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.

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.

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.).

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 – 02.15: ‘The Interior Decorator’ (BBC1, 14 April 1965)

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

02.15: The Interior Decorator (BBC One, Wednesday 14 April 1965) 9:30 – 10:55pm

Directed by James Ferman; Written by Jack Russell; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Richard Wilmot; Music by Norman Kay

Magritte your heart out, ye staid telly visioners!

This play centres on a Georgian townhouse, residence of millionaire Frederick Carter-Carter (Michael Finlayson), whose chic and incredibly elaborate interior decoration was done by a Mr Bellamy (Barry Foster). The Radio Times itemises some of them: ‘alligator shoes, Louis Quinze tables, ancestral portraits, tropical fish ponds, Greek statues, and a circular bed.’ (8 April 1965, page unclear).

Bellamy escorts Frederick’s wife – ‘as fragile and exclusive as the treasures she moves among’ – around the house, and gradually this ‘skilled craftsman’ and his work fascinate Susan:

At this point you begin to realize that you are looking in on much more than a conducted tour. Although apparently preoccupied with marvellous surfaces and material excesses, The Interior Decorator is also concerned with the strange and unpredictable depths of a woman’s mind. (ibid.)

Designer Richard Wilmot’s work is trailed, with a note he won the Television Guild Award as designer of the year; the only mention in any press coverage of writer Jack Russell is that he was new to television (ibid.). Several previews, including in the Coventry Evening Telegraph drew attention to how Wilmot had crushed ‘a new Rolls-Royce into a sculptured mass’ and had ‘a table, laden with cut crystal, descending from the ceiling’ – while then quoting Wilmot that it wasn’t actually a Rolls, but ‘we did concoct a nice bit of sculpture out of car spares and wood’ (14 April 1965, p. 2). The Daily Mirror preview solely focused on this, noting the ‘problem’ facing the play’s producers was ‘how to wreck a Rolls-Royce’ (14 April 1965, p. 18).

The Rochdale Observer mentioned other challenges for Wilmot: ‘Plan a room to represent medieval hell. Recreate the beauty of a Grecian bathroom’, while also quoting him on the need for ‘large photographic reproductions of Boticellis and pictures of medieval devils, which were designed from reference books’ (14 April 1965, p. 9).

This ultimately modernistic, non-naturalistic Play is a video-film hybrid, where two of the three (?) filmed sequences are actually fairly substantial and almost work like mini short films in their own right. In a historical curiosity, this play was directed by James Ferman, who became Secretary of the BBFC for a marathon stint (1975-99), and was seen to be somewhat less liberal than his predecessor Stephen Murphy. Michael Brooke calls Ferman ‘complex, contradictory figure, both liberal and reactionary, open and secretive’.

The play exists in full, but isn’t widely available to access yet; I have managed to watch it via Learning on Screen’s Box of Broadcasts, available to subscribing universities.

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

Now, where to start with this?! It’s a messy Frankenstein’s human of clashing parts: studio drama and European art cinema; bombastic staged rhetoric (in said studio) and visual storytelling (on 16 mm film); Theatre of the Absurd meets ballet and surreal Bunuel or Bergman film. It’s a domestic set psychodrama fused with interior dream logic.

While such ambition couldn’t hope to work, fully, this vaulting intent is refreshing to watch compared with the intellectual and aesthetic timidity of our current era. Before even reading the reviews, I can safely assume they often judged it negatively against a default yardstick of realism. In the era following Troy Kennedy Martin’s ‘nats go home’ (1964) polemic in Encore theatre magazine, surely some critics would hold out for visual artistry and original imagery?

There are hints of the excellent set dressing of the BBC Two version of Pinter’s A Slight Ache (1967), even if the range of references seems overly dizzying – Ancient Rome, the French Revolution, Japan, the Marquis De Sade – there is a clear implicit critique of acquisition, appropriation and societal power relations. Certain misfires occur when we get unspeaking Black and Asian characters, compounded also by one being shown in an excruciating moment just when the word “white” is uttered on the soundtrack. There may just be a good defence in that this is all an addled dream of an insecure lady with racist leanings.

The odd Jacobin-leaning interior decorator Mr Bellamy – who notably doesn’t design or create anything – seems more like a Svengali or shaper of personality through his artful assembly of existing visual styles. This play rather impressively and literally explores the theme of how tastes in the decor and furnishing of rooms can communicate vivid truths about their inhabitants – echoing more overtly the underlying significance of domestic environments in four house party Plays for Today, The Saturday Party (1975), Tiptoe Through the Tulips (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977) and Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978).

The play positions Bellamy as imagining Susan and bringing into being who she is, within what is finally revealed to be a dream narrative. The reality of her far more grotty, loose bedsprings and nails sticking out the floor environment is a clever twist. We are brought back into a different part of London: kitchen sink urban decay, which a tensed-up Susan inhabits. The rest of the play has been a strange, askew imagining of Susan with herself as a ‘beautiful’ aristocratic lady, in an exotic and eclectic modern home. Richard Wilmot’s exceptional design work conveys the rich difference of each and every room, which further illuminates the crushingly empty expansiveness of Susan’s worldview.

There’s also something of the familiar Wednesday Play broadside against modern advertising rhetoric’s stilted, frozen register as in the first Wednesday Play Barry Foster appeared in and Dennis Potter’s debut. This is highly effective in the dining room scene where banal cliches are uttered by the assembled dummies around the table, prompting Susan to ask for some more human response, wherein The Woman Who Thinks (Marcia Ashton) gives a monologue where feeling is revealed to be subordinated to status-seeking and materialistic desires. It’s a bit like Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot, but perhaps just a bit too easily interpretable and needed more of that earthy Beckettian strangeness to it!

The Woman Who Thinks and Susan, who also thinks

The climactic bedroom scene undeniably brought to mind Sartre’s In Camera, which we have covered, which featured Jane Arden. Arden’s voice even takes on the deeper, harsh sonic attack of her performance in that play.

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

While Richard Wilmot is clearly the star, rising to the challenge of a play intrinsically about visual culture and design, and I admired Barry Foster’s Alan Partridge-anticipating consonantal pronunciation: “it’s pure h-white!”, it has to be Jane Arden, a divine, strange presence and a seer unmoored in the world. Interestingly, given her Doris Lessing-like progression into radical feminism and then Sufi spiritualism, Arden here plays a lost materialist.

Hair woven high above her head in Medusan expanses, Susan Carter-Carter appears to be a self-absorbed, snobbish lady with an absent rich husband. She is vain, colonialist in attitudes and openly admits she loves money and objects, claiming to be “cultured” in a way linked to status and possession. I feel Arden’s performance grows in stature as this develops, coming alive in the “theatre” sequence in the dining room, in the Sadean bedroom and then when she is thrust back into a bleak kitchen sink ‘reality’ at the end.

Arden’s sorceress-like attempts to evoke a preening, privileged lady are faltering enough that, once you know the twist, take on a greater depth. It’s a shame that some of the earlier sections of the play feel somewhat protracted, and lacking in concision. However, while I’d fully understand 2025 viewers tuning out due to the opening scenes being slow and dull-seeming, I feel they would lose out on an awful lot that is bizarre and gripping in the play’s second half. Arden here does some enrapturing work which captures the insecurities in those who chase the glossy Sunday Supplement aspirational lifestyle ideals people were being sold. It seems to me part and parcel of her incredible screen work, which included her intellectually and morally righteous response to Salvador Dali’s misogyny and political cowardice.

Jane Arden was a fearless searcher and magnetic screen presence. RIP.

Best line/s: “I wanted to cause a ripple of doubt. And, at the same time, comment on everything I had excluded from the room: the phony world of the Big Sell. Now here they are. The ruins of our Pompeii. Turning to ashes, fossilising as we watch…” (Bellamy)

Elaborate wall collage assaulting phoniness!

Bellamy also says: “I would have killed Corday. History is always wrong. The wrong things happen! Men of vision were destroyed and the fools lived on. What kind of a world is that?” This reflects from a kind of Machiavellian bourgeois revolutionary perspective on the Wednesday Play strand’s ongoing subterranean feature of undermining ‘heroes’ and ‘heroism’.

Audience size: 7.43 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – part 4 / Horizon – The Other Side of the Pill and Search for the Original Mind / Jazz 625 presents the Wes Montgomery Quartet), ITV (Carroll Calling / The Bacharach Sound / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 26%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 69.2%

Reception: The London critics were fairly evenly divided between appreciators and denigrators, with a few somewhere in the middle. Outside London, it was more ignored and those who did review it showed antipathy, by and large. A small minority of viewers was intrigued; far more detested it.

Mary Crozier praised ‘well poised acting’ by Barry Foster and ‘an emotional tour de force’ by Jane Arden, but felt the play was overlong and unconvincingly symbolic and fantastic, ceasing to ‘be interesting long before it came to an end with the apparent collapse of the luxurious house into a filthy slum’ (Guardian, 15 April 1965, p. 9). Crozier felt this play actually deserved the criticism that Pinter’s Tea Party had (unfairly) received for being obscure and tough to follow (ibid.).

In contrast, Peter Black felt this style of play ‘has become almost a cliche of the pretentious puzzle’, but it struck him ‘as remarkably viewable’, with each room ‘more surprising and splendid than the last’ (Daily Mail, 15 April 1965, p. 3). For Black, the ‘writing showed an unusual mastery of the business of combining words and pictures in separate layers’, while he admired its ambiguous yet incisive conclusion, which proved that Russell’s ‘construction was solid and true whichever ending you chose’ (ibid.). Black’s only complaint was Jane Arden’s casting: ‘Her face, with that thrusting lower lip and Bedlington terrier hair-do, was too strong and characterful on its own to stimulate one’s imagination about the character it was playing’ (ibid.). Oddly, the same paper carried a brief item on its front page noting how ‘scores of viewers rang the BBC and the Mail last night to complain they ‘could not understand the play, which involved long dream sequences and was filmed as if through a fog.’ (15 April 1965, p. 1).

The print I saw: not really ‘as if through a fog’!

Lyn Lockwood admitted it was a visually spectacular play but claimed Russell’s ‘message about material excesses, selfishness and inhumanity tended to get buried’, noting the actors just about ‘managed to keep their heads up’, but that Wilmot dominated and that the BBC’s current demand for a higher license fee doesn’t surprise her in this context (Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1965, p. 19). Such reviews, desiring all plays carry simple ‘messages’, seem haplessly jejune.

Anon in the Times felt concerned such plays ‘may thus repel conventionally minded viewers’ (Lockwood was one of these!), yet acknowledged Russell’s dialogue was elliptical, dealt in paradox and cunning wordplay (15 April 1965, p. 17). Despite the skills of Ferman, Wilmot, Arden and Foster, they saw the ‘sultry, attractive’ Susan Carter-Carter as insufficiently interesting a person, lacking ‘importance’ and professed not to care when ‘we discover this to be the dream of a slattern in a house that has decayed into slumminess’ (ibid.).

Furthering the split verdict, Maurice Richardson defended the play, especially Richard Wilmot’s production design: a ‘marvel of ingenuity’ (Observer, 18 April 1965, p. 25). He liked the room full of ‘actor zombies’, Arden’s wistful playing and the revelation that Susan was ‘a self-obsessed, lost girl with a mind full of advertisement-induced status longings and sex snobberies.’ (ibid.).

Richardson noted how this scenario of a ‘slut’ in a ‘decaying Notting Hill-type slum’ had been planted lightly by the opening sequence, though, like Anon, doubted Susan was interesting enough to have ‘such a singularly elaborate dream’ and desired ‘to know more of her conscious world’ and the true state of her husband (ibid.). This said, Richardson ended by praising ‘devilish clever’ direction by Ferman and how even the dream-within-a-dream dance sequence was ‘bearable’ (ibid.).

John Woodforde found that the ‘settings alone held the eye’, acclaiming ‘Superbly extravagant furnishings’ by Wilmot, claiming Russell’s message about ‘inhumanity and selfishness among very rich females of humble birth’ were swamped by the play’s desire to be ‘different’ (Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 1965, p. 13). He much preferred a Dr. Finlay’s Casebook episode, a tour de force on the theme of abortion, surprisingly for a series with a cosy image! (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin gave a slightly better review than usual, noting that such ‘groping attempts to connect […] need sympathy and encouragement’, and reflecting how ‘This strange, ambitious play by a new writer is still snapping at my heels like – well, a Jack Russell terrier.’ (Sunday Times, 18 April 1965, p. 24). Wiggin waxed literary about Russell’s ‘luxuriant proliferation of image, symbol and innuendo; a sort of Jamesian richness of surface texture, combined with a Joycean richness of sub-surface suggestion’, yet ultimately wanted it to be less pretentious and ‘Over-opulent’ and its writing to be ‘clear, or at least in a code we can break on the run’ (ibid ).

T.C. Worsley also praised Wilmot’s sets and ‘one funny scene’, where Susan and Bellamy ‘draped in napkins […] supped on ortolans’, but ultimately felt the play was a great idea whose ‘treatment’ was lacking in ‘intelligence, imagination and invention’ (Financial Times, 21 April 1965, p. 22). Frederick Laws welcomed its ‘visual inventiveness and plain cheek’; I agree with his admiration of the ‘entertainingly morbid’ dining room scene, though feel his claim ‘all that had been communicated was crossness towards women, wealth, taste or just living’ a tad overblown (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681). While it’s clearly critical of status-obsession and materialism, it’s not having a go at all women from a puritanical perspective.

Clifford Davis used the play as one example in a stinging attack on the BBC’s financial excesses and Hugh Greene’s perceived lack of business acumen, making arguments horribly prescient of the Checkland-Birt BBC reforms of the 1980s-90s, which destroyed in-house production and subjected the BBC to marketisation (Daily Mirror, 21 April 1965, p. 21). Davis noted how a play of 90 minutes like The Interior Decorator would fend to cost between £8,000 and £12,000 but that Wilmot’s lavish sets and filmed inserts put it in the ‘£20,000 bracket’, then attacking the play as ‘a flop’ with ‘most viewers’ (ibid.).

Outside London, Argus felt it was now a critic’s ‘duty’ to comment on such a widely watched ‘programme’ as The Wednesday Play, but bemoaned a ‘tortured and ugly […] Absolutely potty’ play (Glasgow Daily Record, 15 April 1965, p. 15). They mocked ‘the woman’ as representing ‘every empty-headed human being who ever found difficulty in dividing life into reality and unreality’ (ibid.). Fascinatingly, Peggie Phillips questioned its focus on visual detail given it was made for the television medium, where due to the smallness of the visual field, ‘spareness’ and ‘shape’ are important: thus sensing that the fuzziness of people’s TV receptions and the meagre size of their sets could render Richard Wilmot’s great designs unclear (Scotsman, 19 April 1965, p. 3).

W.D.A. felt past caring about ‘the mixed-up fantasy life’ of ‘heroine’ Susan, finding ‘a certain compulsive interest’ but also decrying the ‘cheating’ use of a dream being the explanation (Liverpool Echo, 15 April 1965, p. 2). In the same paper, ‘Onlooker’ had easy fun at the play’s expense, claiming it ‘made Harold Pinter seem very nearly as easy to follow as Enid Blyton’ (19 April 1965, p. 4). The next day, W.D.A. linked Pinter’s Tea Party, Russell’s play and David Adam’s We Thought You Would Like To Be Caesar (ITV) together as excursions into fantasy (20 April 1965, p. 2).

Among viewers, the play received an abyssal RI of 26%, by far the lowest of all Wednesday Plays we’ve surveyed so far. 14% gave it the high A+/A ratings, while 68% gave it the low C/C- scores (BBC WAC, VR/65/199). Most responded with anger and irritation, with several viewers complaining that it represented the squandering of public money, just as the BBC licence fee was being increased (ibid.). A steel smelter claimed it took the ‘prize for poppycock’ and called: ‘Let’s get back to sanity, please!’ (ibid.). A chartered engineer termed it ‘honestly […] the worst thing I have ever seen on television’ (ibid.).

There were characteristic attacks on a play which seemed to lack clear meaning, with some also objecting to ‘distasteful undertones’ they claimed to have detected (ibid.). However, an ‘intrigued’ minority praised its ‘fascinating originality’ (ibid.). There were more doubts about the acting than usual, though the handful who protested about overacting did concede this was deliberate for the style of play (ibid.). The main factor that kept many watching was Wilmot’s design, indeed it was seen as ‘a designer’s play’, though some felt it ‘far too lavish for such material’ (ibid.). My anticipation of critical attacks due to its lack of realism better fitted the audience response: ‘some reporting viewers were irritated by the dancing which struck an absurdly artificial note in a ridiculously far-fetched play, they declared’ (ibid.).

Similarly, in a letter to the press, a C.D. Loader of Haylease Crescent in Hereford found it lacking in ‘entertainment’, deriding ‘an hour and a quarter of dreary, and often stupid dialogue’ (Sunday Mirror, 18 April 1965, p. 22).

I would say I personally was inclined initially to feel this was an unengaging failure of a play worth a 4/10, but I was, eventually, won around to a large degree by its ambition to do something unique on TV, matching many of the Six productions on BBC Two (1964-5) which the magnetic Jane Arden had also been involved with as actor and also writer on the existentialist and surrealist The Logic Game (1965) which features an appearance by R.D. Laing. Costly or not, Richard Wilmot’s production designs are incredible here and alongside an intriguingly overambitious script and theatrical performances, they make it gradually fascinating viewing for anyone open-minded enough.

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.🙂

Brexit Britain: Day #1040 – Mass-Observation and Dream Diaries

From the 25-27 April, I attended the seventh annual conference British Association for Television and Screen Studies; the first I had attended and at which I spoke.

On Friday 26th, during my panel, the preceding speaker talked eloquently about a long lost BBC TV series EAST END, broadcast in 1939. This was an anthropological insight into the subject of Jewish and Cockney life in the East End of London, presented by Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of the Mass-Observation movement. More than a decade ago, David Attenborough presented a documentary on Harrisson, entitled Tom Harrisson: the Barefoot Anthropologist (BBC4, 18/01/2007). After our panel, the speaker JJ told me how easy it was to get sidetracked in the M-O archives: for example, getting engrossed in the dream diaries participants were asked to complete in the early years of the Second World War.

On Saturday afternoon, I made my way back from the conference on the Cross Country train to Newcastle. While there was excellent free WiFi access for the whole journey, and I spent much of the time typing up my handwritten notes from a fascinating documentary on Italian genre cinema of the 1970s, I couldn’t help observing some of what was going on around. The woman next to me was older middle-aged, serious but fairly cheery when she struggled to locate the right ticket. At Leeds, the train emptied. At York, it filled up again. A hen party, and nearer to where I was sat, a group of young women – very Geordie and working class. The sort of people Rod Liddle might patronise or, even worse, claim to speak for. The announcer on the PA system chummily advertised alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages on sale.

This group was loud, on a generally noisy carriage. At a few points they had current popular “tunes” on, as I heard a passerby say. They went out of their way to be polite. One of them needed a tissue or something and a fellow passenger gave one and was thanked profusely: “You see, I’ve got manners, me!” It could have been an encounter in Lynsey Hanley’s book Respectable: The Experience of Class (2016).

This was far from the threatening raucousness you can sometimes get on a Saturday train from tanked-up average geezers. Their dialect was interesting – the Geordie usage of “grief” as a verb. Moreover, they did not just speak about their own lives but about the varied (and none too promising) job prospects in areas like nursing. One of them in particular had strongly held views, critical of people in their own generation who seemed to want to earn their money via Instagram, in some way… They were critical of people being “obsessed” with social media and discussed what they saw as the bad pay and conditions of being a nurse today.

After mentioning the difficulties the Health Service is having in providing care for certain conditions, one said: “I don’t think there’ll be an NHS in ten years’ time.”

These aren’t the sort of people, in age, class or geography, whose voices we hear much, except if they are ghettoised in reality TV or entertainment or mediated by journalists of left, neoliberal or right wing persuasions. (Most commonly, the latter two) It made me think of the folly of scrapping BBC3. It also made me think: why on earth doesn’t the BBC make a current affairs equivalent of Gogglebox, based in the likes of trains, bus queues and shopping centres? Unmediated by voice-over.

I had a dream, yesterday morning. The Prime Minister was holding a press conference. This was seemingly being broadcast to the nation. Yet instead of the usual sort of media set up she was sat on the floor. Beside her was a pile of books. After making a very cursory introduction, she picked up one of the books and began reading. The contents were baffling: nothing seemed to make sense.

It seemed she was somehow trying to be “authentic”. Yet, she was completely failing to connect and seemed utterly oblivious to how it was all coming across.

She abruptly abandoned the first book and starting reading from another, which again made little sense. The gathered journalists were scratching their heads and began muttering, uncomfortable at the non sequiturs. The PM’s delivery was as prim and Sunday school teacher patronising as usual, but it seemed she hadn’t learned the content beforehand. It seemed to me that these were books that had meant something to her in the distant past, or to someone else…

I was in the midst of the group and, somehow, a book appeared in my hands. I turned the pages, it was an old book, its contents were obscure. Its texture as a physical object particularly struck me as I turned its dusty pages; whole chapters were marked with soot. Yet, I was able to detect amid its antiquity that its subject was English culture and in particular English seaside resorts.

I suddenly felt that a sense of epiphany, as if it was being provided by a film voice-over: that I was aware, at least in part, of what she was getting at. Yet, I kept my silence and the broadcast continued.