deliver these qualities (Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 17). It was ‘hugely entertaining’, ‘all written with enormous, sometimes Rabelaisian gusto and given the performances it deserved’ by Barron and Bailey (ibid.).

Just as positively, Julian Holland noted how the play showed ‘we must be growing up’ by allowing such a play without any disclaimers or censorship (Daily Mail, 16 December 1965, p. 3). Holland grasped more than many of the critics when he claimed that Potter had a deep understanding of politicians: ‘Perhaps, he adds, they need to lie and cheat and humiliate themselves if they are to change the world’ (ibid.). Holland applauded its ‘merciless ridicule’, not just of the system, but of ‘the compromising sneering at ideals’, while citing Barton’s incisive line: “you try to be honest through the amplifier of a loudspeaker van” (ibid.). Holland liked how Potter made points, in a sledgehammer way, while being very funny: ‘his plays have an old fashioned narrative gaiety that is now rare’ (ibid.).

James Thomas loved the play’s ‘irreverent digs’, then and now always a position Tory papers find easier to publish when a Labour government is in power (Daily Express, 16 December 1965, p. 2). Thomas extolled a ‘caustic’ and ‘inspired piece which reeked of high experience and disillusion’, Bailey and Barron’s ‘Superb performances’ and ‘Bold, unusual strokes’ from director Davies, while typically closing with the comment: ‘But definitely the writer’s play’ (ibid.). In the same edition, Martin Jackson reported that BBC Governors were aiming to take a tighter ‘grip’ on programmes; this can only be seen, I’d argue, as a risible censorious approach few critics or viewers would have wanted in the case of Potter’s play (ibid., p. 7).

Mary Crozier felt this was ‘much better’ than the earlier televised Barton play, noting that Nigel still had a ‘chip’ on his shoulder, still being ‘a bore recounting his class struggle to his […] beautiful middle-class wife’ (Guardian, 16 December 1965, p. 6). Crozier especially admired the ‘sardonic reflections upon the whole process of the by-election’, and how Nigel was ‘eventually persuaded to retail rubbishy claptrap to the electors’, while the canvassing interviews ‘will remain in the memory as comic episodes of the first order’ (ibid.). Despite this high praise, she felt it wasn’t all consistently brilliant and hoped this ‘political cartoonist’ would improve (ibid.).

Mary Holland was more sceptical, finding it ‘far too obviously subjective to be convincing’ (The Observer, 19 December 1965, p. 21) – a truly bizarre argument, given Potter’s whole non-naturalistic mission and desire to get to the real through subjectivity! Yet, Holland cleaved to the critical consensus: applauding its design and direction’s ‘huge panache’ and the actors’ ‘obvious gusto’ (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell argued that ‘During 1965 dramatic electricity has leapt most often’ from The Wednesday Play, claiming most of the 35 plays had been ‘to wildly varying degrees, successful’ (Sunday Times, 19 December 1965, p. 31). Its basic policy ‘tended to work. Its story editors chased authors who were writing about 1965, but who usually had guts enough to avoid modishness’, though he felt they were likelier to have welcomed Ibsen’s Ghosts, but not Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, suggesting establishing ‘different, but equally enterprising production teams’ (ibid.). Mitchell’s panegyric continued:

But consider the achievements. David Mercer’s superlative script “… And Did Those Feet?”, Anthony Page’s direction of “Horror of Darkness”, Kenneth Loach’s work on half a dozen plays including “Wear a Very Big Hat” and the Logue/Myers musical, “The End of Arthur’s Marriage.” (ibid.)

Mitchell also noted the prominent parts James O’Connor and Dennis Potter had played. He felt the opening sequences of Vote, Vote, Vote – as when Nigel deals ‘with the holy Marxism of his wife’ – were witty, but ‘comparatively pain-free’ (ibid.). He admired the incisive shift into dramatising pain in the move from the old people’s home to the civic after-dinner scene:

It was at this point that Mr Potter unleashed his heat and his eloquence and honed the whole play down to a gleaming cutting edge. As the speech was overwhelmed by the noise of dinner guests bashing their silver cutlery on the tables in a bland prison riot, it became clear that Mr Potter is not a promiser or a tumbler. He is a genuine lightning-manufacturer. (ibid.)

Mitchell was inspired to express ‘The fervent hope that the televising of Parliament [not to happen for another 23 years?] will force the PPB to lay down its head, die and make room for more urgent, honest programmes’, implicitly situating Potter’s play alongside stage works like Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig (1963), Theatre Workshop’s Oh What A Lovely War! (1963) and Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965), and his highest valued TV programme of all, Peter Watkins’s Culloden (1964). In contrast, D.A.N. Jones had yet to see Vote, Vote, Vote, but his mentioning it when reviewing Stand Up again show its cultural centrality (New Statesman, 17 December 1965, p. 981).

Patrick Skene Catling bluntly claimed Potter was practising ‘the art of invective […] with such bitterly comic inventiveness and vehemence’ that hadn’t been even since John Osborne’s early days (Punch, 22 December 1965, p. 935). Catling accurately noted how Jimmy Porter ‘had given up’ and was ‘a mere commentator, a backward-looking one at that’, with Look Back in Anger full of a negative energy and defeatism (ibid.). In contrast, Barton finally assumes a ‘defiant dignity’ with his barnstorming, honest speech, and the play’s following Heath’s PPB gave it even greater charge: ‘the play’s attack was so comprehensive that it had a damaging effect on the credibility of political promises of every tincture’ (ibid.). In a superior review, Catling noted Gareth Davies’s ‘keen appreciation of the value of extreme close-ups on television’, utilising them for Jack’s ‘confidential asides’; he was one of very few to even mention Valerie Gearon’s fine performance, making ‘some richly literary lines sound naturally spontaneous, such as: “You make Machiavelli seem like Godfrey Winn.”‘ (ibid.). Catling then detailed a range of scenes ‘depicted with the passionate hyperbole of genuine indignation strongly felt’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws regarded Nigel as ‘a more likeable and active hero’ than in the previous week’s play and extolled Aimee Delamain’s ‘remarkable performance as an idealistic old lady who could see the sincerity behind the agent’s cynicism’, which Laws then sets in context of both Nigel and Jack’s fathers’ hardships and medical ailments and the old people’s home scene (The Listener, 23 December 1965, p. 1047). Laws felt the climactic speech ‘a bore’, but loved the follow-up scene where Anne flattered Nigel, saying his indignation was “a marvellous political weapon”, and her face merged with that of the agent’ (ibid.). Laws rightly identified how the play’s scepticism was ‘well buttered with surprise and sentiment’, and how the contrasting uses of Bevan and Mosley ‘made good points quickly’ (ibid.).

Outside the capital, D. McM. termed it a ‘contentious play, but stimulating’, critical of how Potter drew his Labour characters realistically, but made the one Tory a caricature, albeit a cunning one (Belfast Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 9). Perceptively, they noted how voters were also indicted:

Anyone who has tramped the streets as a canvasser will have recognised, with mixed feelings of amusement and frustration, the accuracy of his descriptions of doorstep interviews. (ibid.)

Argus went so far as to proclaim the current series of Wednesday Plays ‘totally magnificent’: ‘None of the plays have been conventional, stereotypes or easily acceptable’ (Daily Record, 16 December 1965, p. 15). They loved ‘every cynical second’ of Vote, Vote, Vote, with its amusingly convincing insights into party politics, Barron and Bailey’s performances, and how Barton’s line about party political broadcasts commented on Edward Heath’s preceding one! (ibid.)

N.B. praised Barron ageing cleverly as Nigel, Gearon as a ‘delightfully cool daughter of a rich Hampstead socialist’, while reflecting how those of Nigel’s generation or any who are ’embattled in the class war’ would be entertained by the play, but that it may struggle to appeal more widely (Leicester Mercury, 16 December 1965, p. 13). GTL went further in praising Barton’s speech at the Barset council dinner as ‘superb’, alongside John Bailey’s performance, acclaiming the play as being ‘as fine as anything I’ve seen in years’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 2).

Rodney Tyler liked a better than average episode of US drama series The Fugitive, but found the fugitive Nigel Barton ‘far better’ still (Reading Evening Post, 16 December 1965, p. 2). Tyler felt Barton ‘cracked and gave into his wife’s style of politics – Hampstead and dry Algerian sherry – only to realise that his wife did not know what she wanted either’ (ibid.). Tyler garlanded ‘one of the funniest pieces of anti-political satire that I have ever seen’, admiring Nigel’s truthful final speech that we all know our form of politics is the biggest sham going, ‘but we all take part in it and follow the rules just the same’ (ibid.).

Linda Dyson liked how Barton’s passion returned: ‘He made the speech of his life, lost his temper and probably his deposit’, and Jack’s genuflections at an earlier meeting – a very funny scene – every time Nigel mentions old age pensioners! (The Birmingham Post – Midland Magazine, 18 December 1965, p. IV). Dyson applauded how ‘Every political witticism and cynicism was packed into the script’, including Anne’s caustic remarks about party political broadcasts and Jack’s earning that if you start dragging in honesty, everybody will stay at home watching the wrestling (ibid.).

Bill Smith felt this comedy was ‘excruciatingly funny’, exposing our democratic electoral system’s ‘phoniness’, unsubtly but with ‘a clever sincerity it lifted the lid off party politics just enough to let out sufficient odour to make apathy towards political claptrap and smooth, glib-tongues and glad-handed power seekers a stand worth fighting for’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 18 December 1965, p. 9). I would say this was a misreading of Potter’s underlying position as ‘damn them all’ cynicism; it is a scathing depiction of the system, but his sympathy is clearly with the Bartons and, even, Jack to a degree. Smith thought this was ‘even more enjoyable’ than Stand Up, liking Potter’s unique voice, conveyed through Barton (ibid.).

There was even an editorial mentioning the play in a Newcastle-upon-Tyne based newspaper, which saw its significance in how it ‘sums up the nation’s developing dislike for politicians’, an ‘unhealthy state of affairs’, stemming ‘fron the non-participation of the electorate in the process of democratic government’ (17 December 1965, p. 8). Interestingly, this editorial sided with Barton’s critique of the affluent society, claiming it breeds ignorance of those struggling and ‘completely non-political [values]’ (ibid.). The article ended by claiming most politicians remain ‘honourable and deserving of our respect’, noting pithily that Nigel Barton is fictitious ‘and we would do well to remember it’ (ibid.).

There was a local press report that Lincoln MP Dick Taverne had appeared on BBC TV show Points of View, interviewed by Kenneth Robinson on reactions to Vote, Vote, Vote (Lincolnshire Echo, 18 December 1965, page unclear). Taverne is said to have liked the play but not Barton as a character as he wasn’t ‘sincere’ (did he actually watch right to the end?!) and ‘certainly did not like the image of the party agent’, while also reflecting that he himself was embarrassed about asking electors to vote for him personally (ibid.).

The audience research report showed a high RI of 64, four up on Stand Up, and comfortably above the norm for The Wednesday Play (VR/65/702). The large audience size and significant ratings win can be attributed partly to Sir Kenneth Clark’s highbrow ITV offering, though the Wrestling was also part of the mix that Potter’s play defeated! 60% gave it the highest two scores, with only 16% awarding it the lowest, with the play appealing ‘very much to a substantial majority of those reporting, who evidently regarded it as a hard-hitting and thoroughly entertaining expose of electioneering techniques’, and thought it ‘intelligent, original and highly amusing’ (ibid.).

The blend of ‘lifting the cover’ on politics with ‘humour and humanity’ made for ‘excellent entertainment’, with viewers hoping ‘the next is as good’ (ibid.). The fraction who disliked it were typically resistant to ‘bad language’, crudeness or vulgarity, or indeed that it had been ‘unpleasantly cynical’: a misinterpretation taken much more positively by several of the aforementioned critics! (ibid.). A few found it ‘tedious and wordy’, lacking in action, but generally most found the canvassing scenes and the after dinner speech ‘brilliant’ (ibid.). Viewers appreciated agent Jack’s ‘pungent asides’ to them, with one arguing the play ‘Should shake people’s faith in the so-called democratic principle – but I doubt whether it will’ (ibid.).

There was deep, wide admiration for Bailey and Barron’s performances and their ‘struggle’, with ‘a small group’ also referring ‘appreciatively to Valerie Gearon’s and several claiming the minor roles were ‘particularly well played’ (ibid.). The production was commended, with a few feeling the vintage newsreel footage out of place but others found this ‘effective’, while all interiors and exteriors were ‘considered realistic’, following the typical viewer expectations of verisimilitude (ibid.).

In the press, Mrs. E. Radcliffe, Pilgrims-way, Lenham, Kent wrote in to praise ‘the best play I have seen this year’, calling Bailey ‘superb’ and finding the Bartons’ relationship ‘so true, earthy and sometimes downright crude, but it had an impact that came over beautifully’ (Sunday Mirror, 19 December 1965, p. 22). In Glasgow’s Sunday Post, a Miss Sheila Miller was just as effusive, stating: ‘Nigel Barton was one of the best characters we’ve had on the screen for ages. Let’s have a series about him’ (19 December 1965, p. 12).

‘Let’s have a series about him’ (and Jack and Anne!)

Journalist Michael Unger commanded The Wednesday Play team, going so far as to give them an ‘Ungery for the Best Television of the Year’, saying the strand had ‘woken us up to the full capabilities of the medium’ (Reading Evening Post, 24 December 1965, p. IX). Unger listed Up the Junction, Dan, Dan, the Charity Man [wrongly printed as ‘Sam, Sam’], The End of Arthur’s Marriage, Stand Up and And Did Those Feet? (ibid.)

There was also an extensive interview published on Christmas Day (!) with producer James MacTaggart, who is said to speak in a ‘flat-vowelled Glasgow accent’ (Daily Record, 25 December 1965, p. 6). He lucidly rubbished the pearl clutching tendency of the moralistic minority:

They say that ‘the public’ won’t stand for plays that attack authority, for instance.

What they mean is that THEY won’t stand for it, because they have the ludicrous idea that authority is some sacred cow that must never be challenged. (ibid.)

In a key statement, imbued with deep credibility after plays by O’Connor, Dunn and Potter in particular, MacTaggart added:

What I find so refreshing about the current crop of playwrights is that they can represent working-class characters as real people who can suffer as much as any Shakespearian king (ibid.).

This touches on the whole nature of dramatic tragedy* being previously biased towards protagonists of high class and power: a central faultline in cultural history that the new form of TV was well equipped to challenge (*the overall subject which one of my English Tripos degree papers was concerned with, but which wasn’t entirely inclusive of screen media).

MacTaggart and his wife Ann are said to live in a house near the River Thames, to have no children, and that they would love, for sentimental reasons, to return to Scotland, but we’re remaining for practical reasons (ibid.). MacTaggart was now coming to the end of his two years as a BBC TV producer, in order to return to directing, which he declared ‘my main love’ (ibid.). Ellen Grehan’s article again stresses his major achievement as a producer, looking forward to more ‘interesting’ work from him as director (ibid.).

In The Fife Mail, an anonymous column ‘Do You Believe In Christmas ?’ recorded how Rev. John Stevenson, B.D. of St John’s Church spoke to Leven Rotarians after their Christmas lunch and styled himself as a Nigel Barton like teller of hard truths: i.e. that ‘idealistic talk about peace and goodwill and hope’ is empty talk, being simply what people want to hear, while bearing no relation to life as actually lived in homes and workplaces (29 December 1965, p. 8).

Kenneth Eastaugh looked back on 1965, which included referencing ‘veteran Northern actor’ Jack Woolgar as having given ‘one of the memorable performances of the year as Harry Barton’, also praising John Bailey as giving the best comedy performance of the year as agent Jack, with Eastaugh even feeling a 1966 series ‘featuring Mr. Bailey in this role would surely be a hit’ (Daily Mirror, 1 January 1966, p. 11). Eastaugh also singled out Potter as standing out among TV playwrights, with Vote, Vote, Vote being ‘the best BBC-1 play of the year’ (ibid.).

Two days later, L. Marsland Gander relayed Lyn Lockwood’s six best plays of 1965: three of these were Wednesday Plays, one being the conventional thriller Ashes to Ashes, the other two the more biting Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and Vote, Vote, Vote (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17). The play’s influence continued with it being quoted to open a Comment piece on the front page of the Daily Mail: which riffed on the forceful voter’s rebuke to social forces telling people they ‘ought’ to do various things (8 January 1966, p. 1).

The anti-“ought” lady elector Nigel canvasses

This piece branded Labour government ministers like James Callaghan and George Thomas as ‘Them’, telling ‘Us’ what to do in a puritanical way: the former telling people not to take holidays abroad and the latter urging folk to stop gambling (ibid.). This generally tiresome right-libertarian argument fails to acknowledge the deep harms caused by gambling addiction.

In addition to the successes John Cook and I have documented, W. Stephen Gilbert indicates the Barton plays were ‘sold abroad’ (op. cit., p. 133). Potter’s words to the Daily Mirror – the paper Barton’s parents read – reflected satisfaction with the eventual scheduling and his comments on the ending support my own idea that the play’s conclusion contains the seeds of a more optimistic third potential Barton play:

“I didn’t expect them to be screened one after the other – it’s worked out very well.”

How does Barton fare?

“We don’t know when the play ends, but I would like to think, with the aid of the speeches he makes when he becomes completely honest, he could get in.” (15 December 1965, p. 16)

It is a shame Potter never continued the Bartons’ narrative, since his work to that point was, as John Cook observed, finely balanced between idealist and pragmatist traditions, exploring that space with unusual depth, gravity and incisive humour. Had I been there at the time, I would happily have joined Sheila Miller and many others viewers in wishing for more!

In 2025, when a sizeable portion of the British electorate elevates Reform UK and the Labour government too often echoes Farage’s rhetoric and priorities, plays like this feel urgently necessary. Their intelligence and passion insist on looking past cynicism and on imagining a more demanding, generous democracy, even when the odds appear unpromising. Vote, Vote, Vote’s lesson is less about easy cynicism than about choosing one inheritance over another, and about us putting its sharpness to constructive, not corrosive, use.

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 – 02.21: ‘And Did Those Feet?’ (BBC1, 2 June 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.

02.21: And Did Those Feet? (BBC One, Wednesday 2 June 1965) 9:25 – 11:10pm

Directed by Don Taylor; Written by David Mercer; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by William McCrow; Music by Herbert Chappell

An aristocrat in search of an heir. But six marriages produce no children – except for two illegitimate sons, always pursued by their father’s hatred (Observer, 30 May 1965, p. 22).

I quote a BBC spokesman: “Lord Fountain’s bastard sons – fat Bernard and thin Timothy – live in a swimming pool with inflatable rubber animals which they prefer to humans.

“When their father wrecks the pool, they join the London Zoo staff, and release all the animals.” (Ken Irwin, Daily Mirror, 2 June 1965, p. 20).

a way-out comedy, so off-beat in fact that it sounds unbelievable (Bill Smith, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 2 June 1965, p. 15).

Reputedly wild comedy by David Mercer (Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 30 May 1965, p. 11).

David Mercer (1928-1980) was established by this point, as a ‘name’ writer, at least among the press. And Did Those Feet? is a notable one-off in its sprawling length, while being in another in Mercer’s line of collaborations with director Don Taylor. Taylor was a theatrical, studio-loving hold-out against Sydney Newman’s shift to kitchen sink naturalism; I have read parts of his Days of Hope memoir (1990) and a memorable March 1998 New Statesman broadside in favour of imaginative studio plays, against filmed realism. His Dead of Night play The Exorcism (1972), which I saw at Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema many years ago and also on DVD, is an excellent Marxist ghost story. I’ve still yet to see his The Roses of Eyam (1973), about the plague in Derbyshire village, which Ben Lamb has written about here.

he Daily Mail trail it as a ‘sad, funny, mysterious tale’ (2 June 1965, page unclear). The Rochdale Observer describes it as a ‘zany comedy’ with ‘crazy adventures’ (2 June 1965, p. 11). Mercer himself is acclaimed as ‘one of TV’s best writers’, delivering ‘the half-sad, half-comic adventures of a Peer’s illegitimate twins’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 29 May 1965, p. 14) and even ‘considered by many to be the best playwright that television has produced’ (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 2 June 1965, p. 3). Contrarily, Ken Hawkins felt averse to ‘plays that are so absurd they make the Goons appear normal in comparison’, noting this will likely provide ‘plenty of cause for invective […] it will run for 106 minutes’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 29 May 1965, p. 3).

After the play’s broadcast, Mercer was interviewed by Llew Gardner in his Hampstead home, expressing the feeling his plays would be better understood in two or three years’ time, while slagging off both the South and North of England, respectively, as ‘like a toy garden; it’s soft and boring’ and ‘provincial towns anger and bore me’, expressing that London suits his rootlessness, even if his ‘West Riding puritanism’ still influences his caution (The Sun, 11 June 1965, p. 5). Looking oddly like a young, bearded Barrie Rutter in the photo, Mercer reveals his own interest in the sea, and some surprisingly individualistic, Tory views:

he does not like paying income tax. He says: “As I pay them an awful lot of money, I think the least the Government can do is to consult me about how they intend to spend it (ibid.).

Bill Smith jokes about how the twins ‘find it difficult to come to terms with life’, after describing Timothy as a ‘beanpole’ (op. cit.). The Radio Times preview eloquently previews a ‘very sad, very funny, very mysterious tale’, wherein somehow the twins ‘just cannot get on with people and they find the world a harsh puzzling place […] always they are pursued’ (29 May 1965, page unclear).

David Gourlay’s Guardian profile of James MacTaggart made a significant point that MacTaggart had now established The Wednesday Play, some of which had achieved an ‘impact’ on TV comparable to Look Back in Anger on stage in 1956 (3 June 1965, p. 6). This lends Kenneth Haigh’s voice-over narration of the play extra piquancy. MacTaggart’s aims were for Wednesday Play writers to be aiming for ‘the freedom of the novel’, rather than ‘the fixed architectural cadences of the three-act Shaftesbury Avenue piece’, focusing on ideas over entertainment (ibid.). Gourlay describes the images we see:

BATHING BEAUTY – block of flats – ship on the rocks – demonstrators – police – guided missile and then, as unexpected and compelling as the biblical still small voice after earthquake, mighty wind and fire, the figure of a boy standing quietly isolated in some unknown street. Perhaps by now the nine million viewers of the Wednesday Night Play on BBC-1 take these opening titles for granted. (ibid.).

MacTaggart does not, Gourlay states, noting he devised The Wednesday Play’s title sequence as a prologue which was ‘intellectual but pop’, in his evocative phrase (ibid.). MacTaggart is also quoted feeling A Tap on the Shoulder, Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and Horror of Darkness were the most ‘remarkable’ Wednesday Plays so far, with And Did Those Feet? set to ‘push things – almost to the limit’ (ibid.).

Now, this is one we can actually watch! It’s available here in pretty poor visual quality:

I was lucky enough to watch a considerably clearer version via charity Learning on Screen’s educational resource, Box of Broadcasts.

Rating *** (-) / ****

Difference and variety were absolutely crucial to the single play firmament in the 1950s-80s, and this is truly laudable in expanding the medium’s possibilities. Anyone writing it off or dismissing it because of it not fitting their expectations of realism, a “well made play” or a straightforward narrative, is truly missing the point about what made that whole time compelling, unpredictable and artistically “fecund” – to quote Lord Fountain.

On first viewing, this just felt to me like Vivian Stanshall’s Rawlinson End, but without the laughs, the eccentricity just a tad forced. Long-winded, verbose dialogue from human mannequins that didn’t get to the gist of things, or have sufficient grist, compared with that of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter…

That said, there’s something admirable about the BBC giving over 105 minutes of its prime time schedule to a fundamentally weird piece, that would be bound to alienate the majority watching. It showed guts to avoid crowd pleasing when mostly that is what TV did: this ought to be vital in any anti-utilitarian conception of TV as portal, not Huxleyean balm.

Then there is Eric Deeming’s dexterous film camerawork and Sam Barclay’s superlative lighting work in the 16mm sequence in the swimming pool, where Timothy and Bernard go to live. Visually, for me this is play’s one really memorable setting, and it captures the twins’ bizarre, and increasingly admirable, eccentricity, perfectly. These scenes include Sylvia Kay and Jo Rowbottom as Poppy and Laura, who both do well as petit bourgeois and tough working class women, respectively, roles somewhat in line with others we have seen, and given a reasonable amount to say, if not do… They are a vital contrast to the boys, worldly and going with the consumerist herd in just as genuine a way as the boys utterly deviate from it.

Sylvia Kay and Jo Rowbottom as the materialist normals

Herbert Chappell’s music is much more present than is usual for a Wednesday Play/Play for Today, which emphasises this was one of the most prestigious and ambitious productions. It grated on me the first time, but I was more won over by its strings and harp the second time; it was not strange enough, yet it does embed a kind of mottled wistfulness fitting for a play which
Patrick Troughton is a suitably hawkish mad dog of a hapless, delusional and arrogant aristocrat, whose world is clearly fading. The whole scenario just seems like it needed taking even further, Bunuel is mentioned in the script by some posh Oxford student lass, and I mentioned Stanshall already. It seemed a pertinent enough dig at Lord Fountain, without fully drawing out his sons’ ‘proto-hippy’ rebellion in ‘opting out’ – which Oliver Wake shrewdly perceives in his BFI Screenoline article. More scenes like in the indoor swimming pool and the moment where they burst into song, and fewer addled verbose speeches, would have helped…

While there is clearly some radical energy in what David Mercer was trying to do here, it felt it got dissipated through excessive reverential focus on the word. Don Taylor needed to be seeing it more in visual terms, as a surrealist would.

Yet, on second viewing, its curiously aimless – yet not – philosophical ruminations came across much more clearly. It came into view how this was a nuanced celebration of gentle non-conformism – easily extrapolated to CND campaigners or hippies. And, what’s more, a rare deep exploration of entropic lethargy and vigorousness. Decaying chaos vs. busy order. Mercer touches on an odd truth that the old school conservativism of landed wealth is dying, dissipating – indeed, Lord Fountain dies – and then the benign innocence of the twins is taking over, but that Laura and Poppy’s more conventional materialistic path will win out in evolutionary terms. However, you get the sense the twins will in their way, enjoy life more, especially if they’re able to entirely escape the prison of conventional expectations – which, however, aberrant they are, keep niggling at them.

Viewing #2 also made me appreciate the errant silliness of Mercer’s preoccupation with animals, which really anticipated that of Chris Morris thirty years later. We get the daftness of the inflatable animals in the swimming pool, after the strangely lovely Flanders and Swann like duet they’ve recorded on film and watch again as a comfort to Bernard.

Delightful stuff!

Such scenes are utterly unique, and make you forgive the extensive long takes close in on actors’ faces – a stifling aesthetic, even if nobody can deny it gives you a brilliant view of some vividly performed lines, from Goddard, Markham and Troughton in his dream talking with God (Jack May). The second half is significantly stronger, because you’ve got used to the play’s world, register and the performances gel far better. Initially, it just felt risibly broad at times with madcap mugging from certain players very reminiscent of certain 1960s film comedies. Yet, an odd serene gravitas developed, building to a fine, very Edward Lear-like ending.

So, And Did Those Feet? felt a remarkable mix of the preposterously indulgent, in its length and verbosity, and something that was sociologically, psychologically and anthropologically – and scientifically – deeply planned and thought out. For such an apparently whimsical fantasy to taps into some of the 1960s’ major concerns shows the unique scope of the Wednesday Play. Competition, desire, conventional ‘fun’ and herding instincts against morality, fratenity, unconventional fun and apartness. It shows us the different human rituals, juxtaposing busy acquisitive capitalism alongside what seems a sedate spontaneous animism, almost…

Best Performance: DAVID MARKHAM

This was a tough one! Troughton gives it his all, even down to ingratiating dream talk: “oh, bully to God!” At other times, he channels Matt Berry into being long before he was even born!

Sylvia Kay is as grating and crass as she is meant to be; Jo Rowbottom is brassier and strikingly formidable: a bold, modish-talking, leather-jacketed no-nonsense lass. But then I feel anyone would struggle with the absurdly ‘self-revealing’ blubbing scene that Mercer gives her during the meal, late on.

Jo Rowbottom: not to mess with!

Willoughby Goddard has a gently nimble presence, and wonderfully conveys Bernard’s deep special interest in all things aquatic, including dolphins. Yet, I must just give it to David Markham, for a performance of intellect, kindness and poetry: some of his line readings are wonderful. He was also the father of Jehane Markham, a Play for Today dramatist who I interviewed who sadly passed away recently. RIP, she was wonderful. David Markham, then, was one of the PfT firmament’s great nurturers.

Best line: “My family’s put its idiots into the Foreign Office for generations…”

There are zingers aplenty: “He can only paint pictures of women in cages!” Laura gets these: “I used to think because you was strange, it made you interesting. It doesn’t…”; “My mind’s buzzing!”

As well as philosophical musings on remembering what things are called, Timothy gets this absurd profundity/profound absurdity:

If there’s a God, I know what he is… He’s a chuckling idiot with a tape recorder. And what does he do? Plays his tapes through my head. Is that fair? Is that any way to treat a baby. I’ve never had a minute’s peace.

Audience size: 4.95 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Scarlet and the Black – Part 4 / Enquiry – David Dimbleby looks at the Ku Klux Klan / Jazz 625 – Victor Feldman / Newsroom and Weather / Late Night Line-up), ITV (Carroll Calling / Any Old Thing / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 25%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 71.4%

Reception: Viewers by and large hated it, with a minority of adherents. Critics were far more favourable, both in London and outside, though an aesthetic conservative bloc did manifest. Overall, few were indifferent! Though indeed the amount of attention it received was significant, and how several critics almost exactly mirrored my response – which admittedly took an extra viewing compared with them!

Alan Blyth was notably large-minded for the Daily Express, perceiving ‘a poetic, visionary mind, not afraid to think big’, despite a ‘shapelessness, length, and indigestible profusion of ideas’ (3 June 1965, p. 4). Blythe’s nuanced response is like a synthesis of all the critics’ views, liking how Mercer defied logic and saluting the BBC’s courage in enabling it to range ‘with a piercing, occasionally jaundiced eye over the whole human condition’ (ibid.). Blyth noted the twins ‘impotent’ in several senses and likened them to the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘outcasts in the world as it is today’ (ibid.). He also praised Don Taylor’s ‘artist’s eye for grouping and atmosphere’, and Willoughby Goddard for ‘his tender, soulful performance’ (ibid.).

Peter Black, however, felt it was ‘indulging a private chat between its writer and producer’; only seeing it as interesting in its deployment of silent film, narration (from Kenneth Haigh), stop-motion photography, animation, statements to camera and music (Daily Mail, 3 June 1965, p. 3). Unlike myself, Black loved the first thirty minutes, finding all devices worked and the Burmese jungle scenes with the Japanese soldier Ishaki (Kristopher Kum) being ‘funny and touching’ (ibid.). However, he felt Mercer’s message was just ‘how sad that simplicity and goodness are isolated’, and this was iterated repetitively in a ‘dramatically inert’ play (ibid.).

Mercer ‘writes as though he is not in tune with the minds of his audience’, and Don Taylor’s direction is overly ‘reverent’ (ibid.). While he did admit the splendid ‘dramatic fantasy’ of the candle-lit swimming pool sequence, Black attacked Taylor’s ‘wearisome and unpleasant insistence on the big close-up regardless of the value of what was being said’ (ibid.). Still, Black seems to have preferred if somewhat to the ‘ineffable feebleness’ of Granada’s Pardon the Expression, which ‘incarcerates the endearing Arthur Lowe’ (ibid.). Black added later that Mercer’s talent ‘needs the limitation of a frame’, and needs to be separated from Taylor (Daily Mail, 24 June 1965, p. 3).

Lyn Lockwood noted a play ‘very unusual indeed though not, I imagine, popular with the bulk of its audience’, anticipating angry letters (Daily Telegraph, 3 June 1965, p. 19). Lockwood noted the twins ‘were spared the pains of growing up, having begun life in middle age’, musing that this was not ‘the sort of drama for the practically minded person’ (ibid.). A mixed review admitted ‘excellent’ performances from Markham, Goddard and Troughton, and Mercer’s ‘very fertile imagination and a fascinating use of television technique’, but ‘At 105 minutes he was too generous with his time (ibid.).

Anon in the Times felt it was only intermittently funny, ‘often sour and childish’, Mercer working ‘cleverly imagined’ scenes to ‘exhaustion’ in his symbolist determination (4 June 1965, p. 15). However, they admired an ‘abundance of lively if not watertight ideas’ and a ‘central relationship of great beauty between the two outcasts […] beautifully conveyed’ by Markham and Goddard; plus, Troughton ‘triumphantly indulged in malicious senile acting’ (ibid.). They also rightly noted the ‘delightful pictures’ in the swimming bath sequence, but ended by questioning the pace of a directionless and stagnant piece (ibid.).

‘malicious senile acting’: not ‘arf!

Maurice Richardson was annoyed at a ‘wilfully ragged and undisciplined […] jerky dream interrupted by didactic messages with symbols obvious as telegrams’ (Observer, 6 June 1965, p. 25). He found the fantasy ‘thin and forced’, disagreeing with Blyth in hating the ‘silliness’ of the opening half hour’s ‘tricks’, finding a ‘marked improvement’ after the halfway mark as the twins’ characters began to establish themselves (ibid.). Richardson identifies the dolphins as signifying the ‘happy womb-life’ to Bernard, ‘an endearing non-monster’ (ibid.). Again, the swimming pool scene is rightly noted as the play’s ‘best’, while Lord Fountain hitherto ‘a stock senile zombie’, was ‘vivified by his dream dialogue’, while still remaining impotent, leaving him feeling it was worthwhile viewing after all (ibid.). This review almost exactly mirrors my own views!

Philip Purser devoted the vast majority of his weekly column to it: ‘I can’t think of a more magical, more complete bit of invention than the scene towards the end in the swimming pool’, which he then devotes a four-sentence paean to (Sunday Telegraph, 6 June 1965, p. 11). He didn’t see it as confusing as all, but a ‘straightforward allegory’ about innocents who aren’t fitted for the big real world, likening it to Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear, touching the same ‘chord’ as ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ (ibid.). Purser loved a joke in the Russian Roulette bit, and reflected how this pool sequence had physical scale, making him forget ‘the awful making-do of so much TV. drama’ (ibid.). Purser extolled Mercer’s ‘exciting, ambitious approach’, while admitting like Richardson he had ‘almost deserted it’ – after ‘dim jokes’ like the mother in the cage and Hitler appearing in the boys’ Oxford University digs (ibid.). He shrewdly noted how an actor’s TV work is ‘cumulative’, with David Markham’s characterisation ‘a hangover’ from his innocent misfit role in de Montherlant’s The Bachelors (1964) (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin again disliked the opening half-hour, but felt there were ‘some merry moments and some tender insights’, though made in ‘a deterrent manner’ (Sunday Times, 6 June 1965, p. 40). He discerned the symbolism of the Establishment’s ‘sterility’, and how the twins are incapable of making love to their ‘gorblimey girl friends’ (ibid.). Wiggin felt Mercer’s message about ‘the plight of innocence in a greedy and cynical world was sometimes eloquent, sometimes funny’, but done in too ‘inflated’ and ‘pretentious’ a way; like a smug patriarchal mansplainer, Wiggin claims to speak for all:

We are mostly at home with the naturalistic idiom. If Mr Mercer had developed his argument in conversation between credible characters it would have had more weight (ibid.).

Don’t know about you, but I’m not up for his idea, which would have weighed down this drama and made it too like so many others.

Wiggin predictably says Mercer needed ‘disciplines which cannot be rejected by the writer who wants to convert the multitude’, which he feels Mercer at heart wants to (ibid.). T. C. Worsley went even further in the aesthetically conservative assault than Wiggin, being bored at ‘such a pretentious farrago’ (Financial Times, 9 June 1965, page unclear). Even Worsley couldn’t deny Markham and Goddard’s ‘remarkably authoritative’ performances, though he misreads – I feel at least – the twins’ position as ‘negativism’ (ibid.). He claims, more interestingly, that these fine performances of depth clashed with the initial Bob Hope style of Troughton’s acting and the tricks, though I’d seriously question his assertion that Markham and Goddard went against Mercer’s intentions in how they played their parts (ibid.).

My attitude to these Wiggins and Worsleys

Bizarrely, Worsley does not even enjoy the swimming pool sequence, feeling it was giving Taylor more pleasure than it was serving the play’s progress, comparing it negatively with Charles Jarrott’s ‘disciplined’ camera work in the version of Pinter’s Tea Party (BBC One, 25 March 1965) (ibid.). He claimed Taylor failed the viewers in not making Mercer’s intent clear, and disliked the way ‘it kept changing’, questioning how the girlfriends were played in ‘yet a third style of muzzy realism’, while ending in a tiresome violent metaphor of his own:

So shoot the director first, but on this occasion you might use a spray gun, and not mind too much if the author gets peppered too (ibid.).

John Holmstrom liked how Mercer ‘dares to think in large bizarre terms without a trace of affectation […] one senses a wealth of submerged complexities’, though he also felt the story suffered by ‘having no point of normality to relate the grotesqueries to’ (New Statesman, 11 June 1965, p. 930). Wasn’t this actually meant to be Poppy and Laura, and also to get us questioning “normality” itself, as a value judgement? While Holmstrom found the swimming pool sequence a ‘longueur’, he found it ‘rich and absorbing’ (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris could be relied on for wise words, noting that those who had had ‘too hard a day at the office’ would struggle with it, but herself feeling ‘glad’ to have seen it, as ‘something of value had been said’ (Television Today, 10 June 1965, page unclear). Again, the opening was seen as ‘too rich an hors d’oeuvres. Surfeited, it was easy to feel too somnolent to appreciate the finer flavour of the later scenes’ (ibid.). Norris noted Markham’s ‘kindliness’, ‘the sort of man whose shoulder you could weep on’, and Goddard’s role of a lifetime: ‘All the beauty and pathos of the character shone out’ – and how these innocents’ sweetness had engendered ‘hatred’ in others (ibid.). Norris aptly felt most of the others ‘would have fitted equally well into a Carry On film, though Diana Coupland ‘was freer to rise above this mean to give a nicely-judged unreality’ (ibid.). Jack May as the voice of God ‘hit the right note of discreet social compromise’, and Norris’s last words are rather an excellent summary:

Not an ‘easy’ play, but undoubtedly worth doing and worth seeing. Rather too long, occasionally tedious, frequently infuriating, always stimulating. (ibid.)

Outside London, Michael Beale  – not the hapless former Sunderland AFC head coach – called it ‘television theatre of the absurd’, which mixed the ‘hilariously funny’, ‘indigestible’ and ‘boring’, though overall ‘an interesting experiment in fantasy’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 3 June 1965, p. 2). T. McG. took a broader view of the whole Wednesday Play offering, feeling it had, as promised, delivered ‘original and imaginative ideas’ and ‘bright new talent’ so far (3 June 1965, p. 2). They mused that no previous plays had ‘presented such an odd assortment of characters’ as And Did Those Feet?, accurately noting it defied categories: ‘It was hilariously funny in an offbeat sense at one moment, and then the mood would change to one of deep melancholy’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 June 1965, p. 2). They finished with an apt summary of likely public feeling, but freely deviated from it:

I can well imagine many people dismissing it as a lot of nonsense because of eccentricities, but I found it refreshingly enjoyable (ibid.).

Peter Forth found it ‘indeed a strange play, verging on the abstract’, while brusquely branding the twins ‘Strange individuals, these […] who liked animals better than people’, clearly empathising with the girlfriends! (Bristol Western Daily Press, 3 June 1965, 9). Forth backed the Worsley-Wiggin philistine groupthink, feeling it ‘was very clever, too clever’, failing to identify any ‘lesson’, or ‘parable’, while grudgingly admitting there ‘may be a place in television drama for this way-out type of play’ (ibid.).

Alf McCreary gave a more thoughtful response, acknowledging sociologists and psychologists would find much of interest in the play, while also enjoying it ‘at face value as a modern fantasy in the grand Lewis Carroll manner’, with ‘gorgeous sets’ and actors largely matching the dialogue’s ‘intricacies’ (Belfast Telegraph – week-end magazine, June 1965, p. 8). McCreary was delighted to get some fantasy, when ‘Most evenings our television is flat beer – and most of it canned anyway’ (ibid.). This was a hand-pulled pint of foaming nut brown ale that the likes of Wiggin, Worsley and Forth just could not appreciate!

Audiences tended to side with those conservative voices. A Mrs G. McMurrough of Kirkintilloch slammed it as ‘utter rubbish’, ‘Alice in Wonderland stuff’ which constituted ‘a hand out to the settings effects men’, resentfully declaring:

The writer David Mercer must be killing himself laughing in some beautiful penthouse while we cough up our licence money (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 6 June 1965, p. 16).

This play received a pitifully low Reaction Index from viewers of 25, a full 53 points below Where the Difference Begins (1961), and even 17 beneath the low figure A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962) attained (BBC WAC, VR/65/296). Only a minority enjoyed this play, with ‘rubbish’ and ‘tripe’ being earthy descriptors, that could almost have come from Laura and Poppy’s mouths! (ibid.). Boredom at the lack of a ‘story’ and groans of ‘Another weird play – no more, please’ and ‘I’ve seen some rubbishy Wednesday plays but this takes the biscuit’ – were common, though some did find it ‘both funny and sad’ and ‘well worked out’ (ibid.).

Troughton, Goddard and Markham were all admired, though many were baffled by the non-naturalistic makeup of Lord Fountain and Nanny: ‘they looked as if they had been stricken by leprosy’ (ibid.). Others, however, liked this element and also great lighting in the ‘striking’ swimming bath scenes. While a ‘nonplussed’ critical mass (a projected 2.13 million giving it the lowest C- score) clearly detested the play, it is worth highlighting that over 693,000 still gave it A+ or A: a hardly negligible appreciative vanguard.

It’s another Wednesday Play that repays repeated viewing, and in many ways perhaps the most stimulating one yet, alongside Horror of Darkness! Aptly, I was writing much of this while listening to all of Cat Stevens’s 1974-78 albums, the gently electronic Itizso (1977) being much the best of those.

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 – 02.19: ‘A Knight in Tarnished Armour’ (BBC1, 12 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.

02.19: A Knight in Tarnished Armour (BBC One, Wednesday 12 May 1965) 9:45 – 11:00pm

Directed by John Gorrie; Written by Alan Sharp; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Donald Brewer; Music by Herbert Chappell

We arrive now at A Knight in Tarnished Armour, which fits some people’s general idea of what The Wednesday Play was about, while bridging the British New Wave and New Hollywood. Alan Sharp’s play received relatively little publicity, before and after its broadcast. Television Today notes how Harry Pringle can be seen in it, alongside a 30 May episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook (6 May 1965, p. 15).

The Observer says it is ‘about a Provincial boy who dreams he’s not an office clerk’ (9 May 1965, p. 22). The Radio Times described ‘Scots teenager’ Tom (Paul Young) as ‘at odds with world around him’, dreaming of escaping his ‘drab and steady routine’, through being ‘a Raymond Chandler-type private eye, a tough sleuth hunting down gangsters, rescuing damsels in distress, and playing the part of the modern knight errant’ (8 May 1965, p. 39). Tom expresses his Walter Mitty like desires for life to be exciting, like he hoped it would be when a child, to Anna (Leslie Blackater), ‘a hard-boiled office lass’ (ibid.). She expresses an individualist, keep-your-heed-doon conformism:

But she is puzzled and can only shrug : ‘You’ve just got tae look oot for yoursel’ an’ make sure ye don’t get intae trouble.’ (ibid.)

The article notes how Tom’s ‘world is not at all like that of the much-publicised teen scene’ (ibid.). Despite his being in work with a steady income, he is ‘deprived, uncertain’, and is assistant to his ‘disreputable boss’, the seedy private detective Mr Burnshaw (Paul Curran) (ibid.), referred to elsewhere as ‘a seedy inquiry agent’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 12 May 1965, p. 2). In this Glasgow-set ‘comedy’, Tom ‘spends most of his time collecting petty debts and avoiding his own’, but life gets more exciting when he is embroiled in a missing person case (ibid.), becoming ‘the assistant to a seedy private detective’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 12 May 1965, p. 15).

Alan Sharp was noted in one preview for having a successful first novel A Green Tree in Gedde (1966) published and a previous BBC TV play for the First Night strand Funny Noises With Their Mouths (1963), which featured Michael Caine and Ian McShane. Notably, director John Gorrie took a film unit to Glasgow to ‘capture in pictures the local flavour – which is also conveyed in the rich dialogue of the play’ (ibid.). This likely indicates some 16mm filmed inserts of Glasgow used amid the Television Centre shot studio scenes.

Notably, Brian Cox appeared as a character called Nelson, before an illustrious ongoing career which included Nigel Kneale’s visionary satire The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), two Plays for Today (1976 and 1982), Nye Bevan in Food for Ravens (1997) and Logan Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s comedy-drama Succession (2018-23). Cox was a good friend of Sharp, who with Sharp’s widow Harrier helped ensure his papers were gathered at the University of Dundee.

Alan Sharp (1934-2013), was born in Alyth, Perth and Kinross to a single mum, but who grew up in Greenock, raised by adoptive parents – including a shipyard worker dad – who belonged to the Salvation Army. Sharp seems to have done a vast range of blue and white collar jobs, including working as an assistant to a private detective (!), and National Service in 1952-54. His radio play The Long Distance Piano Player was broadcast by the BBC in 1962. A Green Tree..., about youthful self-discovery, was apparently banned in Edinburgh’s public libraries for a time due to its sexual content. He had a sequel published in 1967, but the third in a planned trilogy was incomplete as he became perhaps the first – of many – Wednesday Play/Play for Today dramatists to emigrate to Hollywood, where he took up feature-film screenwriting. Funnily enough, I’m not sure whether his adaptation of his previous radio play as the first Play for Today The Long Distance Piano Player (1970) came before or after he had physically moved to the States.

Sharp had a relationship with Beryl Bainbridge, producing a daughter Rudi Davies, an actor married to Mick Ford, and his passionate but philandering nature comes across in the Scottish playwright William in Bainbridge’s novel, Sweet William (1975), later made into a 1980 film directed by Sharp and Bainbridge’s fellow Play for Today alumni Claude Whatham. Sharp had four wives, six children, two stepsons and 14 grandchildren. He had considerable success in Hollywood, with films in the western and crime genres, and his sensibility fitted closely with that of the deeply masculine New Hollywood, the mid-1960s to early-1980s countercultural wave, associated with Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese, and involving Polanski, Lumet, Corman and many more. I haven’t seen any of the c.25 films Sharp wrote screenplays for that were released over 48 years (1971-2019), which included Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Ted Kotcheff’s Billy Two Hats (1974), Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend (1983) and Michael Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy (1995); alongside Little Treasure (1985), which he directed himself. As the 1980s and 1990s progressed, a fair few of these 25 credits were for TV movies: part of the long-term convergence between the twin screen industries.

The Sharp-penned film which is most on my radar is Night Moves (1975), a thriller directed by Arthur Penn, featuring a brilliant cast headed by the great Gene Hackman. I’ll have to remedy this chasm in my viewing soon!

I can’t watch A Knight… because it does not exist in the archives.

Audience size: 5.45 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon – items on clean air and scientific model-making / Jazz 625, with Bill Evans Trio), ITV (A Slight White Paper on Love / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 45%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 16.6% (needs a more thorough check, this, but a notably low score)

Reception: Generally ignored by London critics, but liked well enough by the two who did report back. Largely a positive reaction outside the capital, but with a few more criticisms of this slice of life narrative for lacking clarity and shape. Viewers were typically rather lukewarm, en masse, as was the case for such plays with regional settings and accents.

Lyn Lockwood felt Alan Sharp had gone about  ‘as far as he could possibly go’ in de-glamourising the inquiry agent; her description of Burnshaw – ‘no one could have been seedier or owned more revolting personal habits’ – brings to mind Slow Horses‘ Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) decades before his time! (Daily Telegraph, 13 May 1965, p. 21). Lockwood found Tom’s character ‘refreshingly naive’ compared with so many ‘worldly wise, self-assured’ young TV protagonists, noting he became ‘disillusioned by learning the facts of life in the hardest possible school’ (ibid.). She admired Paul Young’s ‘very sensitive’ acting of a ‘sympathetically written’ character, with Paul Curran and Harry Pringle giving ‘sharply defined cameos’ (ibid.). John Gorrie’s cameras ‘captured a most authentic atmosphere’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson liked Sharp’s ‘good natural dialogue’ and characters who had life, while feeling they overdid the contrast between Tom’s Walter Mitty ‘romantic quixotic fantasies and the squalid reality’ (Observer, 16 May 1965, p. 24).

Paul Young and Heather Bell

Tom Gregg thought the play was ‘bursting with marvellous characters’, including the ‘rascally’ inquiry agent Mr Connachie (Harry Pringle), the ‘old-womanish widower’ Anna, and a ‘tarty young secretary’ (Runcorn Guardian, 20 May 1965, p. 6). Gregg admired how Sharp depicted Tom’s steep learning curve having left the shelter of home and school, but felt it dragged at 75 minutes, lacking ‘a strong, cohesive story to pull the many good things it contained into a shapely whole’ (ibid.). Further north, Michael Beale criticised ‘a very slight affair’, but nevertheless felt it ‘made food television’ despite little happening other than the illusions of a 16 year-old boy being shattered (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 13 May 1965, p. 2). Beale liked Sharp’s economical characterisation, noting how Burnshaw is most concerned with collecting debts and then embezzling the money, and felt Blackater and Bell ‘neatly’ played the ‘two girls who came into Tom’s life’ (ibid.). He ends with a useful description of one of the settings:

There was a sharply drawn picture of a library reading room, full of pensioners and unemployed with empty lives, who quietly resented the intrusion of any stranger. (ibid.)

Peter Forth deeply appreciated the acting – Young ‘outstanding’, Curran ‘terrific – and most repellent’ and Leslie Blackater ‘playing a very uninhibited girl clerk was both provocative and amusing’ – while arguing it fully held the attention despite not being a very pleasant play (Bristol Western Daily Press, 13 May 1965, p. 7). Alan Stewart echoed the praise of the playing: ‘Some grand character studies in this dig at private eyes. A good knight’s work from the two Pauls – Young and Curran’ (Glasgow Sunday Post, 16 May 1965, p. 12). An anonymous columnist found it not wholly successful, but memorable for veteran Paul Curran’s performance as the ‘dissolute private detective’ (Cumbernauld News, 21 May 1965, p.10).

Over in Edinburgh, Peggie Phillips acclaimed ‘its exquisitely accurate thumb-nail sketches of Glaswegians’, but felt it lacked ‘sufficient speed and incident in the script to counteract or balance the native [my emphasis!] slowness (Scotsman, 17 May 1965, p. 8). Phillips felt it must have been ‘an exercise in nostalgia’ for producer James MacTaggart, and liked how it conveyed the ‘curious diffidence of both young and old Glaswegians – even the tough Nelson cracked’ (ibid.). She felt Tom’s fantasy moments were monotonously repetitive, with strong production and atmosphere let down by a slight script, with Gorrie’s direction ‘palely loitering as if somebody could not bear to miss a word of such hall-marked dialogue’ (ibid.).

Among viewers, this got a somewhat below par reaction, with 28% giving it the highest scores, and 42% the lowest – and 30% in the middle (BBC WAC, VR/65/257). There was criticism of ‘too thin a plot’, which made it ‘slow and boring’ to many; a Traveller called it ‘a very poor play about nothing’ (ibid.). In contrast to an aforementioned critic, Tom was felt to be unrealistically ‘dopey’, with the wider dramatis personae termed ‘a drab collection of dull oddities’! (ibid.)

Epithets like ‘dreary’ and ‘dowdiness’ were aired, though the smaller number who liked it found it fascinating and sensitive and found Tom a refreshingly ‘unspoilt idealistic youngster’ in contrast with more typical ‘tough’ teenagers on screen (ibid.). This group of viewers loved the vignettes of all the other characters – including Blakater’s and Bell’ (ibid.) The acting was largely admired by all, with Young seeming ‘to give just the right impression of vulnerability’ (ibid.). Final comments indicate ‘lengthy’ outdoor sequences with Tom walking through ‘unnaturally deserted’ streets, which stalled the action, while the authentic settings’ ‘very seediness made the play all the more depressing’ for some (ibid.).

Despite or indeed perhaps because of such partial barbs, it’s a shame we can’t see this, to assess an early work from one of the most significant writers in The Wednesday Play’s very masculine firmament of this time. Sharp’s career clearly made snide metropolitan attitudes against the ‘provinces’ seem absurd, being a clear forerunner of Peter McDougall, while also working in parallel to Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Billy Liar (1963). It feels like it probably accessed some of the spirit of Eric Coltart’s Liverpool-set Wear A Very Big Hat, which we’ve covered, or indeed, William McIlvanney’s A Gift from Nessus, utterly dour miserablism entirely at home in the spring 1980 run of Play for Today.

There was no Wednesday Play on 19 May 1965, for whatever reason. Instead, story documentarian Robert Barr’s Z Cars episode ‘Checkmate’ was in a later slot than usual (9:30 pm), followed by a piano performance by New Yorker Peter Nero (10:30 pm).

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 – 02.18: ‘Cemented with Love’ (BBC1, 5 May 1965)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 5.94 million.

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

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 50.2%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harold Goldblatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harold Goldblatt and J. G. Devlin

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

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

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

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

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

very good, if it had been for local viewing

Congratulations; you have shown everybody up

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

Very funny. A riot. Congratulations.

(ibid.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.13: ‘Cat’s Cradle’ (BBC1, 31 March 1965)

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

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

02.13: The Cat’s Cradle (BBC One, Wednesday 31 March 1965) 9:50 – 11:05pm

Directed by Henric Hirsch; Written by Hugo Charteris; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Michael Wield

Do you like cats ? Or just being catty ? Either way you’ll probably enjoy “Cat’s Cradle” (Sunday Mail, 28 March 1965, p. 16).

CATS are by nature independent creatures, keeping their own counsel and not showing the kind of motivation a writer Dan make use of in a play or a film (Geoffrey Lane, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 31 March 1965, p. 13).

Billed as a black comedy, about retired townspeople Hereward Daintry (Leo Genn), of once-landed gentry and Valerie Daintry (Barbara Murray), a town-loving former suburbanite, living in the countryside. Hereward buys his lonely wife a cat called Oscar for company. Neighbouring couple the Ulyatts’ (Billy Russell and Rachel Thomas) cat Copper, a savage tom, takes a dislike to Oscar. Oscar is described as a ‘superb fluffy white kitten which plays a major part’ in the play (Geoffrey Lane ibid.).

‘Soon there are rumours – of savagery and violence, and even murder.’ (Torbay Herald Express, 27 March 1965, p. 4) Jack Bell’s preview in the Daily Mirror indicates that Copper was played by Buster – a cat owned by a Mr. John Holmes – whose first star role was in the Hammer horror film, The Shadow of the Cat (1961) and who can earn as much as £16 a day (31 March 1965, p. 16). A few decades earlier, Skippy, the terrier who played Asta in the Thin Man films, could earn 250 dollars a week.

Leo Genn, getting on, a tad…

The Radio Times preview notes Hereward is getting on, just retired from ‘a sinecure in the city’ and ‘His new bride herself is no chicken’ (25 March 1965, p. 43). You don’t say, or rather they did. Further information indicates the play’s theme of women whose social aspirations clash:

But Valerie has always been a town girl and does not hit it off with her rustic neighbours. They expect her to play the part of the squire’s lady, but then resent her intrusion into their social life. They are a close, awkward bunch, always on their dignity. Not a bit like her old London girl-friends. (ibid.)

The play was written by Hugo Charteris, a known journalist and novelist, responsible for several significant works for The Wednesday Play and Play for Today before his death at a sadly young age. It was a second Wednesday Play shot in BBC Glasgow’s studios.

Audience size: 5.94 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon / Jazz 625 with Art Blakey / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Frank Ifield Show / Professional Wrestling from King George’s Hall, Blackburn).

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 50%

Reception: Fairly lukewarm, middling response from both viewers and critics, though far from disastrous.

Gerald Larner bemoaned a ‘petty drama’, of intolerably slow pace which submitted the actors to ‘facial exercises while the camera focused on them and the narrative gave their life histories’ (Guardian, 1 April 1965, p. 11). Larner disliked an ‘untidy’ production and felt that director Hirsch ‘had nothing like the command of style necessary to create a convincing if unreal world out of the script’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood was somewhat more favourable, finding it a ‘goodish’ black comedy, if ‘dangerously on the leisurely side’, also finding the use of a commentator ‘a bit of a plague’ (Daily Telegraph, 1 April 1965, p. 19). But Lockwood acclaimed ‘some nice work’ from Genn, Murray and Russell and revealed how the ending involved tomcat Cooper being ‘given his quietus’ by Hereward, brandishing a heavy candlestick (ibid.).

Barbara Murray

The Times reviewer felt a ‘cold-hearted little play’ was improbable, but its ‘cheerful dissection of empty lives gave pleasant if very leisurely viewing’ (1 April 1965, p. 5). They questioned the likelihood of Valerie ever marrying Hereward and how a woman of ‘apparently some ability’ was presented, but relaxed into enjoying it when it ignored its own contradictions, like Barbara Murray, ‘who wisely refused to notice the inconsistencies with which she was presented’ (ibid.). Yet, it was foiled by a ‘predictable ending depending on doubts about the cat’s sex and showed us not only what to expect but when and how to expect it’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson mockingly referred to the play to close his weekly TV roundup: ‘the baleful influence of the theatre of the absurd on the theatre of the tea shop ; the result is our old friend the repertory of rot.’ (Observer, 4 April 1965, p. 24). Frederick Laws felt it was ‘nothing to write home about’, but was well acted, with Billy Russell doing some ‘powerful tearing of heart-strings with easy humour thrown in’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575).

Marjorie Norris felt it was trailed in a manner suggesting ‘something disturbing, frightening, and full of Meaning’, which made excessive claims for what still did have meaning – for instance, director Hirsch’s ‘handling of Valerie’s walk through the village under the cold but curious eyes of the women’ (Television Today, 8 April 1965, p. 12). Norris disliked the descriptive voice-over narration, but credits Olive Gregg as doing a good job of a bad case of telling us, not showing us, who the characters are (ibid.). She acknowledged Charteris gave Barbara Murray a very tough task, which she was ‘not entirely successful’ in, but felt that Billy Russell, Rachel Thomas and Ann Way in a smaller part ‘walked away with’ the play, the former showing himself ‘a character actor right up there with the best’ (ibid.).

Outside of London, Peggie Phillips felt Doctor Who had perked up with ‘The Lionheart’, following ‘that last flop with the mansized bumble bees’, but conversely regarded Cat’s Cradle as ‘one of the less happy efforts of the generally sound Wednesday Play’ (The Scotsman, 5 April 1965, p. 4). Over in Glasgow, Argus noted Fancy Smith being beaten up by a thug in Z Cars, expressing disappointment in this play ‘made up of trivialities’; despite admiring Murray and Genn’s talents, they found it ‘just one long bore’ (Daily Record, 1 April 1965, p. 15).

G.F. felt the play defined that ‘very fashionable’ genre, the black comedy, echoing Marjorie Norris about the narration, finding it ‘slowed things down a bit’, but that this ‘offbeat’ offering held the attention due to Genn, Murray and Russell’s performances (Belfast Telegraph, 1 April 1965, p. 9). N.G.P. regarded the play’s tempo as ‘curiously slow and gentle’ having tuned into the exciting Walker-London fight on Sportsview (Liverpool Daily Post, 1 April 1965, p. 5). They warmed to it, having a ‘certain cumulative power’, aided by the ‘authenticity and charm’ of Billy Russell’s ‘ancient rustic’ (ibid.).

W.D.A. was harsher, mocking a ‘distinctly pedestrian and rather ordinary […] mildly off-beat’ effort, that didn’t really justify the ‘black comedy’ descriptor (Liverpool Echo, 1 April 1965, p. 2). The reviewer has fun with a feline pun – ‘category’ – while noting the dialogue lacked richness in what was ‘merely a short story dramatised in an inordinately leisurely way’ (ibid.). They were favourable towards the performances, though, including Russell’s ‘fine cameo’ (ibid.). Russell, ‘one of the greats of music hall’ – first on stage aged seven in 1900 – was interviewed by James Green in the same paper (Liverpool Echo, 6 April 1965, p. 2).

Russell bemoans the invention of the microphone, where previously performers had to project to survive and thrive (ibid.). He notes how variety went far back to the market places of China and reflects that British music hall’s demise was as it had become ‘too static’ and predictable:

The modern artist hasn’t starved the way we all did. Part of the trouble was when artists began playing golf instead of improving their act. We put the business first. (ibid.).

This curiously anticipates the Alternative Comedy criticisms of the cosy clique of popular light entertainers in the 1980s…! Russell’s appearance anticipated later turns music hall veterans took in Play for Today, like Leslie Sarony, Nat Jackley and John Grieve.

The audience response was fair to middling. While it still scored a healthy audience of nearly six million, ITV scored a fairly rare ratings victory in 1965 over TWP. Two housewives’ contrasting reactions – finding it lovely and boring, respectively – represented a fair microcosm (BBC WAC, VR/65/171). Some who found it highly charming nevertheless had to admit the story was ‘a little trivial’, while antagonists branded it ‘piffle’ and ‘one of the most stupid plays I have ever sat through’ (ibid.). There was some anguished critique of the oddly brutal killing of Copper the cat: ‘striking a very jarring note in an otherwise peaceful setting’ (ibid.).

Like the critics, viewers loved Billy Russell, and there was admiration of the resemblance of Leo Genn to Ronald Colman; Genn and Murray’s popularity was noted, the latter playing a ‘spoilt, peevish wife’ (ibid.). Positive response to the production indicates there were mainly domestic interiors, but also ‘outdoor shots’ which created a realistic impression of village life. The two cats were termed ‘delightful’ by one group of viewers (ibid.).

Barbara Murray and ‘Oscar’

There seems almost to have been a 50:50 split in 1965 Wednesday Plays so far between the challenging and the comparatively anodyne; boundary pushing plays in form and/or content versus plays within existing popular genres. Now, I’d be mildly interested in seeing this if it was ever recovered. While I grew up with cats and still like them, I’m now a confirmed dog owner. While there sounds like there’d be some interest in Russell’s performances and the social class tensions between the women, it really does sound like potentially annoyingly silly fare, and might make even A Little Temptation seem like challenging and cutting-edge by comparison!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of the Peterborough Evening Telegraph.

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.2%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 44%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 50%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.3%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 67%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.02: ‘Sir Jocelyn, the Minister Would Like A Word…’ (BBC1, 13 January 1965)

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.

02.02: Sir Jocelyn, the Minister Would Like A Word… (BBC One, Wednesday 13 January 1965) 9:25 – 10:40pm

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

Radio Times cover image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 3.96 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 24.2%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 55%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 78%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a coda, the theatre critic W. A. Darlington was critical of the published text of Sir Jocelyn…, finding it strained credulity, with the ‘full preposterousness’ of Mr Flute and his swaying of the Baroness (Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1966, p. 13). Notably, Darlington far preferred Ronald Millar’s recent staging of C. P. Snow’s superficially similar novel, The Masters (1950), acclaiming Snow as a ‘realist’ over Raven, a ‘satirist’ (ibid.).

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