Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.01: ‘A Tap on the Shoulder’ (BBC1, 6 January 1965)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Series producer MacTaggart expressed his aims for the season:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: GEORGE TOVEY

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.91 million

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

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

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

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book review: Liz Smith (2006) OUR BETTY: SCENES FROM MY LIFE

As with many memoirs of famous people, this has greatest power in its reflections on childhood, growing up and life before fame. Smith’s fame has been as a skilled character actor, not any sort of star, but nevertheless the latter half of the book is rendered blander by the very human diplomacy and tact she adopts in discussing people she had worked with, and still might work with.

That said, this book is a resounding corrective to any idea of Liz Smith as a cuddly, mild eccentric. While ‘I love playing nutty creatures in eccentric outfits’ (p. 145), Our Betty establishes the reality of her as a perceptive observer and unconventional performer, able to move from sitcoms to social realism to Samuel Beckett absurdism, with these experiences blending into and informing each other.

Smith reflects on her love of cinema growing up in 1920s Scunthorpe, noting films like The Singing Fool, Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway alongside The Variety Theatre and strolling players doing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a boxing ring below the railway lines. Her mother died when she was two, and her father deserted her when she was seven, after several prefiguring instances of his irresponsibility. Adopted by her Grandma, she got fascinated by performance when at school: ‘That was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. Make people laugh, have lots of lights, no gloom and no oil lamps.’ (p. 50)

One of her most vivid childhood memories of playing in the street constitutes one of the most magnificently bleak ripostes imaginable to any ‘good old days’ nostalgic romanticising (pp. 21-2). There are also fascinating tales of her Grandad and the 1926 General Strike and how life working in the steel furnace was ‘pure theatre’ (p. 27). The segment about the Plough Jags reads like a condensed, five-paragraph J.G. Ballard short story rooted in Scunthorpe strangeness (pp. 27-9).

It’s fascinating to read about her time in Portobello from the late 1940s, at art and then drama school, moving in a milieu including Rita Webb, Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and even Diana Dors. She seems to have far preferred this life in a London ‘village’ than in the suburbs near Epping Forest that she subsequently moved to in the 1950s. Smith, who had worked at the impressively open and democratic sounding Gateway Theatre (pp. 82-3), joined the Unity Theatre and then Charles Marowitz’s experimental group which rehearsed at Fitzroy Square. They all needed day jobs to manage this, as Marowitz paid them no money for their evening work. She had some great creative experiences with Marowitz, but the economic side of it seems exploitative and he dropped them abruptly to go to the RSC with Peter Brook.

The creative heart of the book is Smith’s association with Mike Leigh, who cast her in his feature film, Bleak Moments (1971) and then Smith’s first of seven Play for Today roles: in Leigh’s Hard Labour (1973). The section on the latter (pp. 131-7) is riveting. It provides insight concerning Smith’s creative input into her role as Mrs Thornley, ‘a woman who worked for others. Like a slave’ (p. 133). At a time when Chantal Akerman has now supplanted male auteurs in Sight and Sound’s greatest films ever poll, Hard Labour stands as Play for Today’s most prescient and subtle feminist drama of 1973, alongside Nemone Lethbridge’s more baroque Baby Blues. Smith’s enactment of Mrs Thornley’s painful life was meticulously researched but clearly also has some roots in her own experience of dull and exploitative labour (p. 54, 120-1). Smith relished Leigh’s rigorous and challenging ethos; working with Leigh continued her learning process with Marowitz, but was more fairly rewarded and lasting. Hard Labour enjoyed the vast luxury of eight weeks of improvisations followed by a month of shooting, all enabled by a BBC steered in a radical direction by producer Tony Garnett.

Call me a doyen of Play for Today’s ‘deep cuts’ if you will, but I do just wish she had reflected on playing Miss Pritchett in Elaine Feinstein’s Breath (1975); she is unnerving in that, channelling elements of Whitehouse and Thatcher, and showing her vast acting range.

The latter section has some fine vignettes on the more unusual side of British TV and film. We hear about Smith working on the likes of Peter Tinniswood’s offbeat I Didn’t Know You Cared (pp. 147-9), with its variety of settings, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), by Viv Stanshall whom she rightly calls ‘wonderful’, Peter Greenaway’s tremendously original The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and a series for children called Pirates. We learn how Smith features in a student film production involving Timothy Spall, Sanscape. While she absolutely adored the experience of being in LA for various projects, film productions often fell through or parts got cut.

Apt given her lifelong love of the cinema medium, Smith also provides a welcome roster of now neglected films of the 1980s-90s: A Private Function (1984), Apartment Zero (1988), High Spirits (1988), We Think the World of You (1988), The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) and La Nona (1991) for BBC2’s erformance play strand, alongside drag artiste extraordinaire Les Dawson.

Smith makes the crucial point that The Royle Family, which she calls a career ‘highlight’, felt deeply naturalistic due to the lack of an audience, which naturally leads to larger, communicative performances, but it was also performed as scripted and totally without improvisation (p. 209-10).

Smith comes across as a perceptive and caring person: a long time vegetarian who loves animals, commits to charitable activities, including Water Aid, and reflects on childhood memories of encountering one Black man locally (pp. 30-1) and her cosmopolitan experiences as a WREN in the Second World War (pp. 58-67). On the final page, she recounts sitting in a favourite armchair and how she listens to Al Bowlly every day and takes joy in her family life, which was clearly far more stable for the younger generations than hers was.

Book review: David Stubbs (2023) DIFFERENT TIMES: A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY

Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.

The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)

He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)

Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.

Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).

Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.

While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).

Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.

I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.

These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).

There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).

There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.

The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.

The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and This Country (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).

The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?

There’s an astute reference to how much The Office (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).

The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.