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 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.).

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)

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 – 03:09: ‘Stand Up, Nigel Barton’ (BBC1, 8 December 1965)

To analyse this play accurately as a product of its time, some misogynistic language from the dialogue is quoted.

03.09: Stand Up, Nigel Barton (BBC One, Wednesday 8 December 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm
Directed by Gareth Davies; Written by Dennis Potter; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Richard Henry

This play is lighthearted, resting on the fact that Dennis Potter finds British politics fun.

It should be especially interesting, as it follows immediately on the heels of a real party political broadcast at 9.30 p.m. (Bristol Evening Post, 8 December 1965, p. 4).

In 2004, when TV drama is corporate, committee-driven, blandly homogeneous, Potter looks even more of an anomaly than ever (Mark Fisher, ‘a spoonful of sugar’, in Darren Ambrose (ed.), K-PUNK: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 – 2016), London: Repeater Books, 2018, p. 107).

And if television was the chief modus operandi of his enemy Admass, ‘the voice of the occupying power’, then to hijack it for the opposition was doubly effective, because ‘the resistance ought to take place within the barracks as well as outside’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography, London: Faber and Faber, 1998, p. 172).

The Leicester Mercury anticipated the comedic introduction of the physical cartoonist Brandt in The Day Today by 29 years by announcing ‘the first of two comedies by Dennis Potter which take a wry look at British politics’ (8 December 1965, p. 3).

In copy much recycled over the next six days, Vote, Vote, Vote For Nigel Barton‘s withdrawal was referred to, along with pundits apparently predicting that ‘Barton would never be seen again’: only to be confounded by (gasp) two plays appearing at once! (Lincolnshire Echo, 2 December 1965, p. 6). The article quotes Potter, interviewed, wanting to stress ‘that both plays are comedies’, looking at British politics and political machines, with some events happening in Potter’s own life, others being fictional (ibid.). In a way oddly anticipating Tony Benn’s later issues focus, Potter decries how political machines react to opinion polls, ignoring how policies will be decisive (ibid.). Barton is described as a ‘misfit’ at home and at Oxford, while wanting to ‘remain true to his political and social principles’ (ibid.).

Tony Garnett’s preview notes Barton’s cleverness and confidence, his eagerness to succeed, being ‘part of the cream of the first Free Milk generation, One of the Chosen Few’ (Radio Times, 2 December 1965, p. 39). Garnett explains how the school-mistress coos at him, while rapping ‘the knuckles of the village boys and girls who are already destined for the slag-heap’ – who in turn bully Nigel (ibid.). Crucially,

Nigel is too well aware of the fashionable potency of being both brilliant and working class. He wants everyone to know about the coal dust and, to get a job on the telly, he is even prepared to exploit the inevitable tensions between himself and his parents. (ibid.)

Garnett explains how his ‘glamorous new experiences’ at Oxford ‘are not quite seductive enough to win his complete allegiance. He cannot simply go back and suffocate in the coal dust, and he cannot blandly progress towards a heroic status in the colour-supplement world. Perhaps politics is the answer? It seems worth trying.’ (ibid.). This introduction ends with Garnett emphasising Barton encountering the ‘big wide comic world’, and learning, including ‘how to laugh until it hurts’ (ibid.).

The Liverpool Echo‘s listing noted how Nigel is ‘unwilling to shrug off his background to become a fashionable success’ (8 December 1965, p. 2). A fresh interview with Potter by Ken Irwin in the Daily Mirror revealed a little more of his intent: ‘This is an explanatory piece, so that everyone will know what kind of a character Barton is’ (8 December 1965, p. 18). Potter gives an account of his annoyance at the postponement of Vote, Vote. Vote, due to BBC unhappiness about ‘some of the politics’, and that he was only asked to do a few pages of rewrites (ibid.). He was also commissioned to do another play on Barton, claiming he was influenced by standing for election in 1964: ‘I found being a candidate a very comical experience’ (ibid.). Rumours are aired that he may want to write a third Barton play, to which he replied: ‘That will have to wait at least until next year’ (ibid.).

Before my own review and coverage of the reasonably extensive post-broadcast reaction, here is a contribution from John Cook, a renowned Dennis Potter expert.

John Cook writes: From the evidence of Dennis Potter’s notebooks (housed within The Dennis Potter Archive, Forest of Dean https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/dennis-potter-archive), both Stand Up, Nigel Barton and the October-transmitted Alice were drafted contemporaneously over the first half of 1965 as Potter seized on his new ‘vocation’ as television playwright with energy and gusto.

There are similarities: both are interior ‘memory plays’ which begin when inner tensions racking the central protagonist become too great as a result of the pressures from their external environment – in the case of Nigel Barton in Stand Up, tensions between himself and his coalminer father as the Oxford student accompanies the older man to the pit gates; in the case of the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson, an encounter with one of his previous child protégés on a train and the painful realisation she is now all grown up and about to be married. Each ‘inciting incident’ then triggers off a psychologically associative search for answers, as the rest of each respective work explores the circumstances that have built up to the present moment of inner conflict within the central protagonist.

Delving into the non-naturalistic world of Lewis Carroll for his period drama marking the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland, may have inspired Potter with the confidence to adopt a similar approach to the contemporary material he explores in Stand Up. Certainly the latter is a more sophisticated play, structurally, than Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (that was written a year earlier in 1964 prior to having had to be revised for belated transmission a week after Stand Up aired, as a result of a censorship row at the BBC).

Potter acknowledged this fact in an interview with Paul Madden as part of a 1976 BFI retrospective season of TV drama, shown that year at the National Film Theatre:

I suspect Stand Up, Nigel Barton is a better play than Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton because I used television techniques with more ease. Up to Vote, Vote, Vote, I was obtrusively thinking, ‘How do I use television, how do I go from that scene to that scene, using television in the best way?’ After that, it became second nature. I’ve never since had to think about the grammar of television.[1]

Potter’s notebooks in the Forest of Dean archive reveal his original intended title for Stand Up was to have been Never Go Back – a subtle nod, possibly, to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and the whole subsequent ‘Angry Young Man’ movement that first brought Potter and many of his like-minded contemporaries to national prominence.

But switching the title underlined the greater sophistication with which Potter was now working, because ‘Stand Up, Nigel Barton!’ is at once an angry young man call to arms and rebellion against a ‘sea of troubles’ and the ultimate expression of conformism and submission to authority; being the injunction his elderly teacher would shout to Nigel, her ‘class pet’, whenever she wanted him to show the other kids up in lessons, as witnessed within the flashback scenes in the play to the village school. Punning here is rife: ‘class’ is at once educational and political. Nigel is both working class hero and obsequious class traitor: going to Oxford and ‘standing up’ for his class but also selling out his fellow ‘class-mates’. First, the child he betrays at school in order to ‘get on’ and carry on up the ladder of success and then, ultimately, his own parents in the interview for national TV that forms the climax of the play.

The play is both a Hamlet-like tragedy and a black comedy of errors. Nigel is every bit as much a ‘class comic’ as the class comedian of the village school (and later, adult ‘stand up’ at the working man’s club), Georgie Pringle, whom Nigel falsely accuses at school of a ‘class crime’ he himself committed. Here, Potter first sets up the symbiotic link between the clever child and the ‘backward’ child as the same type of displaced outcast within the local community; a running trope throughout his writing which would reach its apotheosis, twenty years later, with the famous Philip Marlow-Mark Binney classroom betrayal and scapegoating scenes of The Singing Detective (1986) (in which actress Janet Henfrey, who played the schoolteacher in Stand Up, was deliberately recast in the same role in The Singing Detective to underscore the connection with the earlier play).

It is interesting to trace the evolution of this primal ‘class’ and classroom betrayal scene in Potter’s writing: at one point in his ‘angry young man’ non-fictional work, The Glittering Coffin (1960), written while he was still a student at Oxford, Potter briefly recalls an incident in the village school within the Forest of Dean when, angry and embarrassed at having been singled out for praise by the headmaster in front of his peers, he later stayed behind and wrote the word ‘shit’ on the teacher’s blackboard so that he could become ‘a hero at the subsequent inquest’.[2]

Twenty-five years later in The Singing Detective, this ‘crime’ becomes literal and embodied: the child secretly defecates on the teacher’s desk, in a form of passive protest against the patriarchal authority structures he is increasingly coming to see through and to judge. But in Stand Up, Nigel Barton, the primal ‘crime’ is the stealing of a daffodil from the classroom windowsill and the subsequent scapegoating of an entirely innocent child. We now know from his notebooks in the Dennis Potter Archive these are scenes which Potter had conceived and begun to write out in prose form some years earlier as part of his unpublished autobiographical first novel, The Country Boy. Indeed Stand Up, Nigel Barton is, in one sense, a part-dramatisation of aspects and incidents from the earlier unpublished The Country Boy, though crucially, now, ‘looking back’ with some distance, no longer necessarily in anger but through a more sardonic, blackly comic lens.

It was this sophistication that made Stand Up, Nigel Barton different and which gave it its impact – taking themes of the ‘angry young man’ and the plight of the scholarship boy that had become well-worn, even tired, tropes in British social realist culture (having been frequently explored in books, films and plays since the late 1950s) and infusing these with a new energy and power via a non-naturalistic storytelling filter that now emphasised personal tension and psychological ambiguity as much as political challenge and revolt. As Potter put it to me at one point in my 1990 interview with him: ‘Ambiguity haunts one’s mind’.[3] Echoing the trajectory of his fictional alter-ego Nigel Barton, the play helped hurtle Potter ‘through a doorway marked “Success”’, winning him acclaim and alongside Vote, Vote, Vote, awards. [4] With Stand Up, Nigel Barton, Potter, the Wednesday Play ‘discovery’, had arrived as a television writer of some recognised distinction.

[1] 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.36.

[2] ‘In my rage and misery at being identified as “different” in the sense that no working-class schoolboy wants to be different, I stayed behind after the final bell and wrote “shit” on the blackboard so that I could be a hero again at the subsequent “inquest”’: Dennis Potter, The Glittering Coffin. London: Gollancz, 1960, pp.76-7.

[3] Dennis Potter, personal interview, recorded 10 May 1990, London.

[4] ‘Mr Potter, aged 30, a miner’s son and an Oxford graduate, stands at present like a study in suspended animation – poised to hurtle, or be hurtled, through a doorway marked “Success”. Behind him, last Wednesday, is Stand Up, Nigel Barton, for my money one of the best plays the BBC has presented this year. Ahead, next Wednesday, is the sequel Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton which, if it lives up to expectations, should put him in the forefront of TV playwrights’: Barry Norman, ‘What the Class Barrier Did for Dennis Potter’, Daily Mail, 13 December 1965, p. 9. In 1966, the Screenwriter’s Guild awarded Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton its TV play of the year award and in an unprecedented move awarded the runners-up prize to Stand Up, Nigel Barton.

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Before my review, here’s some chronological production history information. The play was commissioned by Tony Garnett on 20 April 1965, with Potter delivering his script on 19 August 1965; location filming was on 2-3 November and studio from 16-18 November (Greaves, Rolinson and Williams eds., 2015, p. 338).

Rating: **** / ****

This is a superb play, definitely one of the best witnessed so far in this adventure through the first year and a bit of The Wednesday Play. It manages this by being a well crafted play, and also an insightful sociological lens into Britain at this point in time.

A play should have vivid conflict, compelling character development; it doesn’t necessarily have to have any Aristotelian unities, nor clearly resolved endings. This has several utterly vivid conflicts, in the schooldays flashbacks, between Nigel and both worlds he is moving between (great inter-cutting between the working men’s club and the Oxford Union debate), and the final personalised clash between Nigel and his parents. There is vivid development of these three characters and others play a crucial part too: I felt Janet Henfrey and Vickery Turner were superb in enacting their roles.

Potter’s play dares to openly address people feeling caught between classes and belonging nowhere anymore. Yet, in the brilliant ending where it comes full circle with Nigel and Harry, his Dad, walking on the road, there is a hopeful suggestion they will reconcile and come to a far deeper mutual understanding as a result of Nigel’s unwise usage of his parents and airing of his personal feelings in a TV documentary about class. This is a deft development from the tragic, melancholy initial scene of the parents’ reactions, and Nigel is now gaining the maturity to realise what he did was naive, but also had a cruelty in it. While his claims that other parts were edited out may well be true, he has been given a lesson in how media people will shape a simplified story for their audience. This incident was based on Potter’s own appearance on episode two of Does Class Matter? on BBC TV on 25 August 1958, which was followed by a discussion led by Christopher Mayhew with guests Canon Ronald Preston and Richard Hoggart; Potter himself admitted he had been a ‘shit’ and ‘betrayed his parents’ (Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams eds., Dennis Potter: The Art of Invective – Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94, London: Oberon Books, 2015, pp. 5, 332).

There’s a vivid savagery to the playground bullying scene, played out by adults in direct anticipation of Blue Remembered Hills fourteen years later. The editing is restrained when it needs to be (a great opening tracking shot down the road), and then at other times uses montage-like quick cuts, as between Nigel’s profile and that of the Oxford Union debating chamber’s old statues of past luminaries. There is dialectical force behind the editing between Nigel’s two worlds, which is deeply angering and sad and funny, by turns. The formal departure from realism extends to several instances of Nigel addressing us viewers at home, breaking the ‘fourth wall’. People are still claiming this stuff is revolutionary in 21st century fictions, they’d do well to look at Dennis Potter’s work before making such claims. Anyway, Troy Kennedy Martin clearly would have approved!

It is geographically both distinct and indistinct, which enables broad appeal. Nigel’s home village is vaguely Northern, as betokened by the accents, which is canny in departing from Potter’s own working-class Gloucestershire environment: making the point that his experiences were widely replicated across the UK. Interestingly, the script apparently indicates it was meant to be set in South Nottinghamshire, while location work was indeed done there (Carpenter op. cit., p. 167). The village used was Bestwood, now partly in the Nottinghamshire constituencies of Gedling and Sherwood, including the inventive decision by Tony Garnett to shoot the club scenes in an actual club in Bestwood, using a mobile video OB unit (W. Stephen Gilbert, Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter. London: Sceptre, 1995, p. 126).

Nigel is studying PPE at New College, Oxford, where Potter himself studied and where, incidentally, the current (just about!) Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves studied. The media man who comes up from London to interview Barton’s parents has a condescending, manipulative air, and is righteously sent packing.

It is clear that Nigel is right that Harry and other miners walking in the middle of the road is a sign of personal independence, proudly aloof from the mechanised Admass phenomena of what Harry calls “bloody cars”, and their mass adoption making people more atomised, individualised while their vehicles hog space we could be inhabiting together. They’re dangerous (nearly running Harry down!) and polluting, and most of the younger miners have them, as Nigel notes, his Dad being a principled objector to this aspect of modernity.

I liked the precise detail of the recounted drunken incident at the King’s Arms pub in the city centre, where Nigel has refused to stop singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and given a false name to the Proctorial Office, receiving monetary fines from the officious college authorities. In contrast, the working men’s club comedy in the Bartons’ Northern mining village links forward to Joe’s Ark (1974), with performers facing a relatively less tough crowd, it must be said! We get some wonderfully uninhibited, letting our hair down expressions and behaviours in this sequence. Easy rapport, hearty guffaws and drinks of stout and the like contrast with the uptight complacency and arrogance of most we observe in the Oxford Union environment.

Richard Henry’s production design in all settings is magnificent, with details of decor emphasising class attitudes and how environments are made to be intimidating or welcoming. Barton’s parents’ home is clean and has all sorts of ornaments and plates on show: set dressing which illuminates their archetypal quiet, modestly aspirational tastes. There is no composed underscore, why should there be? We hear mostly diegetic music, like performances or sing songs in the club (the plaintive, moving ‘In a Monastery Garden’, used way before The Singing Detective, 1986!). At the end (and I think earlier too), we hear The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, a youthful call which does not actually accord with Nigel’s heart, though his head does seem to know he needs to. The two paths seem to be a TV career (hints of Melvyn Bragg’s real life trajectory), or politics. The next play, of course, depicts him opting for the latter.

This play stirred a range of personal feelings for me. I was educated at a state comprehensive in the North East before studying English at Cambridge – a path far less obviously to power than PPE at Oxford, though clearly conferring some life advantages in the UK in the 21st century, though it’s really networking and social confidence rather than simply having been to Oxbridge which gets you far in terms of worldly ambition, and I never found those things easy. My family was unlike Barton’s, though perhaps closer to that of their parents’ generation. Our home was full of books as well as a dominant television.

I often recognised myself in Nigel’s position at school: an academic high-flier, though generally without his verbal confidence. At different moments, and across different stages, I shifted between being part of the crowd and feeling like an outcast – especially veering to the latter in the early years of secondary school. Throughout my life, I have experienced belonging and estrangement in long, competing phases.

While Barton ‘happened’ nearly four decades before I was at this stage in my life, it is remarkable how strongly his experiences resonated. This was especially true of the dizzying contrasts between being at Cambridge for half the year and back in Sunderland for the other, from autumn 2001 to summer 2004 – a strange, varied period that was daunting and difficult, yet inspiring and wonderfully enjoyable, after which nothing could be quite the same. Funnily enough, my enjoyment of being in the North East felt all the greater, feelings magnified by being away and then returning… My own complex path and difficulties I now realise also emerged from being neurodivergent in a world geared towards the neurotypical, which exalts social ability above all, with a veneer of meritocracy promoted. This play shows perhaps even more crucially alongside the dialectic of the present, how Nigel was ‘torn’ between the competing perspectives of his teacher and his classmates. Miss Tillings’s and most in the class’s mutual antagonism was something I witnessed I fair few times at Secondary School, and often I could not fully align with either party.

I must concede that Mark Fisher made some of the same points I made in my review earlier. He notes the ‘universally superb’ performances, especially Woolgar’s and Barron’s, and how Barton’s rhetorical style can become ‘somewhat too histrionic’ talking about Oxford (‘Stand Up, Nigel Barton’, in Ambrose (ed.), op. cit. p. 116). The one point I would disagree with Fisher on is that it conveys ‘a nihilistic message’ that ‘there is nothing to aspire to, nothing you’d want to return to’. While there is a pervasive cultural cynicism at play, Nigel does walk off to the club with his Dad at the end and they don’t seem entirely apart but walk and talk together in the middle of the road, bringing the play full circle. Fisher seems to undercut his own bleak reading of it by quoting Potter’s idealistic description of how TV was offering a common culture with the potential to expand consciousness and social awareness:

There is no other medium which could virtually guarantee an audience of millions with a full quota of manual workers and stockbrokers for a “serious” play about class (Potter introduction to The Nigel Barton Plays, London: Penguin, 1967, p. 21).

The real bleakness is not in this play, but how the varied cultures it represents and embodies were deliberately forsaken in the long term, by so many forces, in the media, yes, but most specifically engineered by Thatcher and all her successors. In the immediate aftermath, Potter’s own father was very proud of Stand Up, Nigel Barton (Carpenter op. cit., p. 172). The play more than justifies Glen Creeber’s shrewd analysis of its Brechtian qualities and formidable, deliberate fulfilment of Troy Kennedy Martin’s calls for popular modernist non-naturalism in ‘nats go home’, getting people to question ‘reality’ (pp. 53-4).

Best performance: JACK WOOLGAR

The performances are, as already stated, superb across the board here. I think Keith Barron has a charisma that veers between soft and sharp. A liveliness that he can use in public and yet also an interiority and critical impulse emerging from his developing identity as an intellectual. He can still sometimes express himself in the same way as others in the club, but his instinctive responses to life around him have become rapidly complicated by his experiences at Oxford.

I liked the performance of the archetypal insular, nosy and quarrelsome Northerner character in the club, I think named Jordan. by Peter Madden (later in Jack Rosenthal’s lost Play for Today Hot Fat, 1974). His nosiness and judgemental nature is on a par with Norris Cole of Corrie himself!

Janet Henfrey’s performance is expertly malevolent. It is fascinating to read that Potter expressed in 1975 that the actual equivalent teacher in his schooldays was ‘young and gentle, the first love of my life, an emancipator’: emphasising how art shaped his reality into a darker hue (Greaves, Rolinson and Williams eds., op. cit., p. 166).

Vickery Turner (1940-2006), who later married Warren Oates and then Michael J. Shannon also became a successful novelist and playwright. Here, she is humanly unrecognisable from her working-class performance in Up the Junction, entirely convincing as a blithe, yet not entirely hidebound member of the privileged classes Nigel resents. She is able to see her own kind for what they are, how they gain and hoard power, while not really caring to do anything about it. While there are outbursts of Potter/Barton misogyny in the language Barton uses towards her – “bitch”, “you silly flaming cow” – the latter does convey his class perspective about her patronising, presumptuous joke about him being her “very own Andy Capp!”

Barton hits Jill in a puritan response to her flirtatious suggestion he have sex with her while he wears a dinner jacket; her class goading touches a nerve which causes him to lash out appallingly, and we don’t really get a critique of this violence. While Nancy Banks-Smith’s critique that Jill was ‘a tart on tranquilizers’ is valid, I feel Turner’s performance makes her more than this, giving her a lively intelligence and at least some openness to exploring beyond her own class (ibid., p. 172). Potter himself recognised he had a residual misogyny from the English working-class male culture he came from (ibid.).

I have to actually award it to Jack Woolgar, this time. I think he’s quite magnificent here. Gruff, warm and bearing the physical strain of a life down the pit, including regular bouts of coughing, there’s a goodness about him, and awareness of his limitations, and pride in his son and community which is moving. It would be good to compare this performance with Jim Carter’s in The Singing Detective…

Best line: “Nye Bevan, you know, he always refused to wear a dinner jacket…” (Harry Barton; this also has a significant follow up showing his and his wife’s political outlooks)

I’ve really not given this as much thought as it really deserves. There are obviously crucial ones like:

“When you were a little lad, he vowed that you’d never have to go down the pit… He’s got to get away from this place, he used to say, he’s got to get away” (Mrs Barton to Nigel)

“It’s clean enough here, Nigel, you could eat off the floor…” (ibid.)

“No one, who’s been brought up in a working-class culture can ever altogether escape, or wish to escape, the almost suffocating warmth and friendliness of that culture. But…” (Nigel Barton)

Audience size: 6.29 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 45.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: Orchestra Wives), ITV (Glad Rag Ball / Wrestling)

The Shropshire Star, despite being another to quote Potter’s view of his play bring a comedy, trailed ATV’s Glad Rag Ball as for ‘Viewers who prefer light entertainment’, ‘a marathon seven-hour dance marathon for 8,000 London students are Wembley Pool a fortnight ago, in aid of five charities’ (8 December 1965, p. 9). Jimmy Tarbuck compered, with the ‘star-studded line-up’ including Frankie Vaughan, The Three Bells, Lionel Blair, Donovan, The Who, and Ted Heath and his orchestra (Staffordshire Sentinel, 8 December 1965, p. 6).

Audience Reaction Index: 60%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 76.9%

Reception: This play received a much wider critical reaction than most in this autumn/winter run, barring Alice and Up the Junction. While there were a few dissenting voices, this seemed to begin to establish Potter as having a dramatic voice that critics would invariably tune into. I didn’t notice any marked difference between critics outside London and those in the capital, really. The public reaction seemed actually rather similar as that to Up the Junction, mixed, but with an appreciative ‘silent majority’ making their feelings clear: given too little emphasis in much of the Potter literature which seems to fixate on the negative framing of the audience research report, rather than its actual quantitative substance.

Lyn Lockwood flatly did not identify with this drama, feeling ‘quite uninterested in Nigel’s future’, and whether he belonged to his Dad’s world or ‘to the world of the brave new middle-class at which the admass, coloured supplements of the newspapers are directed’ (Daily Telegraph, 9 December 1965, p. 19). Lockwood put her lack of interest down to the play’s ‘mechanical technique’, whatever that meant, though did concede that the ‘writing managed to get airborne in the last 15 minutes’ (ibid.).

A reviewer hitherto unknown to me, Julian Holland, found it an ‘excellent’ play, though resorted to tiresome conflations with other, actually rather dissimilar texts: ‘He is Unlucky Jim who has found his Doom At The Top’ (Daily Mail, 9 December 1965, p. 3). Holland is relatively perceptive when qualifying his claim that Potter is ‘sentimental’, by noting ‘it is hard not to be when sentiment is the greatest quality they have to bequeath’ (ibid.). They also identified Gareth Davies’s ‘brilliant evocative direction’ of Potter’s scenes which were ‘all masterpieces of immediate illumination’ (ibid.).

In the Guardian, Derek Malcolm, a critic I’d never seen specifically doing a TV column – though he regularly reflected on film and television’s convergence in the 1980s-2000s – assessed Potter’s play (9 December 1965, p. 9). Malcolm felt what could have been ‘thumpingly pretentious’ was elevated ‘into more than fair entertainment’ by ‘full-blooded direction’ and the cast’s ‘ripe characterisation’ (ibid.). He had hoped that the follow-up would be better as this left ‘a deal unanswered about young Barton’s tightrope walk between two Hoggartian cultures’ (ibid.). He notes how Jill Blakeney (Vickery Turner), the judge’s daughter is ‘tranquilised from the waist upwards’, emphasising the medication trends of the time, and the wry languor of her line about the Eamonn Andrews Show (ibid.). Malcolm was most touched by the scenes at the club and the school, ‘observed and written with a panache and depth of feeling which made full sense of Barton’s incurable suffocation syndrome’ (ibid.). Keith Barron also came in for praise for his detailed portrayal, Johnny Wade for his ‘grimly terrifying portrait of a school baddie: and Woolgar ‘was magnificent as the father, perhaps the true hero of the story so far’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson found the play ‘viewable, some of it compulsively so’, though felt, in a brief yet waffling review, that it left the viewer too much sorting of the ‘wheat from chaff’ in terms of its uneven quality (The Observer, 12 December 1965, p. 24).

Philip Purser expressed that he had by now come to respect, if not enjoy, James MacTaggart’s Wednesday Plays, though clearly disapproves of the standard style: ‘a bombardment of images and scenes which the actors must half inhabit and half disown’ (Sunday Telegraph, 12 December 1965, p. 13). After a ‘patchy’ start with the College party scene, Purser felt this fashionable style ‘worked as well as it’s ever done’, with the chopping between scenes ‘relevant to the narrative that was emerging’ (ibid). He also rightly commended the adult-actors-playing-children device, while noting the TV documentary element must have been influenced by Potter’s own documentary about the Forest of Dean ‘some six or seven years ago’ (ibid.). Purser reflected how Jack Woolgar provided the play’s final effect: ‘An actor with the face of a sandbag [, he] seemed to me to assume the gait, the stoop, the accent, the essence of the man’ (ibid.).

A younger critic than many, Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008), the renowned poet and later Play for Today dramatist in 1972, perceived how Potter ‘drilled away’ at the ‘nerve’ of the English ‘class structure’, anticipating it would have caused ‘some wincing’ (Sunday Times, 12 December 1965, p. 40). Mitchell acclaimed Potter as now a ‘strong’ TV playwright whose work ‘spoke eloquently’, emphasising how ‘He reports realistically’, and condenses his language ‘until it shines’ (ibid.). He also felt the school scenes transcended possible ‘Will Hay giggles’ to illustrate the ‘grotesque menace of schoolroom violence and betrayals’, leading the most moving scene for him: Nigel’s realisation that he is concerned for others’ suffering, being culpable for the class clown’s beating (ibid.). ‘This is a play which will be remembered for what it shouted’, Mitchell concluded, eagerly looking forward to Vote, Vote, Vote (ibid.).

T.C. Worsley proclaimed that Potter’s play, like the Armchair Theatre play, The Gong Game, was ‘some 10 or 15 years out of touch’ with their subject of class, but that Potter’s was more up to date in its presentation (Financial Times, 15 December 1965, p. 26). Worsley felt its theme was actually very close to Emlyn Williams’s theatre play The Corn is Green (1938), but lacked the ‘special vitality’ that Williams’s ‘particular talent’ have to that play (ibid.). Worsley mused in quite a leaden and literal way about Barton being such a ‘lone fish out of water’ at Oxford in 1965 wouldn’t be true, perhaps not grasping Potter’s autobiographical influence was his mid-1950s experiences, and also how the President of the Union may now be ‘a Black gentleman with a beard’ (ibid.). This last point is odd as the play does include a senior figure in the Union who is Black, though doesn’t give them any lines. Worsley eventually admitted the cross-cutting between worlds did give the play ‘some sharpness’ (ibid.). Alone among critics, TPW disliked the adult actors as children device while also questioning the veracity of ‘a virago of a “Miss” who must surely have been a rarity even ten years ago, even in the coalfields’ (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris felt the play a ‘patchwork quilt’, with certain high quality characterisation, incident and dialogue,but a ‘shapeless and unexciting whole’ (Television Today, 16 December 1965, p. 12). Norris had little sympathy for Nigel due to him being ‘a lot less intelligent than he was intellectual’, though was impressed by Barron’s charming performance, and felt the schoolyard scenes excellent, with Janet Henfrey ‘magnificently poker-faced and staring-eyed – the very personification of the schoolmarm of childhood scenes’ (ibid.). She disliked the Oxford party scenes and felt it unrealistic that he would be the only one in this position (to be fair to the play, while it clearly presents Nigel’s interiority, it does not state he is the only such uprooted and anxious person…).

D.A.N. Jones saw the play’s challenge to complacent people who felt that ‘equality of opportunity’ had created a ‘classless society’, (New Statesman, 17 December 1965, pp. 981-2). Jones also identified the play’s force was enhanced by the fact it must have been viewed by both ‘pitmen and graduates’ and how the climactic TV viewing in the Bartons’ home emphasised this (ibid.). Jones saw the prime merit as being Jack Woolgar’s performance as ‘this passionate, sensitive man, stunted, deprived and strengthened by his working life’, questioning whether his son had got to a better place (ibid.). Frederick Laws proclaimed the ‘skipping about from class to class almost worked’, while questioning the veracity to time period in how The Animals were on the soundtrack alongside Nigel’s references to Ramsay MacDonald (The Listener, 23 December 1965, p. 1047). Nevertheless, Laws liked Woolgar’s ‘puzzled dignity’ as Harry and found the ‘taunting’ of Nigel in the club good and the ‘reception by the parents of a low reporter excellent’ (ibid.).

While not really to the extent of Up the Junction, or Horror of Darkness, the play did keep living as news for a time afterwards. Barry Norman noted how this atheist Potter was ready to ‘be hurtled, through a doorway marked “Success.”‘ (Daily Mail, 13 December 1965, p. 6). Norman detailed Paul Fox’s fear that the original postponed play was ‘too accurate’ and would ‘induce cynicism about politics’, while claiming himself that Stand Up was one of the plays of the year (ibid.). Interviewing Potter, Norman discovered the writer saw himself as having ‘crossed what he calls the “tightrope” between the classes into the classlessness of the writer (ibid.).

Outside of London, a D. McM. in the Belfast Telegraph liked a very ‘quiet and thoughtful’ play, laying charges which they felt ‘may well go off’ in the following week’s play (9 December 1965, p. 15). They mentioned Alice to confirm Potter’s already extensive range in ‘deft’ writing, his ‘sure touch’ now extending to a modern setting which was largely ‘subtle and amusing’ (ibid.).

Across the Irish sea, W.D.A. wisely noted how televisual this play was, escaping theatrical modes via rapid and frequent editing, aiding an especially lively iteration of what wasn’t a new theme (Liverpool Echo, 9 December 1965, p. 2). They anticipated later responses to the modernist Blue Remembered Hills: ‘Every minute was utterly credible – even the adult appearance of the schoolboys did not jar because we were, after all, seeing the school scenes as a man’s flashback recollection’ (ibid.). This is strong on identifying the subjectivity, weak in terms of its own use of the rhetoric of realism to describe a different mode actually being used.

Further north-east, Michael Beale felt the adults wearing short trousers led to ‘painfully embarrassing scenes’, missing the point entirely (Newcastle Chronicle, 9 December 1965, p. 2). However, Beale commended the performances of Barron, Woolgar, Parr and Henfrey and felt his appetite sufficiently whetted for next week (ibid.).

Even farther north-east in Edinburgh, Peggie Phillips gave a self-satisfied reply that the play may be a thrilling revelation to English audiences, but in Scotland, ‘from time immemorial, all classes have had their representatives in universities and no one gave it a thought’ (The Scotsman, 9 December 1965, p. 11). Phillips commended great acting and production of what was ‘a subject already chewed to death’, and felt it a ‘pity’ that some of ‘our lads o’ parts may be growing self-consciously pretentious about their working-class backgrounds’ (ibid.).

A three-hour train ride down south, Ralph Slater felt it was ‘pretty poor’, decrying ‘gimmicky’ presentation approaching ‘eccentricity’, in its shifts of place and time (Reading Evening Post, 9 December 1965, p. 2). Slater joined Worsley in feeling the adults playing kids device was ‘contrived’, while bemoaning overlong overly documentary-like sequences in the club (ibid.). Slater noted a line in the play mocking How Green Was My Valley, but felt this older tale was ‘superior in every department’, though felt much more enticed by Vote, Vote, Vote‘s trailer (ibid.).

In Bristol’s Western Daily Press, Peter Forth felt the action ‘slow’ – the opposite to many! – and ‘the general atmosphere phoney and pretentious’ (9 December 1965, p. 7). Forth was another to criticise the as adults playing kids device as ‘more comic than dramatic’, a bizarrely emotionally blinkered response given the bullying scenes (ibid.). Forth was put out about dialogue being drowned out by ‘background noise’ and came up with one of the squarest, primmest passages I’ve yet encountered in trawling old TV review press cuttings: ‘While the sequence of the wild party at Oxford may have been authentic, I fear it must have caused some anxiety on the part of parents with sons and daughters at the university’ (ibid.).

The reaction got even more local in a front-page story headed ‘FLEET GIRL SEEN ON TELEVISION’, noting how ‘Fleet actress Miss Janet Henfrey’ plays ‘a middle-aged school-mistress with an acid tongue in a mining village in the North’ (Aldershot News, 10 December 1965, p. 1). Sheila McGregor noted the play’s relevant themes and also how it gave no grounds for any uproar, given the previous suppression of Vote, Vote, Vote (Birmingham Post – Midland Magazine, 11 December 1965, p. IV).

The audience reaction was reasonably warm. 50% gave it the highest two scores, 21% the lowest two scores and the RI of 60 was ‘equal to the current average for television plays’ (VR/65/689). The text of the report claims responses were ‘mixed’, with ‘Much comment’ to the effect that the author appeared determined to ‘pile on the bad language’ in his depiction of both environments (ibid.). Naive (if we’re generous) snobs regarded Harry’s ‘crude behaviour’ ‘hawking and spitting into the fire’ as ‘offensive’ (ibid.). There were echoes of some of the critics’ obtuse focus on the school details seeming more 1940s than 1950s, with some even claiming there were only teachers and classes like those depicted in 1890! (ibid.).

Despite the decent RI score, the negative feelings are given primacy in order and volume within the BBC report of its viewer sample. Quite a few disliked its ‘distractingly episodic […] construction’, with some disliking the ‘strangeness’ of adults dressed as children, though a Railwayman and a Housewife identified this as a comedic strategy, finding its results ‘hilarious’ (ibid.). I would add it is clearly in the way of working-class gallows humour, which is just as amusing, yet tragic in its depiction of brutality, as Blue Remembered Hills is. A Foreman Electrician felt it was all ‘probably very true to life’, which I suppose gets at the way non-naturalism could convey interior realism and a person’s truthful way of seeing (ibid.).

The especially enthusiastic minority loved how Potter’s play encouraged sympathy for Nigel, struggling with his identity ‘and making heavy weather of the problems and relationship [sic] involved in this situation’ (ibid.). These viewers loved the flashbacks and ‘full development of some pungent characterisation’, with ample ‘human interest’ seasoning a ‘very topical theme’ (ibid.). There was much special praise for Barron and also Woolgar: ‘a miner to the life, it was said several times’ (ibid.). The cuts between the two worlds and the integration of filmed inserts were widely praised, though ‘various’ viewers thought the party scenes at Oxford were spoilt by excessive background noise (ibid.).

A D. Tsui, c/o 1 Windlesham Gardens, Brighton wrote into Glasgow’s Sunday Mail felt the play was a ‘thought-provoking […] masterpiece’, ‘brilliantly acted’, enabling them to share Barton’s thoughts and feelings, while perhaps also learning ‘the lesson’ too (12 December 1965, p. 16).nAn E. Penson of Henley Park, Yatton, Bristol had a letter in the Sunday Mirror which was, comparatively, a tiresome cliche: ‘SEX, appalling habits, cruelty and bad language’, decrying ‘One and a quarter hour of viewing wasted’ (12 December 1965, p. 22).

Subsequently, Penguin published the script alongside its successor in 1967, while scenes were used from it in a 1968 stage version of Vote, Vote, Vote. Both plays were released on DVD by 2Entertain on 26 September 2005, which enabled my first viewing of them. This release included edits to the music used, for copyright reasons.

It’s clear that, not for the last time in Wednesday Play and Play for Today history, an act of temporary censorship aided the public reception of this play, which may well not have existed without the hasty postponement of Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton in the spring! While it clearly epitomises the historical tendency towards male working-class perspectives over those of women of any class, it marks a unique individual voice coming to the fore, and it builds on the British New Wave to create one of the most incisive portrayals of class ever seen within 75 minutes on British television.

— Thanks again to John Williams for the help in locating a range of press cuttings

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 – 03:08: ‘The Bond’ (BBC1, 1 December 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 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.

03.08: The Bond (BBC One, Wednesday 1 December 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm
Directed by Mary Ridge; Written by Dawn Pavitt & Terry Wale; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Stephen Bundy; Music by Dudley Simpson; Vocalist: Rita Williams

Sally is asked, “What do you do?” at a party. To her alarm, she finds herself replying: “Nothing. I’m married.”

Light music has a sometimes benign, sometimes manipulative, functional quality. A way of intentionally, or incidentally, organising an emotional response (Paul Morley, BBC Radio 4, 2011)

Wednesday Play story editor Tony Garnett introduced this latest play by describing its central couple as ‘the new Britain’, no less:

Every politician woos them. Anyone with something to sell, from glossy magazines to commercial television, tries to seduce them. They are the new middle-class. Their parents are working-class.

Their future is rosy. This is their world. They have got on. Most other people are thought to envy them. They are the coming Mr. and Mrs. 1970 – the Joneses we are invited to keep up with. (Radio Times, 25 November 1965, page unclear)

Garnett claimed the play explores these people ‘as they are’, not as the politicians or advertisers seem them, implying some connection, I feel, to Potter’s forthcoming Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (ibid.). Garnett also stresses the play’s autobiographical element, being ‘a play by a young married couple about a young married couple’ and has universal appeal as ‘trying to make marriage work is a moving, difficult, and hysterically funny experience.’ (ibid.). As with other recent Wednesday Plays, Garnett emphasises likely differing emotional and intellectual reactions from viewers:

Those who want to be Mrs. 1970 will find Chris and Sally a disturbing pair. Those who think conventional marriage a drag will find them priggish and self-righteous. What will you think? (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell’s brief preview described a ‘Drama about an ultra-smooth young couple’ (Sunday Times, 28 November 1965, p. 29), whereas The Observer had it as ‘A stereotyped prosperous couple try to break away from convention but the attempt ends unhappily’ (28 November 1965, p. 22). The Coventry Evening Telegraph indicated the play aimed to dispel the ‘glossy magazine idea of marriage being a “rosy togetherness”‘, tracing the first three years of married life for fashion artist Sally (Hannah Gordon) and draughtsman Chris (Barry Lowe), ‘an average young professional couple’ (1 December 1965, p. 2). The Nottingham Evening Post and News reveals how Sally finds marriage ‘more arduous and complex than she first thought’ and soon returns to her parents, also finding family relationships are more complex there (1 December 1965, p. 9).

The married couple writing duo, Terry Wale, an actor, and Dawn Pavitt, a stage designer who had met in repertory theatre, made their TV writing debut here. Interviewed by Jack Bell, Wale, 27, contradicted Garnett, claiming, ‘it is not about us or our lives’, despite their marriage being four years old (Daily Mirror, 1 December 1965, p. 18). This article outlined the plot shifting from their wedding morning and ceremony to a Paris honeymoon and then the ensuing marriage, and how Sally gives up her job, and becomes a housewife, with Wale implying a critique of this proto-trad wife move (ibid.). Wale claims they intended a mix of humour and sadness, interestingly delineating the creative division of labour:

To start, my wife had all the ideas of the theme and characters and I wrote most of the dialogue.

Then, as we got on the same wavelength of the play, things fused more and we did the rewriting together (ibid.).

Wale and Pavitt are said to now bring working on ‘a new play with a historical theme’ (ibid.). Rita Williams was singing again, after the recent Logue-Myers musical. In a large cast of 33, probably 15 were women, a reasonable percentage.

Hannah Gordon would go on to give an absolutely major Play for Today performance in Orkney (1971), John McGrath’s adaptation of three George Mackay Brown short stories, playing the alcoholic Celia, who resembles a Play for Today viewer as well as being a heartrending tragic protagonist. Also interviewed by Bell, the Edinburgh-born Gordon claims The Bond is ‘a very revealing play. It takes the relationship that develops on marriage and lays it bare’ (ibid.).

Pavitt, born in Rochford, Essex in 1933, wrote a few episodes of Mickey Dunne (1967), three Thirty Minute Theatre plays (1966-67) and seemingly a 1971 Dutch TV movie. Terry Wale (1938-2021) worked alongside Pavitt on all these projects, though they later divorced. Wale met Lesley Mackie in 1974, later marrying her. Mackie was brilliantly internal and subtly heartrending as the lead in Peter McDougall’s first screened Play for Today, Just Your Luck (1972).

While I am not going to commit to a full review, as it does not all exist, I feel this seems a revealing breezy comedy, not necessarily meant to be depicting the “square” society, but unquestionably this does depict a middle-class milieu that now seems very staid, while always being more unbuttoned and pleasure seeking than equivalent people would have been in the previous decades. While this initially seemed annoying, it seems a clear, linear narrative which is simultaneously a sociological play showing us the contours of a specific London tribe and heavily implying a feminist critique of stultifying patriarchal and conservative values.

In the copy I watched, at times the sound cuts out of the existing extracts which total 33 minutes in duration. There seems to be a familiar mix of primarily video studio interior scenes and a few filmed inserts in exterior locations.

The play captures lots of fussing, activity and spoken clichés as they all prepare for the main pair Christopher and Sally’s wedding day. “Mutton dressed as lamb”… “Ring, manacles, ball and chain”… “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue!”, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”… “All that mumbo jumbo”… “It’s your funeral”… “The way to a man’s heart…”, which Sally speaks sardonically to Chris, holding up a Heinz baked beans tin. “An Englishman’s home”… This fits too with the frozen register of the vicar presiding over the wedding service. We also rather randomly get “You’re a slut…” delivered in a mildly flirtatious marital context, concerning house cleanliness. It’s all clearly at least somewhat satirical given the frequency of the clichés, though the way the play jumps around – due to the missing material – may be exaggerating this somewhat… Mildly satirical seems about right, really.

Sally works in fashion, Chris is very work focused. We see him operating a slide rule as part of architectural design or some such. “I wouldn’t really care if the whole fashion industry collapsed tomorrow”, Sally muses, despite recognising being a fashion artist is a “super” job.

We see them, as if in fast forward, on honeymoon. Later, Great Portland Street station. Sally seems to have given up the job to become a housewife, as clear when we see her in the kitchen, putting on her portable radio, to be greeted by the Housewives Choice (BBC Light Programme, 1946-67) theme itself, Jack Strachey’s ‘In Party Mood’ (1944), that utterly venerable signifier of jaunty and cosy 1950s domesticity.

We soon witness an argument between Chris and Sally, as she has somehow forgotten to iron one of his shirts he “needs” for an important work meeting, and during this, she has left food on the hob which burns. This marks the turning point, with marriage now revealed as unglamorous and a fraught terrain, where the husband is unquestionably in the driving seat.

Annette Crosbie, playing Sally’s friend Liz, acts as a force of comparative modernity, subtly influencing Sally to question her giving up her job, while Sally’s mother forces the conservative view on Sally, saying she wants to her to produce grandchildren for her while she is able to enjoy them. There are popular cultural references to Sean Connery and the song ‘Delilah’. Liz is a costume designer, who is very much hoping to get more stage work, emphasising the great sway of theatre in British culture at this time and how it offered women the chance for creative autonomy.

Sally’s mother. Yes, the hat signifies so much!

The play gives us a range of different women’s experiences and Hannah Gordon a chance to portray an archetypal realisation, that comes much sooner in life, mercifully, than Sue Johnston’s Edith Thistle in Martha Watson Allcross’s fine new Play for Today, Big Winners (2025), which very much set out to make a new domestic, human-centric play for today with some socio-political reverberations.

Audience size: 6.88 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 43.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: Happy Go Lucky / Newsroom), ITV (The Gang Show / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 60%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 23.1%

Reception: While slightly more widely reviewed than some others, recently, this elicited a lukewarm reaction among critics. None of the London mob liked it much, while outside the capital three appreciated it, three really did not and one had a very mixed, balanced assessment. The audience was generally much more positive, with an especially marked indication that younger people and young married women enjoyed its pacy style and saw a lot of themselves in Sally.

Lyn Lockwood termed the play unoriginal, referring back again to the couple as ‘members of the new middle class – the young Joneses whom advertisers encourage other couples to keep up with’ (Daily Telegraph, 2 December 1965, p. 19). Lockwood felt ’emotionally disengaged’ with a play that seemed to her to ‘have been turned out on a conveyor belt under the same instructor’ (ibid.). She decried, somewhat unfairly I’d argue – at least compared with contemporary 21st century TV – ‘its lack of sustained scenes and frequent interjection of “visuals” doing little or nothing to forward the story’, yet acknowledged Hannah Gordon brought the play to life when she was given ‘a sustained scene at the very end’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson described The Bond as emerging ‘stillborn’, seeing the couple coming from lower-middle-class or working-class parents and having ‘smart friends’ like Liz as ‘a favourite telly playwright’s theme’ in ascribing ‘social relevance’ (The Observer, 5 December 1965, p. 25). Richardson scoffed at how this ‘Unfortunately […] nearly always results in a heterogeneous assembly of zombies who are about as real as those families in the bright party pictures you see on boxes of crackers’ (ibid.).

Bill Edmund very similarly bemoaned ‘some strange old-fashioned people who were supposed to be modern’, a claim not entirely untrue, adding that only William Marlowe as Jeff seemed ‘real’ (Television Today, 9 December 1965, p. 12). Edmund found the couple ‘Dullest of all’, whose first two years married are spent ‘running everywhere as if they were in a commercial for milk’, and is wry about Sally delivering ‘passionate speech about the generations to which nobody took any notice’ (missing from the 40% odd extant footage I saw) (ibid.). While Clifford Parrish, Campbell Singer and Joan Young were termed ‘very real’, Nancie Jackson was said to be ‘too well spoken and fashionable for the sort of mother she was supposed to be’, indicating keen critical interest in social hierarchies and types (ibid.).

Only William Marlowe (right) seemed ‘real’

N.G.P. saw it as ‘a sort of extended and more serious Marriage Lines [1963-66 sitcom with Richard Briers and Prunella Scales] related rather slowly but with some charm’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 2 December 1965, p. 8). At times, they found it ‘moving’ and praised how Lowe and Gordon ‘cleverly suggested the bewilderment of those who mainly seek a practical reason for the inexplicable causes of changes in emotion’ (ibid.).

In contrast, G.D.C. was rather dissatisfied with a play which ‘too assertive to make good television theatre’, resembling a World in Action probe into the Kinsey Report: a pity, they felt, as it had relevant comments to make (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 2 December 1965, p. 2). They termed the couple ‘”with it”‘, while noting a presentation in vogue at the BBC: ‘plenty of original camera work, laced with Dick Lester-type stills, with problems posed and left unanswered’ (ibid.).

T.E. felt it went ‘on and on like the babbling brook until it got tiresome’, disappointing as initially its domestic scenes had ‘struck at the breast of the male viewer’ (Belfast Telegraph, 2 December 1965, p. 9. They regarded these incidents as being magnified so ‘grossly’, though, that realism was lost and they mocked how Sally ‘brooded over her sea of matrimonial troubles rather like a female version of the Melancholy Dane’, whole the husband typically wasn’t ‘seen or heard half so much’ (ibid.). The review ended with a reflection: ‘Happiest note of the evening – Hancock to a person : “What do you do for a ing?”‘ (ibid.).

Rodney Tyler noted it was focused more on the mental and psychological rather than material or economic, feeling Sally and Chris could have come from ‘any social class’ (Reading Evening Post, 2 December 1965, p. 2). Tyler reflected that the play gained in realism as it went on and became less bitty, including ‘One of the most true marriage rows I have ever seen on television’, wherein neither of them see the other’s position and are overly influenced by how others see marriage (ibid.). Helpfully given our lack of a full copy of the play, Tyler describes an ending whereby Sally’s questions are answered and the marriage has evolved from ‘romantic to re-assuring’, ‘and presumably they all lived happily ever after’ (ibid.).

T.J.D. took a biographical lens to it, commenting on Waite and Pavitt’s accurate and pertinent ‘observations’ of married life, aided by actually being a married couple themselves (Leicester Mercury, 2 December 1965, p. 6). They expected older viewers would be intolerant and younger viewers more sympathetic to the young couple, though felt overall Chris and Sally were depicted as humourless – humour being ‘the one important ingredient that prevents most marriages being carbon copies of theirs’ (ibid.). Ultimately, this left it ‘slightly depressing, but nevertheless uncomfortably compulsive’; high praise was given to the realism of the ‘cliche-riddled chatter of Sally’s family’ in the final scene (one that doesn’t, sadly, exist) (ibid.).

From the West Midlands, Linda Dyson termed The Bond ‘a fresh and perceptive look at a modern marriage, carefully avoiding The adultery cliches’ (The Birmingham Post, 4 December 1965, p. IV). Dyson revealed, news to me, that the couple’s honeymoon was in Paris, and acclaimed its portrait of ‘dissatisfaction, bickering and hypocrisy’ behind the image and dream of ‘instant married bliss’ (ibid.).

Tom Gregg made the familiar complaint that ‘These plays certainly tend to be little chunks cut from life in one level or another with not too much attention paid to beginnings or ends’, with ‘true-ringing dialogue’, but storylines ‘as hard to find as jellyfish skeletons’ (Runcorn Guardian, 9 December 1965, page unclear). Gregg felt The Bond was also guilty of this: admiring the acting, but using the laboured simile, ‘like apple pie without cream’, and admitting his overdose of Andersen and the Brothers Grimm in childhood has predisposed him to clear narratives (ibid.).

The viewers were somewhat more favourable. An ex-teacher now a housewife felt it was a ‘sound’ play very much ‘”in tune” with many of the young couples of today’, implicitly recognising some of her own situation in Sally’s (BBC WAC, VR/65/679). The RI of 60% suggested broad appreciation along the customary realist lines: ‘This was life. So true, it might be used as a handbook for newly-weds’ (ibid.). A smaller group did find it obvious in its message that marriage is ‘what you make it’ and ‘platitudinous’; a student felt the message ‘was never in doubt in anyone’s mind before seeing the play’ (ibid.). Despite this, the Student found it ‘quite well written’, with an ‘adequate’ story’, though a Supervisor felt it was cruel to the older generation’ (ibid.).

‘Here and there’, a Whitehousian view was aired, objecting to ‘unnecessary expletives’ (they actually weren’t many in the bits I saw), including the husband calling the wife a ‘cow’, a realism which ‘spoilt the play’ for them (ibid.). There were few comments either way on the setting, while the cast’s performances were praised, with ‘many’ saying Hannah Gordon’s ‘superb acting made the play. She was me or any other young married woman’ – many loved her outburst at the family Sunday lunch (ibid.).

While the production was admired, some found Hannah’s many photographic poses unnecessary, with an Engineer feeling these snapshot sequences felt they would ‘never end’, with others feeling tired at how much Sally was running about (ibid.). Others admired the integration of outdoor sequences, with another Student praising ‘some excellent camera work (‘sweeping shots, e.g. as at the party, gave the play a fast “modern” attitude)’ (ibid.). This suggests that the binary attitudes towards disjointed narratives/modernist paciness evinced something of a generational divide in responses.

During the snapshots sequence; ‘disjointed’ discourse ahoy!

Mrs P. Aldridge of Bravington Rd, Paddington, London called it ‘boring’, and ‘a waste of an hour’, yet did perceptively applaud Hannah Gordon’s acting: ‘This young actress has obvious talent and she deserves something better’ (Sunday Mirror, 5 December 1965, p. 22).

It is, again, a shame that we cannot see this in its entirety, as it grew on me considerably while watching what does exist. I feel it probably was a valuable minor precursor to 1970s Second Wave feminist screen works by John Berger, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and Chantal Akerman. While it doesn’t scale such incisive heights as those, it is covering similar ground. Mike Leigh’s great, underrated Play for Today Hard Labour (1973) more directly exposes the societal undervaluing of housework and indicts patriarchal and religious structures of feeling more fully. But taking tentative steps in a vital new direction should be commended from a historical perspective.

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.🙂

Hit the North podcast

I can announce that my podcast, HIT THE NORTH, has reached the landmark of being broadcast into the internet’s ether for a whole month!

This podcast is simply based around my talking to a range of special guests with at least some connection to the North about their lives and experiences and about Northern representation. The North is defined inclusively, and subsequent series may well eventually venture beyond British shores… It is a non-profit podcast, so thankfully I can promise: no ads, it is purely done as a labour of love. No AI is used, as it is a profoundly overrated and absurd Ponzi scheme – one that is consuming our water and electricity at an unseemly rate, to boot.

Here’s a trailer with a decidedly low Average Shot Length! :

And here are the episodes themselves so far on YouTube as embedded videos:

#001: Introduction

#001: Matthew Kelly (NORTH WEST)

“If I were to choose one [finest ensemble cast], it would always be the one I’m working with…”

#002: Ruth-Ann Boyle (NORTH EAST)

“There was a few moments of intrusion, like the press doorstepping me mother…”

#003: Justin Lewis (WALES)

“I could hear the guy who was doing the pub quiz reading out some of the questions that night. And I thought: these are very familiar questions…!”

#004: John Howard (NORTH WEST)

“Who’s been licking the library steps then?”

You will also find it on most of the mainstream podcast platforms, like Apple Music and Spotify.

Here too is a link to the Hit the North musical playlist, containing all the songs featured in the series, alongside exclusive IT’S ONLY A NORTHERN SONG OF THE WEEK selections shared to Hit the North‘s Facebook group. If you want to join that group, please do so here.

It has been an absolute blast, and a delight, so far to talk to these fine people; enjoy the podcast! Please spread the word, give it five-star ratings (or don’t bother!), or indeed get in touch to suggest a guest or correspond about any Northern places or stories.
Email: HitTheNorthNE41@proton.me

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:05: ‘The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne’ (BBC1, 10 November 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 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.

03.05: The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (BBC One, Wednesday 10 November 1965) 9:45 – 11:00pm
Directed by Peter Duguid; Written by Alan Seymour; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Natasha Kroll; Music by Stanley Myers

An eminent former diplomat mysteriously disappears from London Airport and a massive nationwide hunt begins. In fact he has been kidnapped by a young pop impresario called Wolf. (Lincolnshire Echo, 4 November 1965, p. 10).

After the realist juggernaut of Up the Junction changed everything, The Wednesday Play’s follow-up didn’t exactly play it safe, though it is certainly accurate to say that Alan Seymour’s The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne didn’t elicit anything like the same volume of reaction. It didn’t become a news item in itself, though I think it’s a very interesting, oddball play that deserves re-examination sixty years on from its original screening.

The Lincolnshire Echo emphasised the play included a ‘rare’ television performance by film star Jack Hawkins as diplomat Sir John Rampayne, ‘a most unusual role for him’ (op. cit.). Rampayne is ‘viciously and mercilessly arraigned by Wolf and his friends for the blunders and sins of his privileged class’ (ibid.). So far, this sounds like a class/culture war narrative highly in tune with our divided 2025.

Apparently, ‘Slowly, agonisingly, Sir John is stripped of his establishment figure image and brought face to face with the past and his real self with intense dramatic results’ (ibid.). This text is clearly part of a press release as parts are quoted word for word in Television Today (4 November 1965, p. 11). Notably, though seldom commented on back then, a 26 year-old Ian McKellen played Wolf. Someone hiding behind the moniker ‘Monitor’ of the Coventry Evening Telegraph, clinging to the old world, puts the pop in pop impresario in inverted commas: “pop” (10 November 1965, p. 2).

A local angle was conveyed in the Derby Telegraph, which promoted how three former members of the Derby Playhouse Company were appearing in The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne: Penelope Lee, Alan Mason and Richard Kay (8 November 1965, p. 5). Mason is said to write the scripts for the Playhouse’s pantomimes alongside his wife Diana Bishop (ibid.). Most emphasis was on Hawkins, however, with Ralph Slater being hopeful about the play, as ‘I can’t see Hawkins making one of his rare TV performances unless it’s a worthwhile effort’ (Reading Evening Post, 10 November 1965, p. 2).

Bill Smith described Hawkins as the ‘benevolent father-figure of the British cinema and the personification of all that is best in the Bulldog breed of British man’, looking forward to a play charged with suspense akin to the recent Wednesday Thrillers (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 November 1965, p. 11). Smith describes Rampayne as ‘A man of discretion, though an immense power behind the news’, making a doubtless unintentional link to Tony Garnett’s desire to make drama intervene in the national news (ibid.). Smith noted the twist that it wasn’t the usual Russian spy ‘equivalents of Amos Burke and Patrick McGoohan’, and relished this ‘off-beat’ and ‘unconventional’ plot (ibid.).

The Radio Times billing indicated a large cast of 28, eight of whom were women actors. Tony Garnett’s preview emphasised the play’s political theme and encouraged viewers to use critical thinking:

‘A distinguished and devoted public servant of our time.’ ‘An enemy of the people.’ The death notices are written. They are ready to roll. Which paper will you believe? (Radio Times, 4 November 1965, p. 35)

Garnett pointedly describes Rampayne as ‘one of that handful of men who went to the right school and belong to the right clubs, and he feels has the right to rule’, emphasising how he makes ‘decisions which affect all our lives’ (ibid.). Garnett stressed the play would reveal the ‘human being’ behind the ‘public mask’ and that he is ‘maybe not quite the one you expect to find…’ (ibid.). Garnett’s confident steering of viewers to question and distrust authority must have seemed highly bold in an era where deference still held much away. It notably conveys the proudly socialist intent of the strand at this stage, which offered some plays which presented a rare left-wing counterbalance to the BBC’s more small-c conservative news and current affairs output.

‘JACK HAWKINS’ is the big bold headline at the top of page 35, and he features on the front page, but anyone reading Garnett’s text will begin to doubt, ideas circulating, reassurance left behind…

Happily, I’ve been able to watch this play, whose trial and “torture” mainstay is set in Windsor, Berkshire, and it’s another fascinating entry in The Wednesday Play’s questioning, garrulous public mission.

Rating: *** / ****

I liked this, by and large; it was both an admirably serious direct interrogation of the British establishment, both in old (Rampayne) and new and future (Wolf) guises, and an offbeat camp caper of absurd theatrics, actually in the same ballpark as Diana Rigg era The Avengers, with its eccentric villains and occasional bizarrerie:

Alan Seymour is a writer deeply critical of militarism and imperialism, but who also maintains a belief in democratic values as opposed to a sundering revolution. This comes through via the play’s nuanced inclusion of distinctive ideological types: the (mostly) men who Wolf enlists for Rampayne’s trial include a “castrated liberal” and a “Bolshie”.

The New Statesman-style journalist reveals the embedded co-dependence within a media ecology with a settled, comfortable range of beliefs: “I realise that I’ve quite enjoyed despising Sir John for all these years. But, destroy him and what role do I take up?” This seems philosophically to reflect the idea of regarding political opponents as adversaries worthy of respect, not enemies to be crushed. The Freudian liberal with glasses and beard calls Rampayne “all that is best in England”, following Wolf’s denunciation of him as “all that is worst in the human race!” Seymour’s play is open to different readings, one of which is to deplore the cosy indulgence and staid thinking on display from the liberal as much as from Rampayne.

Wolf’s prosecution pointedly assails British imperialism in India and Kenya, exposing the British as “a cruel and vicious enemy”, as Rampayne’s old African clerk in his colonial days Manao’s (Harry Baird) says, in his impassioned indictment of Rampayne as being like a First World War general behind the lines, drinking whisky and oblivious to the inhumane acts the British forces are committing. After some brutal newsreel shots: “These are our white masters, and their civilisation” as Stanley Myers’s frenzied jazz broils on the soundtrack:

**Tortured image projected onto the floor – good direction from Duguid**

Seymour is another writer, well before M. John Harrison, to pick up on The Water Babies, situating Charles Kingsley’s text as one that Nanny reads to John as a boy. This play rather impressively exceeds its apparent all-video studio aesthetic with its concise and significant flashback sequences to John’s youth and to the 1926 General Strike, all of which establish how he succumbed to the reactionary group think and actions of his class, the ruling class.

The left-wing March (Milton Johns) comes up with several relevant statistics, countering Rampayne’s pseudo-Macmillan arguments that the masses have never had it so good: the top 1% of people own over 50% of the country’s wealth; 50% of Oxbridge places are taken up by those who went to fee-paying public schools, and over two million people still live in houses officially condemned as unfit for human habitation.

I feel this play is relatively progressive in its representations. There are many roles for women, mainly outside the blankly allegorical “court”, and who are thus not quite as central as in Up the Junction, but it feels something of an advance on many other 1965 plays.

It is a tad odd, though, that Louise (Myrtle Reed) appears late on as a witness, randomly clad in her undies and bra; she gets a worldly liberal humanist parting shot about us all being human.

Myrtle Reed had earlier appeared as a risque, subversive Britannia act slightly anticipative of Jordan in Derek Jarman’s bizarre, punk-era masterpiece Jubilee (1978). I really liked the way the courtroom scenes were introduced with hooded goon captors and Wolf initially wearing an animal mask straight out of Ancient Greek theatre or some bygone pagan past.

“You select so crudely!”, one of the dinner guests/witnesses tells Wolf. Manao is told at one point by Wolf he is going soft, and how this always enables people like Rampayne to get away with it. Yet, Manao reverts to a more radical position at the end: “why don’t they just pull out the plug and let this whole rotten island sink into the sea…?” Yet, in this, he seems to personally forgive Sir John as an individual, taking on Wolf’s earlier stated position that he was created by the public school system: the dominating and bullying traits were forced on him by the powerful.

The bluntness of the play’s message about base and superstructure determining the individual’s (Sir John) actions is oddly undercut by the way it seems to thus excuse him in a woolly liberal manner. But this can be read as a strength in terms of how this play tackles many political ideas to the table in an intelligent way quite unimaginable in our more simplified 21st century TV dramas. You can choose whose ideas and feelings you identify with the most, and Manao and March’s words seem most pertinent in 2025 with rising global fascism in the US and Argentina and a third of British voters seemingly happy to import this cruelty and bullying.

The ending, with the wild goose chase element of the authorities being misled to look for Rampayne on a beach, while Rampayne has been released in Windsor, feels like it is emphasising how Wolf – the new amoral pop establishment – now has the real underlying cultural power, with the police tiny hapless dots in a landscape. There’s a rather dry, chilly note about the ultimate meaninglessness of Wolf’s power. He promotes bands like the significantly named ‘The Rippers’ and a 1960s freedom without ethical socialist relations with other people is hollow.

As with Seymour’s earlier Auto-Stop, which I wrote about here, I feel it is a great strength of this play that it provokes deep and conflicting thoughts in me. It may ultimately be overly talky and too discursive a piece for some viewers today; however, it is fundamentally a very playful teleplay, and that makes it an enjoyably engrossing watch for me. Funnily enough, I’d say the collective hive mind of IMDb voters – 53 of them as of today – scoring this play 7.1 / 10 is spot on!

Best performance: JACK HAWKINS

This was Burnley-born Sir Ian McKellen’s second screen role at the age of 26, after an appearance in a series of Rudyard Kipling adaptations the previous year and with Lynn Redgrave in Peter Draper’s Sunday Out of Season (ATV for ITV, 7 February 1965) and as the lead in a nine-part version of David Copperfield (1966). His accent seems broadly Brummie to me, with at times short Northern vowels too. As perceptive Letterboxd reviewer gibson8 notes, there’s a definite slight resemblance to Malcolm McDowell’s performance as Alex De Large in A Clockwork Orange seven years later, with much the same truculence.

All other players do a good job (Harry Baird is a fine commanding and sincere presence, Milton Johns overdoes the emotion in a way totally acceptable in a piece diverging from realist tenets), but really, this has to be Jack Hawkins’s gong, this week!

He plays Rampayne as a simultaneously puffed-up but assailed figure, battered but never to be fully bowed. A lesser actor would have made him haughtier, more stolid. Hawkins clearly conveys how well he listens to all that is said in this trial, and he is humanly embarrassed by his faults – and his failure to take responsibility for his actions during the General Strike and in India and Kenya. Yet, the play itself doesn’t ultimately condemn him for this, marking its final, liberal humanist turn which shades into a Christian forgiveness. By thoroughly indicting him, it is echoing Michael Hastings’s For The West, though its final softness is also undercut by Manao’s final words. Hawkins is a brilliant symbol of the certainties of the British Empire and conservative stiff-upper-lip, and despite being credibly challenged on his past actions, the play depicts him as out of touch, but also with some residual individual decency to him.

**Amid some droll dialogue about jeroboams and magnums of champagne**

Hawkins’s voicing of effectively many of the criticisms leveled at Up the Junction and Saved gives them a real gravitas – given Wolf’s cocky amoralism – yet this is undercut by Seymour’s shrewd inclusion of his utter complacency about apartheid South Africa, which was indeed much in line with the often overtly racist Moral Rearmament and NVLA positions on that regime.

Wolf has indeed included Manao’s perspective, and while not a righteous figure, Wolf is a lord of misrule who is well able to expose the cant and humbug of the old establishment. I just love how Hawkins delivers Rampayne’s patronising final brush-off to Wolf:

“You’ve made some interesting points, young man, but of course I shall carry on…! As long as I can…”

Best line: “Taste? We’re not interested anymore, mate, in your dead-as-mutton ideas of good taste, bad taste…! We like bad taste, we want bad taste! We will use bad taste to prise open your mask of…” (Wolf, responding to Rampayne’s “I consider that to be in the most execrable taste…”)

I also liked:

“Oh, well! It’s a good nosh-up, anyway!”

“The amount spent on hats at Ascot last year would have paid for 10,000 old-age pensions for a year!” and

“I had not learned yet that he, and so many of his Englishmen, they liked that blood and superstition. They needed it. It proved that Africans were what they wanted them to be, and justified them. Yes, justified them in their own ways of putting us down.” (Manao to Rampayne)

Audience size: 5.89 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 49.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood – Duck Soup [1933, Marx Brothers]/Newsroom and Weather), ITV (Crime and the Bent Society 03: ‘Coppers Are People’ / Football: England v. Northern Ireland)

Audience Reaction Index: 39%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 23.1%

Reception: The critics’ response was meagre, mixed and mild, with a fair bit of appreciation matched by notable criticisms. Viewers were more broadly negative, feeling it was a disappointing play, some taking against its politics, others using a wearying, typical view against its supposed incomprehensibility.

In, as far as I’ve been to find, the only next-day review, Lyn Lockwood’s headline proclaimed that ”U’ DIPLOMAT FACES POP ACCUSER’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1965, p. 21). Lockwood argued this play was ‘very much of the present day’, presenting a clash between the ‘Righter than Right’ ‘diplomat at large’ Sir John and Wolf, ‘a member of the brave new “pop” world who had lured him away from a students’ society debate for a bizarre inquisition’ (ibid.). Rightly, Lockwood felt Seymour’s central idea of ‘a sadistic kind of “This is Your Life” ordeal was an excellent one’, but felt the drama was ‘lost in some diffuse writing’ halfway in, though felt it ‘a rewarding 30 minutes or so’ at ‘the crunch’, with ‘admirable’ performances from Hawkins and McKellen (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell felt the ‘same prejudices and that same anger’ against materialism and advertising that came across in Robin Chapman’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying on BBC Two with Alfred Lynch ‘should have had a field day during’ The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (Sunday Times, 14 November 1965, p. 44). Mitchell didn’t feel his ‘social conscience’ was stirred, gradually losing interest: ‘In its first half-hour [it] seemed to run out of Avenger-like visual sweets. From that point it became a panel game’ (ibid.). He felt there were ‘a few good comic ideas’, but, ironically, in view of some of the play’s dialogue, felt it amounted to ‘no more than a Rag Week sketch inflated by some brusque and unhelpful scenes which should be returned to the file marked “Motivation.” The file should then be destroyed’ (ibid.). As Mitchell watched Jack Hawkins sat, suffering, he ‘kept being reminded of a much shorter and surer piece of hatchery, the night when TW3 went for Mr Henry Brooke.’ (ibid.).

Quoting W.H. Auden’s The Dog Beneath the Skin, D.A.N. Jones picked up on the play’s camp allusions to the Profumo Scandal, noting how ‘Jack Hawkins, representing the Establishment, was wheeled into view by masked men in leather and compelled to watch a film of his secret visits to a sado-masochists’ brothel’ and how Sir John was made to kneel before ‘a girl in a black bra, who menaced him with a rubber dagger’ (New Statesman, 19 November 1965, p. 804). Jones reflected observantly how the play was based on the ‘popular belief that stiff-upper-lip and Britain-can-take-it values reflect an unwholesome national interest in the infliction if pain, closely connected with the education of our ruling class’ (ibid.). While Jones noted the clear depiction of his strike-breaking propensities and admiration for Hitler and Verwoerd, he felt the connection of these public activities and Rampayne’s sex life and education was ‘tenuous’ (ibid.). Jones was rather dismissive of the use of ‘Pop’ culture, regarding the play also as ‘much more droll than it was meant to be, illustrating rather than criticising the current desire to see cruel deeds performed’ (ibid.).

This seems slightly verging on the moralistic critiques that Edward Bond’s Saved received, and, as in that case, I’m not sure it really holds, especially given that Wolf’s supposed ‘cruelty’ is surely miniscule compared to the events in Rampayne’s past. Jones also stood up to be counted into 1965’s culture war by claiming ‘It was worth Ken Tynan’s while to challenge press-sponsored ‘public opinion’ with his stammered ‘obscenity’, even though the BBC saw fit to apologise on Monday’ (ibid.).

Argus pejoratively claimed it was ‘one of those way-out and slightly weird efforts which put the onus on the viewer to discern between right and wrong’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 11 November 1965, p. 17). Interestingly, this actually accords with how Up the Junction could be, and was, read differently by different viewers. Argus felt Rampayne was ‘viciously and mercilessly grilled for the sins of his life and the class of society in which he moved’ (ibid.). I would question whether it really is that vicious, compared with bringing the troops in during the General Strike or the sort of acts shown in 1950s Kenya. Argus seemed oddly put out that it wasn’t didactic about whether Rampayne was ‘a thorough rascal or a character who had merely played the game of life to his best ability’ (ibid.). They called it a ‘flop’ as entertainment, but acknowledged ‘the acting was first-rate’ (ibid.).

More positively, K.H. felt it was ‘a remarkable demonstration of the television director’s art’, appreciating the neat, skilful dovetailing of the historical flashbacks with the present (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 11 November 1965, p. 2). Anon in The Newry Telegraph regarded Seymour’s play as ‘Absorbing and interesting, because it was different’ – always a view I will tend to share (13 November 1965, p. 12). They noted McKellen’s ‘sneering, sarcastic inquisitor’ and how the play ‘had the quality of a night-mare’, exacerbating the more we saw of Rampayne’s past (ibid.). Hawkins was said to be ‘grand’, McKellen ‘irritatingly scathing’, while they felt Rampayne’s ruthlessness had been exposed, along with the ‘real personalities of those other three involved, especially the Communist’ (ibid.).

The audience, collectively, was far from impressed: 18% giving it the higher A+/A scores and a significant 49% scoring it C/C- (BBC WAC, VR/65/636). A Company Director felt it utterly ‘boring – nauseating theme and characters’, while a Housewife claimed, ‘I am sick to death of protest plans. For heavens sake let us have an end to them’ (ibid.). This is an odd comment to make, given it is closer to N.F. Simpson than to agitprop in style and, as already mentioned, really isn’t didactic, though I suppose criticism of the British establishment and South African regime may have touched some nerves.

A Bank Manager was greatly disappointed, especially due to the ‘front page (Radio Times) treatment’ it had been given, claiming it was ‘a blatant advertisement for extreme Left-wing cum Communist thinking, or lack of it’. This became an interestingly contradictory response, while seeming to perpetuate the fallacy – common today – that representation equals endorsement:

Many old scores were re-opened and we were again treated to colour and race hatred and class distinctions served up ad nauseam. It was a dreary play enlivened only by invective and spleen. (ibid.)

Others assailed ‘sick entertainment’ or ”a pretentious dressing of the theme’, unlikely to the point of being ridiculous’ (ibid.). I am afraid I am going to have to consider it evidence of a lack of intelligence on one viewer’s part that they claimed to have spent 45 minutes ‘trying to fathom what it was all about, and finally gave up’: as it is straightforwardly about putting an old Establishment man on trial for what he has done in his life!

A third moderately liked it, though many of these also felt a good idea hadn’t been developed successfully, and some claimed it ‘lacked fire’ and included several ‘longeurs’ (ibid.). A small group is said to have really enjoyed its cleverness and freshness, being ‘definitely different from the ordinary run of plays, imaginative, exciting, original’ and ‘very viewable’ (ibid.). While acting was felt to be slightly below par by some, most were impressed, with ‘many praising’ Hawkins and McKellen (ibid.). The production was felt to be satisfactory by the cast majority, though the easily confused disliked the ‘jumping about between years’ (ibid.).

I’ve only located one letter to the press about it. Mrs B. Kane of Lincoln Road, Werrington, Northamptonshire regarded the play as a major ‘waste’ of Jack Hawkins’s ‘talent’ (Sunday Mirror, 14 November 1965, p. 22). Kane eye-rolled that ‘sound effects and scenic departments were obviously enthralled by their tasks’ in ‘that stupid BBC play’, while, in a parallel way to critics of Up the Junction, taking against the characters they saw:

The monstrous know-all young man wearing the animal head was such an objectionable character mouthing phoney dialogue that the play lost any impact it could have had. (ibid.)

Ultimately, Alan Seymour’s play was a good watch, and while not quite imaginatively enough developed from its brilliant absurd premise, it stands up as yet another fascinating time capsule of 1965 and its TV drama, and was playful enough that its 72 minutes flew by.

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)

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.

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.).

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 – 02.17: ‘The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler’ (BBC1, 28 April 1965)

02.17: The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler (BBC One, Wednesday 28 April 1965) 9:40 – 11:00pm

Directed by John Gorrie; Written by Jean Benedetti; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Leo Radford

This play was based on a true story, of a payroll robbery in Massachusetts, USA, on 15 April 1920 – misreported as 1925 in several newspapers. Two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried for murder following this, and the case ‘attracted international attention, lasted several years and developed into a political witch-hunt’ (Liverpool Echo, 24 April 1965, p. 2). On 23 August 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were ‘electrocuted for murder’ (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). At their trial, they were defended by lawyer Fred Moore (John Barrie).

Kenith Trodd, previewing Jean Benedetti’s play, acerbically detailed the political and legal context of the events depicted:

They [Sacco and Vanzetti] were not only foreigners but anarchists – that is to say their political views struck right at the narrow bigotry of New England, and this at a time when the country was outraged by anarchist bomb attacks.

On its legal merits, the case against Sacco and Vanzetti was not a strong one. The evidence was shaky, the witnesses unreliable, and both men had strong alibis. But what transpired was not justice and fair play. The two men were tried not for what they had done but for what their opponents believed them to be (Radio Times, 24 April 1965, p. 43).

Trodd added that Vanzetti in particular was ‘a man of fantastic courage and determination’ (ibid.).

Sacco (Bill Nagy) and Vanzetti (John Bailey)

In contrast, Robert Pitman emphasised the two payroll guards as victims, ‘both quiet married men’ and how Fred Moore’s worldwide protest was supported by ‘Shaw, Wells, Stalin, etc.’ (Daily Express, 28 April 1965, p. 10). Pitman went on, very much in crusading right-wing opinion columnist mode:

But were they [Sacco and Vanzetti] really Martyrs ? I used to think so until my wife worked on the case for an encyclopedia. I remember her surprise when she turned from the legend to the facts, namely that this supposedly pathetic pair were both heavily armed when arrested – in Sacco’s case with a revolver which was almost certainly the murder weapon.

Both also undeniably belonged to a group which was amassing revolutionary funds by armed robbery.

Even then I did not realize that Carlo Tresca, revered leader of U.S. anarchists, privately admitted in 1943 : “Sacco was guilty.” Or that another Italian later confessed to being coached by the anarchists to provide a false alibi for Sacco (ibid.).

Pitman detailed how US Liberal Francis Russell changed his mind and felt Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti an accessory after the event and how even Fred Moore confessed to Upton Sinclair that he no longer believed in their innocence (ibid.). Pitman then attacked Trodd’s article and the BBC:

Narrow ? I say that, whatever his motives may be, a ruthless killer of innocent men is surely an enemy of any society. And it is irresponsible and reactionary for the B.B.C. to present him to ordinary viewers as a martyred “good shoemaker.” (ibid.)

Other coverage emphasised people involved in the production. The Daily Mirror emphasised John Barrie’s star status, who plays the defence lawyer here, known for playing the title character in Sergeant Cork (ITV, 1963-68), the long-running series (28 April 1965, p. 16). John London in the London Evening News and Star stresses Jean Benedetti’s status as an actor who had been in Beyond the Fringe for 11 months, but was now writing between parts for the ‘lucrative’ sum of £500 per play (29 April 1965, p. 3). Benedetti is said to find writing

a terrible bore. I only do it for the money. I’m far more interested in acting. My aim is to get to the Comedie Francaise or Stratford-upon-Avon (ibid.).

London’s article nevertheless states there are two more Benedetti plays ‘in the melting pot’ (ibid.). Benedetti is quoted giving a slightly more measured account of the case than Trodd or Pitman:

We may never prove conclusively whether Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent or not. Their accusers could only see them as subversive and murderers. Many of their supporters were only too willing to exploit them as martyrs of the Left.

Political passion raged and destroyed justice. This is what I have tried to show – as well as something of the two men’s human qualities during their long and bitter ordeal. (Liverpool Echo op. cit.)

Benedetti (1930-2012), was actually born as Norman Bennett in Barking, Essex, changing his name by deed poll in 1965 to reflect his passionate love of French and Italian culture. He advised Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre on the European repertoire and translated Brecht plays and became a leading scholar on Stanislavsky. He also worked as Principal at Rose Bruford College during a ‘golden period that produced a new breed of British stage and screen actors including Gary Oldman’ (Guardian, 20 April 2012)

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail described the case simply as ‘the most famous and controversial’ trial of ‘the century’ (28 April 1965, p. 3).

Audience size: 6.93 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (Liza of Lambeth – Part 1 – Innocence / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Sound of Motown / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 69%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: Mixed-towards-positive among London critics. At least from the evidence of cuttings provided, it was comparatively ignored outside London. Viewers were largely appreciative of a play that felt like familiar fare in several ways.

An anonymous reviewer perceived that Sacco and Vanzetti ‘live as symbols of the power of blind prejudice’ and felt the drama valid and found John Bailey’s growth into spirituality as Vanzetti made the ending ‘deeply moving’ (Times, 29 April 1965, p. 17). However, ‘everything that followed the combination of passion with quiet, resigned nobility in his courtroom speech was an anticlimax’ (ibid.).

Clive Barnes gives a more nuanced account than Robert Pitman, by noting it doesn’t matter whether the men were innocent, but whether they were given a fair trial (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). Despite the play ‘suppressing certain facts’, it made ‘gripping television’, while demonstrating probable bias against them from the judge and foreman of the jury, and how witnesses lied and evidence conflicted (ibid.). Barnes, however, ends by emphasising how the play, while based on the trial transcript, ‘ignored a completely impartial contemporary committee report which found both men guilty’ (ibid.).

Peter Black described it as ‘dealing honestly enough’ with a case which had outraged the world, establishing ‘beyond anyone’s capacity for doubt that they did not have a fair trial’ (Daily Mail, 29 April 1965, p. 3). Black therefore derides ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pitman’ for obtusely claiming it was clearly about their innocence, while praising a ‘very strong and troubling play’, distinguished by John Barrie as the ‘bull-headed lawyer-politician’ and John Bailey’s ‘simple dignified’ Vanzetti, whose speech from the dock ‘still rings with the voice of the unjustly accused’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood professed to find courtroom drama fascinating, especially when ‘taken from life’ like this ‘excellent reconstruction’ of a ‘furiously discussed and now almost legendary’ case’ (Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1965, p. 20). Lockwood sees the trial as representing an earlier period of McCarthyism, with ‘poor, even coerced, evidence on which they were convicted’; again, Bailey and Barrie received particular praise (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson regarded the material as strong, centring on the Red scare which followed the First World War, and admired John Bailey’s ‘simple eloquence’, calling Benedetti’s use of verbatim transcripts ‘not unskilful’ (Observer, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Yet, he found the production and acting often monotonous, meaning the ‘symbolic quality tended to get lost’, and saw this as ‘one of those rare cases for a more televisual style of presentation, with even, perhaps, a commentator’ (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin was more positive, regarding Benedetti’s play as stronger than Marc Brandel’s Goodbye Johnny, about the last hours of the troops on Anzac Cove (Sunday Times, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Wiggin’s claim ‘court rooms are eternally dramatic, trenches have had their day’ points wisely towards Crown Court (Granada for ITV, 1972-84, 2007) and Showtrial (BBC One, 2021- ) (ibid.). He noted how both plays ‘rubbed in the lesson that we can never afford to assume that our leaders are over-endowed with either intelligence or integrity’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws notes how ‘we’ felt Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution was unjust in the 1930s, though felt the play was not fully satisfactory bar the ending; he did find John Bailey’s Vanzetti ‘effective as a cry of innocence’ (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681).

Marjorie Norris expressed feelings of desensitisation towards such true-life stories, when the tale’s telling was ‘ponderous’, ‘wordy and boring’: ‘we have supped too full of horrors to care unless the victims can be made to live again for an hour and their wounds can bleed afresh’ (Television Today, 6 May 1965, p. 16). Norris found Sacco and Vanzetti either too wordy or ‘as motionless and lifeless as the figures in the Chamber of Horrors’, while John Gorrie did little ‘to bring home to us’ how long they were imprisoned (ibid.). She admired John Barrie’s ‘naturalist style’ but felt even his performance was constrained by the play’s undramatic ‘adherence to the facts’; similarly, Cec Linder – who she admires – has a few ‘good scenes and vanished’ (ibid.) Robert Ayres’s performance justified it being on TV rather than radio, his face staying with her, ‘personifying unyielding prejudice’ as ‘a sleepy-eyed unmoveable bigot’ of a judge (ibid.).

The audience response was rather more consistently positive: 69 places it alongside the O’Connor plays, if somewhat below Moving On. Viewers liked its ‘strong and moving theme’ and basis in a true story, though quite a few felt it was overly slow, boring – ‘I felt no pity or passion’ (VR/65/223). More were engrossed in a play which was easy to follow, while also feeling glad to live in England, not America; a Piano Tuner could have been forecasting Trump’s America, with its attempts to make the orange fascist’s word law:

Extremely well written, bringing out political bias as the jumping off platform for legal judgement (ibid.).

Costumes, settings and performances were all enjoyed, with viewers liking Barrie and Bailey as much as the critics had; typically, ‘a few found the two rapid sequences of ‘stills’ somewhat trying to look at’ (ibid.).

While clearly Benedetti’s subsequent TV writing was not going to be prolific given his attitude in the aforementioned interview, he did write extensively for BBC Two’s Thirty Minute Theatre, at least: three plays in 1969, about dictators Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin (with Brian Cox starring as the latter), and the two-part Lilly (1970), centring on campaigning muck-raking journalist William T. Stead (Iain Cuthbertson).

Significantly, in summer 1977, Sacco and Vanzetti received posthumous pardons from Massachusetts Governor – and future Democrat Presidential candidate – Michael Dukakis, who declared ‘their conviction was permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility towards unorthodox political views’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1977, p. 17). In a lengthy article, Richard Boston declared himself totally certain both men had received an unfair trial and that Vanzetti was definitely innocent of the crime, and Sacco probably was too (Guardian, 27 August 1977, p. 9). Boston also traced the significant backdrop of FBI and state repression and imprisonment of left-wing politicians like Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, the first Socialist member of the House of Representatives: which amounted to a now-forgotten precursor to McCarthyism (ibid.).

This history should be urgently remembered anew when the world witnesses a US gulag in El Salvador and evil specimens like Stephen Miller given excessive power. It is a shame this doesn’t exist, as it would provide another corrective to the view that The Wednesday Play was simply one thing. True-life crime and legal dramas were clearly part of the offering, anchoring its appeal to those with mainstream tastes. It would also be good to see John Bailey, another actor familiar to me via Doctor Who, where his performance in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967) showed his skill in conveying pathos.

— With thanks again to John Williams for the press cuttings

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 – 02.16: ‘Auto-Stop’ (BBC1, 21 April 1965)

02.16: Auto-Stop (BBC One, Wednesday 21 April 1965) 9:25 – 10:45pm

Directed by Brian Parker; Written by Alan Seymour; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Eric Rogers

This play shows the evolution of an old, formerly elite cultural practice. The Newcastle Chronicle reflects, with a notable indication of class democratisation:

The Grand Tour of Europe was an essential part of the wealthy Oxbridge student of former days. Now more people undertake a tour of Europe, but they make it the hard way, hitch-hiking (21 April 1965, p. 2)

In common with several other previews, they emphasise ‘the beautiful, and willing, girls’ Henry meets (ibid.). The Radio Times noted how ‘Nowadays fewer ‘milords’ can afford the trip and yet more people seem to attempt it’ (15 April 1965, p. 37). People leave it to ‘pot luck’, the preview suggests, emphasising the dangers but also attractions of an ‘haphazard’, open adventure, which may involve various forms of transportation (ibid.).

The plot revolves around callow Henry’s (David Hemmings) older European girlfriend Federika (Delphi Lawrence) ‘exercising the ancient charm of the femme fatale’, challenging him ‘to broaden his mind, enlarge his horizons – grow up, in short – by enduring the rigours of a Continental summer. He has to make his way to Athens where he will find awaiting him an even greater challenge from his enigmatic Federika’ (ibid.). He also agrees that they will meet again on 30 September at midnight, when they may sleep together properly at last, having lost his virginity with another woman.

Robert G. Archer in the Rochdale Observer called it a ‘comedy drama’ (21 April 1965, p. 5), but the Wolverhampton Express and Star‘s Bill Smith thought it sounded ‘peculiar’ and asks, cynically, ‘Is it, I wonder, too much to hope that I shall not be sighing later on tonight for more plays like James O’Connor’s “Three Clear Sundays,” on BBC-1 a week or two ago?’ (21 April 1965, p. 11).

Writer Alan Seymour (1927-2015) was a gay Australian playwright whose most famous play was about contested attitudes concerning Anzac Day, The One Day of the Year (1958). He worked as script editor and producer at the BBC (1974-81), also subsequently adapting many literary works for TV, like John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (1984) and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles (1988-90), which I saw as a child. He worked as script editor on five incredibly varied Plays for Today, including Donal and Sally (1978) and Even Solomon (1979). Rather more incongruously I feel, he produced Jim Allen’s Willie’s Last Stand (1982) which explored sclerotic Northern working-class masculinity.

Brian Parker here directed a second Wednesday Play, after Moving On. This is a less overwhelmingly male-centric play. Eric Rogers composes a fairly light musical soundtrack, off the back of Carry On Cleo (1964) and many other mainly film underscores.

This play, happily, exists in the archives, though isn’t widely available.

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

I liked this. David Hemmings was relatable, he felt like certain people I’ve known. Henry learns, shifts deftly between joy and cynicism about people and life and finally back again. Seymour’s play cleverly diagnoses an ironic kind of universal petty national chauvinism that transcends national borders. As the excellent BFI archivist Lisa Kerrigan discerns, it exposes ‘the hypocrisies and absurdities of national pride’. Kerrigan notes the allusions to Fellini and how Hemmings would soon go onto star in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966).

Australia is represented through a boringly cynical driver man who decries the wonders of Athens, in a wonderful scene and Moya (Janice Dinnen), who is highly instinctive and shrewdly feminist. Europe figures as a talismanic legend and force that wills Henry into his unusual adventure. While autumn-winter 1964 saw several European authors’ texts adapted as Wednesdays Plays, and Horror of Darkness featured a European character, this marks by far the most topical engagement yet with European and English identities. Few Plays for Today would go so deep into the Continent as this does: Thicker Than Water (1980), The Executioner (1980), The Cause (1981) and Aliens (1982) do the most, though more widely domestic decor, as in The Piano and several house party plays, bore unmistakable European influences, as did a significant singsong at a party in The Good Time Girls (1981).

While one or two do play their real nationalities, Katherine Schofield, Kevin Stoney, Deirdre Turner and Jonathan Burn – and perhaps many more of the cast – play various continental Europeans reasonably well, accent-wise, even if Lisa Kerrigan’s criticism of some accents seems fair. Burn was to play a Spaniard in Derek Lister’s 1981 PfT The Cause. It’s impossible to reach a wholly satisfactory answer to the complexities surrounding essentialist identitarian authentic or open, chameleon-like casting, but this is a somewhat better advent than Moving On for the latter, I’d say… It’s a play with a ludic, paradoxical humour to it. Thus, actors playing outside their own direct experience seems to support the play’s own attack on the ‘97%’ who do retreat into insular bordered identities.

Hemmings himself speaks in a now-stiff seeming RP accent, but is clearly much looser and more laid-back than average for his times, speaking in Americanisms which themselves feel like pop cosmopolitan: “Zowie!”, “voom voom” and “Wham!” The others he especially gets on with are the beautiful Danish Karin, and the Italian film director Marcello. At the end, he doesn’t recall Karin’s name, subtly implying an under-the-radar gay subtext. This is affirmed more overtly in how, late into his Grand Tour, Henry repeats a reference to young men being able to make money a certain way when in Rome. There’s something in how Henry relishes doing a working-class job in a fish market and Marcello’s Visconti-like romantic Communism and aristocratic self-loathing, which suggests the play is a coded gay paean to crossing class boundaries and getting with the workers. There’s definite mockery of supposedly universal bourgeois self-cultivation alongside the wonderfully detailed satire of many insular nationalisms.

In 1965, Britain – aided by the Beatles – joined America, Australia and Italy as those cultures perceived to be most vigorous, when Fellini was a common reference point in the sitcom Steptoe and Son, and also when sexually liberated Denmark was on the way to becoming Mary Whitehouse’s bete noire. Seymour gets in what I take to be an overt dig at predators’ exploitation of loosening mores by having Henry’s very first hitch-hiking encounter be with a driver who speaks creepily of picking up “girls”. His accent is English. Seymour also gets in a relevant attack on German nationalism reproducing itself in the young. We take the side of the French barmaid in the Strasbourg beer hall argument.

Ultimately, though, this play is squarely on the side of intercultural exchange and cosmopolitan fun. It’s salutary to be aware how the actor playing Maria at the Rome party, Bettine Le Beau, escaped, when a child, from Vichy France’s concentration camp Camp de Gurs near the Spanish border. Maria represents the continent’s modern stylishness in her silvery dress. While she’s a symbol compared to Karin and Moya, the sexual openness of the Rome party seems an incalculable advance from Nazism, fascism and their collaborators.

Formally, Auto-Stop builds on the John McGrath-Troy Kennedy Martin visual inventory by using photo montages which show the journeys or simply famous places. As, while I’d imagined this as an all filmed piece, clearly it couldn’t have been in 1965. It’s all studio on VT, barring these montages. While not as showy or grandiose as Richard Wilmot’s sets in The Interior Decorator, Eileen Diss does a strong minimalist job – anticipating the Gerald Savory-ethos for Churchill’s People (1974-75) – in conveying many varied places very cheaply. She’s aided by strong sound design. Clearly, anyone used to filmic realism might well scoff watching in 2025, but I doubt viewers in 1965 batted an eyelid.

Brian Parker does a grand job at making this about the people and their relationships through the words and the simple, profound central idea. Seymour’s accessible storytelling, with a Jules Verne-like grand simplicity in its spatial and temporal focus, is itself a joy. Its assured mix of entertainment and clear moral and intellectual messaging makes me forgive certain limitations or holes. For example, the situation with the letter in Athens left me none the wiser, being dealt with unclearly, or even cursorily.

Best Performance: KEVIN STONEY

David Hemmings is very good here, as garrulous and palpably changing due to his experiences. Katherine Schofield and Janice Dinnen make the most of reasonably strong parts, especially Dinnen.

But I have to give the award to Kevin Stoney, who isn’t in this for long but makes a great impression as the rich Italian film director and generous party host Marcello, who is quite clearly signified as gay and expresses overtly Communist views. Like Peter Jeffrey, Stoney is invariably a magnetic TV actor, able to invest solid hokum with intriguing gravitas – as in his Doctor Who role as the malevolent, suave tech-gent Tobias Vaughn in ‘The Invasion’ (1968). Here, he absolutely nails a richly etched thumbnail from Alan Seymour, enacting the role with deft flamboyance.

Marcello feels like a benignly presiding Lord of Misrule symbolising the whole carnivalesque spirit of the 1960s, somehow. Clearly, this would have ruffled feathers back in 1965 and probably still would now, given the absurdly unfeeling ‘anti-woke’ idiots who want to turn back the clock on all progress and social consciousness.

Best line: “It’s good to see so many strangers that they are no longer strange…”

There were loads of excellent, quotably philosophical lines in this, but this one especially gets to the core of Seymour’s play.

Audience size: 8.42 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 53.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Open Grave / Enquiry / Jazz 625: Thelonious Monk Quartet), ITV (Carroll Calling / A Camera in China – with Robert Kee / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 14.3%

Reception: In contrast to my own extensive review, the play received frankly scant coverage from London critics, though slightly more from their regional counterparts. Both camps had mixed views, expressing a range of conservative and liberal attitudes, though by and large, it was a more muted equivalent of The Interior Decorator‘s mixed press reception. The audience was also divided, but it was notably large, and notably more appreciative of it than Jack Russell’s play, tapping into a fresh modern zeitgeist with its zesty picaresque narrative.

Clive Barnes – who missed out Hungary from the list of countries Henry visits – praised David Hemmings’s ‘finely gangling’ performance but found the play as ‘green’ as Henry in ‘many’ aspects (Daily Express, 22 April 1965, p. 4). While Barnes felt the play ‘entertaining’, seeing Parker’s direction had ‘a certain style’, he found the journey towards its ‘fine’ moral – ‘that all men are born foreign, but should forget it and cultivate the international bit’ – was ‘pretty longwinded’ and tedious (ibid.).

This all does beg the question, though: how much time has the Express ever spent trying to advance the play’s values, that Barnes so rightly termed ‘fine’?

Interestingly, Lyn Lockwood seemed to enjoy it as much, if not more, than Barnes, praising Hemmings as ‘likeable’ and Dinnen’s ‘attractive’ performance within an ‘entertaining’ affair, which may broaden the minds of ‘staid parents’, letting them know ‘their trail-blazing Henrys are safer on the Continent with the female of the species’ (Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1965, p. 21). Such tentative worldly liberalism is undermined by Lockwood’s casually homophobic parting shot: ‘Kevin Stoney contributed an excellent cameo as the type of Roman citizen every normal young explorer should avoid.’ (ibid.)

Outside London, R.S. noted how ‘a colleague’ loved ‘a superbly written and produced piece of the type we see too rarely these days where ‘moral points were made without there being any moralising’ – an accurate and perceptive point (Birmingham Evening Mail and Despatch, 22 April 1965, p. 3). In contrast, N.G.P. found this ‘gentle travelogue’ with ‘very pretty actresses’ would have been better as a ‘picturesque novel’ or radio play, lacking the drama ‘one was […] always expecting’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 22 April 1965, p. 5). They loved Terry Scully’s ‘splendid’ performance in Z Cars rather more than this tale of Henry discovering ‘that the greatest deterrent to enduring peace is racial pride’ (ibid.).

Some bod called ‘Touchstone’ disliked ‘rather tired moral philosophising on past German atrocities and on intolerances inbred by so-called racial pride’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 24 April 1965, p. 5). This crusty chump, thus far so far-right Muskian/AfD, goes on, hilariously, veering into Mary Whitehouse territory:

Young Henry […] undertook a not-so-grand version of the Grand Tour, broadening his innocent mind, not by following the cultural guide book to famous places and faces of old, but by bumping into such seedy characters as one may meet if one is careless of Continental ways, and by toying with the affections of a succession of easily obliging girls – in these days he might have accomplished as much on the beach at Brighton. (ibid.)

Touchstone did end by admitting ‘it was not without amusement or point’ and liked how it ‘was certainly much lighter fare than the BBC have been dishing up in their Wednesday Plays of late’ (ibid.).

John Tilley felt that The Wednesday Play’s ‘new ways of presenting drama on television’ were becoming rigid orthodoxy (Newcastle Journal, 24 April 1965, p. 9). Tilley found it ‘very entertaining’ but unoriginal, perceptively citing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and McGrath and Kennedy Martin’s Diary of a Young Man (1964) as its ‘genealogy’, where stills are used to save the expense of using film: ‘No device has been more quickly absorbed into the repertoire of the up-to-date B.B.C. producer, and we got a big helping of it on “Auto-Stop.”‘ (ibid.)

Tilley noted how, unlike Diary‘s ‘Hartlepudlian grappling with the mysteries of crime and big business in London’, Henry was a ‘public school boy’, while finding it ‘extremely entertaining’, unpredictable in its rambling plot and liking ‘the vein of erotic suggestion which ran through the script’ (ibid.).

Subsequent responses indicated it became pigeonholed by more staid critics as a ‘kinky’ play. In a Kenneth Baily article we’ve previously mentioned, a ‘People’s Viewing Panel’ assailed The Interior Decorator for its ‘whimsy’, and Auto-Stop was more mildly rebuked as being one of a group of eight plays which ‘could be better’ (People, 2 May 1965, p. 4). Ken Irwin made a blinkered conservative attack on Horror of Darkness and Auto-Stop wherein he noted that – shock horror:

there were some astonishing scenes of couples cuddling and kissing at a party in Rome… scenes which, a few years ago, would never have been allowed on the screen.

There was also a short sequence in which one man asked another in sign language if he were a homosexual. (Daily Mirror, 24 April 1965, p. 15).

Irwin’s moralistic ire was shared, predictably, by Mary Whitehouse and John Barnett of the newly-formed National Viewers and Listeners’ Association, who asked Mr. Robinson, the Minister of Health to see a rescreening of the play (Times, 29 April 1965, p. 8). While Whitehouse’s response is not as overtly homophobic as Irwin’s comments, it clearly encompasses such feelings:

It is our considered opinion that this play could do nothing but propagate and stimulate promiscuity and that such plays undermine the moral, mental and physical health of the country.

We are asking the Minister to use his influence to ensure that our homes are not subjected to the onslaught of such demonstrations. (ibid.)

While it is equally naive to claim that media forms have no substantive influence on us, this from the NVLA is a rather simple-minded view that TV dramas function as instructional ‘demonstrations’ which people automatically follow.

Now, where did the larger range of viewers actually stand? They were mixed, edging towards positive, with an RI score two above the Wednesday Play’s 1965 average, and more than double what The Interior Decorator had attained. Many did find it pointless, meandering or ‘very suggestive and with no story to it’ (VR/65/211). However, ‘a substantial minority’ watched it with ‘considerable enjoyment’, liking an ‘original’, ‘different’, ‘modern’ and ”with it” play which was ‘frank and realistic’ (ibid.) A student was said to be ‘in sympathy with the play’ from the off, ‘possibly due to a little self-identification with the student Harry’ (ibid.). An income tax inspector shared this view, claiming the play was ‘gorgeous, new and naughty’, though some disliked the inclusion of the concentration camp images, though saw the moral ‘of the German portrayal’ as ‘very good’ (ibid.).

Performances were largely admired, with the exceptions of the odd dubious accent. Kevin Stoney’s ‘fine cameo’ was acclaimed as the ‘charming but dubious’ Marcello (ibid.). Typically, there was some critique of the fast moving stills and excessive number of scenes moving between too many different countries and varied tones (ibid.). However, a driver summed up the somewhat larger favourable response:

It never lagged at any time, and (from one who has travelled Europe) the atmosphere was captured perfectly. (ibid.)

A planned repeat of the play, along with Three Clear Sundays and Up the Junction, was due to be repeated in summer 1966, with the BBC explanation – convincingly or otherwise – being that this tentative original list could be replaced by the World Cup and the international horse show (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1966, p. 17). The play did however surface within the US NET Playhouse strand in 1968: the copy I watched even contains its title sequence alongside the usual Wednesday Play one. Lisa Kerrigan notes that this play was rediscovered alongside many other TV dramas at the Library of Congress in 2010.

I’m delighted they found it, as this is one that stands up as both fascinating historical artefact and, well, a good freewheeling TV play with an ever-relevant cosmopolitan core.

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 – 02.14: ‘Three Clear Sundays’ (BBC1, 7 April 1965)

02.14: Three Clear Sundays (BBC One, Wednesday 7 April 1965) 9:45 – 11:10pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Jimmy O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Music by Nemone Lethbridge (lyrics) & Harry Pitch (harmonica)

Now, we are onto a play which began defining the Wednesday Play’s iconoclastic populism. Story editor Roger Smith notes how ‘hundreds’ of letters were received praising James O’Connor’s A Tap on the Shoulder, asking for more from the writer (Radio Times, 1 April 1965, p. 35). Just three months on, their wishes were granted.

Barrow boy Danny Lee (Tony Selby) pushes a man down in a pub brawl and gets landed in prison on a six-month sentence. Herein, he is manipulated by two wily inmates into hitting a police warden – he hits him over the head, sufficient to kill the man. Thereafter, he pleads guilty, honestly, and is faced with the death penalty under law. Despite his formidable Mum’s (Rita Webb) machinations, he is found guilty and is executed by the state via hanging. The play’s title comes from ‘the three clear Sundays a condemned murderer spends in jail before execution’ (Daily Mirror, 7 April 1965, p. 18). The same preview indicates O’Connor wrote the play when in Dartmoor, but revised it for TV (ibid.).

The Daily Mirror reported that ‘the BBC are awaiting Parliament’s decision on capital punishment before fixing a screening date’ for 3 Clear Sundays (6 January 1965, p. 12). Indeed, this play had been the first of O’Connor’s accepted by the BBC, before A Tap on the Shoulder which was screened on 6 January (Television Today, 25 March 1965, p. 9). It has an added non-naturalistic element wherein ballads, with lyrics by Nemone Lethbridge and harmonica playing by Harry Pitch, periodically summarise or comment on the on screen action.

The Daily Express indicated the sensational nature of the play, showing an image from its conclusion, and claiming it was the first hanging scene in TV ‘to be shown in detail’, while emphasising how O’Connor himself was under threat of ‘a REAL noose’ only to be reprieved 48 hours before he was due to he hanged (18 March 1965, p. 7). O’Connor claims the play was not propaganda but was written from the heart and was ‘an emotional autobiography’ (ibid.).

A certain androcentric bias at the root of a drama like this was plainly indicated in a Daily Mail article about Andrea Lawrence’s appearance in the play, titled ‘Andrea stars with 56 men’, though it excludes mention of Finnuala O’Shannon or Rita Webb entirely, both who give significant, substantial performances here (15 March 1965, p. 4). Another newspaper mentions the large cast of 69, while noting the play concentrates on the effect Danny has ‘on the other inmates and those waiting and praying outside the jail’; furthermore, it intriguingly adds that A Tap on the Shoulder ‘is to be made into a film.’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 April 1965, p. 3).

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail reflected how O’Connor’s decade in Dartmoor prison means ‘there is a great deal of feeling and warmth in the play’, also expressing surprise how he ‘has managed to bring a touch of humour to this frightening situation’ (7 April 1965, p. 4). It’s notable how few of the reviews mention Ken Loach’s part in the production as director; one of the few which does calls him ‘Kenneth Leach’. The emphasis in the press build-up was squarely on Tony Selby, with at least six papers publishing images of him behind bars, and O’Connor, who is praised thus by Roger Smith:

But what is remarkable is that in spite of the genuine outrage he feels his writing is warm and compassionate, with an extraordinary joy of life. In the worst situation he can find humour – something very rare in a writer (op. cit.)

In other words, the classic working-class survival – or gallows – humour.

You can watch the play here on the estimable Play For Forever’s YouTube channel (or indeed the excellent Ken Loach at the BBC DVD box set from some years back…):

YouTube video (accessed: 7 April 2025)

Rating *** / ****

The earlier sections of this play felt much in the same brash capering tone as A Tap on the Shoulder, but its tragic development felt very different, all in aid of an impassioned anti-capital punishment stance. The illiterate Danny Lee is unable to deny he did what he did and meant to do it. But is not able to identify the blame that also ought to have been attached to the two men, including self-styled “King of the Underworld”, Johnny May, who persuaded him to do what he did.

The point isn’t really that he was innocent, but just that no one is deserving of state execution, whatever they have done. He’s a wretched individual in terms of what he did, and Tony Selby performs brilliantly to ensure we believe his limitations and gullibility, but then also feel for him as the inexorable fate of the death penalty is cruelly applied. The play’s ending is well edited and sparsely suggestive, not prurient in any way. Then we get three on-screen captions including ones by Albert Pierrepoint and Arthur Koestler.

The songs, lyrics written by Nemone Lethbridge, and music played on accordion and/or harmonica by Harry Pitch, felt an odd, novel gesture, somewhere between Brecht/Weill and English folk song a la Ewan MacColl and the Radio Ballads. They had a worldly, sardonic air.

The drama overall felt like had astute perceptions about varying working-class underworld attitudes and distinct hierarchies of crime. This includes the perception that thieving and making material gains is the way to go, rather than just getting in the nick for violence, as a mug does. Johnny May and Robbo Robertson know how to manipulate a mug, which Danny foolishly allows to happen to him.

This felt like it gave an unvarnished, real blast of experience and untidy, vigorous but painful life in 1965 London. Yemi Goodman Ajibade and Henry Webb get small roles as a Black man who a racist landlord refuses to serve and a Jewish man accused of financial cheating who faces reprisals – it’s not really made clear the truth of this latter situation. These roles, dialogue from some of the lags about “poofs” and also the spirited but constrained Rosa – who lacks the freedom to have a safe abortion – indicate just how restrictive British society still was, in many different ways. We also hear from an appallingly unrepentant murderer of three “whores”, who, in the most macabre of the songs, wants to commit a fourth murder. As with Tony Parker’s plays, you feel you are an eavesdropper of some horrible, unpalatable but true human behaviours and attitudes that exist. It was an uncomfortable moment which reminded me of reading Blake Morrison and Gordon Burn about the Yorkshire Ripper killings.

As is sometimes the case with Ken Loach, you get a clearcut moral judgement on the narrative situation, but here Jimmy O’Connor avoids a neatness and the whole scenario, if not glorifying crime, certainly has something of the Graham Greene-Bonnie and Clyde attitude of fascination and some admiration for these people. But there’s good writing and playing of Danny’s manipulation and betrayal by May and Robbo, which is keenly observed in documentarian style by Loach. The cast is perhaps excessively large, which even more than the previous O’Connor play, makes it somewhat hard to follow the various strands, but it conversely helps to create a rich, untidy tapestry of the life of the times.

As with O’Connor’s previous Wednesday Play, there is a rich variety of colloquial language: ‘Mush’, ‘snout’ (packet of cigarettes), ‘in the family way’, ‘a slash’, ‘chokey’, ‘the screw’, ‘the nick’, ‘geezer’, ‘got his collar felt’, ‘bit of bird’, ‘cock’, ‘done me nut’, ‘a stretch’, ‘nicker’, ‘let’s get down to brass tacks’, ‘straightened’, ‘the cat’ and ‘a diabolical liberty’. And that’s just a cursory list!

I’d say this play’s overall vigorous spirit and campaigning heft – through a tragic human story – made it a fine and crucial addition to the now established, ongoing Wednesday Play project.

Best Performance: TONY SELBY

Television Today noted this was Selby’s thirtieth TV role (1 April 1965, p. 11). Nine days after the play’s broadcast, an article noted that Pimlico-born Selby’s first acting job was in 1949 at the Scala Theatre alongside Margaret Lockwood in a version of Peter Pan (Westminster & Pimlico News, 16 April 1965, p. 1). It reveals also that Chelsea FC fan Selby lived with his wife Jackie Milburn and parents at Kent House, Tachbrook Estate, and he and Milburn were about to buy a house of their own (ibid.).

Now, Rita Webb was very close to getting my nod here, with an indomitable performance as a matriarchal battleaxe. I think I recall reading about how Liz Smith regarded her as a close friend in her early days after moving to London, among many others part of the cosmopolitan theatre circles Smith moved in after the Second World War.

But Selby, whose performance Roger Smith praised as ‘one of the most moving’ he had seen (op. cit.) edges it as he makes the latter stages so tense and, gradually, moving. O’Connor’s script and Selby’s playing convey a hapless man, guilty, but who deserves a better fate than this and clearly deserved some measure of forgiveness and chance at redemption.

Best line: “You ain’t missing much in ‘ere, y’ know… It’s a miserable bastard life outside! What with my back, Aunt Lil’s operation and atom bombs in Scotland, and now there’s a load of flu about, I think I got a dose meself. Now where’s me snuff box?” (Britannia Lee to her son Danny, who is soon to die)

I do also like some of Nemone Lethbridge’s folk ballad lyrics, e.g. “Mother’s got the geezer straightened! She won’t ever let a chance go by!”

Audience size: 9.90 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 68.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – Part 3 / Jazz 625 – Tubby Hayes Big Band), ITV (The Budget – response by Mr. Edward Heath / The Tigers are Burning – dramatic reconstruction of a 1943 battle between the Russians and the Germans / Professional Wrestling from Bradford)

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46% (to be checked later)

Reception: Fairly good response from London critics, if miserly in number and with certain reservations. However, the reviews gathered from outside London are almost uniformly glowing, which, as with A Tap on the Shoulder, says something about how The Wednesday Play was now communicating well beyond metropolitan journalistic elites. This is corroborated by the viewer responses from the time, from a vast audience nearing 10 million.

Anon acclaimed its ‘shattering effect’, Loach’s lucid direction, Selby’s ‘remarkably accurate’ and ‘moving’ performance and Webb dealing with a ‘caricature’ role with ‘strident gusto’s and O’Shannon ‘touchingly gentle’ (Times, 8 April 1965, p. 6). Gerald Larner questioned the structure and plausibility of the first two-thirds’, but admired the harrowing final third, see it as ‘not a play but a plea against capital punishment’, which was ‘valuable’ (Guardian, 8 April 1965, p. 9). Generally, though, Larner felt it undisciplined, with excessive ‘stock’ characters (ibid.). The paper later apologised to O’Connor for an erroneous reference to him having written the play while in Broadmoor, potentially influenced by a stray line in the play mentioning that establishment (Guardian, 10 April 1965, p. 6).

The Daily Express front page rather vaguely reported that ‘Viewers protested to the B.B.C. last night at a hanging scene’, odd given the brief and suggestive rather than lingering and graphic nature of the said scene! (8 April 1965, p. 1). This same page’s main story ‘JAIL FOR RACE HATERS’, reported on Labour Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice’s Bill to outlaw racial discrimination in public places (ibid.). While this had many loopholes, it was a significant step forward in creating a new offence of inciting racial hatred. O’Connor’s play has a scene where a White publican won’t serve a Black man: its truth is demonstrated by the words of Councillor Austin Webb, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers’ Central Protection Society: ‘”We do not preach a colour bar, nor do the brewers. But I know some publicans do not allow coloured people on their premises.”‘

This reveals how multifaceted certain Wednesday Plays could be: focusing on one overall societal problem – here, the death penalty – but then also squarely highlighting others in single scenes: racism and abortion.

Like Larner, Maurice Richardson appreciated the message but felt the characterisation and construction were ‘amateurish’ (Observer, 11 April 1965, p. 29). He found it very viewable and revealing of prison life, though, feeling that O’Connor’s underworld dialogue is ‘the most authentic in the business’ (ibid.). Frederick Laws felt the main story of Danny was unconvincing and lacked sure pacing, but found the use of modern hanging ballads ‘persuasive’, the language ‘vigorous and plausible’ and acclaimed Rita Webb’s ‘proper gusto […] a splendid invention – receiver, mother of crooks, and humbug’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575). Laws thus expresses a desire for O’Connor to write comedies (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris again showed a deep frame of reference, noting similarities to Victorian Melodrama and inversions of morality akin to the Carry On… films (Television Today, 15 April 1965, p. 12). Norris felt seeing ‘the snare closing round’ Danny ‘was pitiful’, and praised Rita Webb for making Britannia Lee an admirable but not loveable ‘harridan’ (ibid.). She liked how Ken Loach knows ‘when to leave well alone’ and not show off with visual techniques, and handled the folk tune sequences effectively: ‘They linked the suffering of a 1965 innocent to all those who have preceded him’ (ibid.). Norris noted ‘Another success from producer James MacTaggart.’ (ibid.)

Jess Conrad, a footballing crony of Tony Selby noted his ‘old chum’ had been ‘hoofing in Edwardian bathing draws – ‘stripes going The wrong way, and all that gear’ – at the Players Theatre near Charing Cross: as a means of unwinding from his ‘sterner performing chores’ elsewhere and with filming of TCS in the bag (The Stage, 29 April 1965, p. 7). John Holmstrom did not see it as all that stern a challenge, describing Danny as an ‘absurdly innocent victim-hero’, with his progress to the gallows achieved via ‘a series of bizarre accidents’, though he did like O’Connor ‘apt yet stylish’ dialogue (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660).

B.L. thought it both a great play and great propaganda, admiring the various settings’ atmosphere, including the home of Britannia, ‘the Cockney female Fagin’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 April 1965, p. 15). B.L. likened the play to Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow – which Selby had appeared in on stage – especially in its use of ‘extremely effective incidental music’ (ibid.). They also felt, tellingly, that Z Cars, in comparison, lacked authenticity and was beginning to feel more like Dixon of Dock Green in its cosy focus on the Newtown police having ‘hearts of gold’ (ibid.). Argus found it ‘stark and powerful’, ‘a tremendous, exciting story [that] came over with a rare strength’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 8 April 1965, p. 19).

W.D.A. spoke up for the importance of emotions, in justifying O’Connor’s appeal to them over reason, and how Danny, the rare straight one in the Lee clan earns our sympathy (Liverpool Echo, 8 April 1965, p. 2). They noted how ‘A combination of the author’s writing and Tony Selby’s excellent acting communicated most powerfully the sensation of the numbing sickness of fear overtaking the condemned man as events took their inexorable course’ (ibid.). Michael Beale felt it avoided over sensationalising or sentimentalising the situation, and emphasised with ‘poor, bewildered’ Danny and found Britannia ‘repulsively fascinating’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 8 April 1965, p. 2).

Accolades grew. In the Somerset-based Western Daily News, Peter Forth avowed it was ‘no play for the squeamish’, hitting ‘home with savage force’ and will be remembered ‘with respect for the author and those taking part’ (8 April 1965, p. 7). Jim Webber went so far as to say The Wednesday Play had ‘contributed very largely’ to the BBC’s ‘return to grace’, with this play’s ‘trenchant bite’ a good example (Bristol Evening Post, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Webber loved the ‘sheer authenticity’, likening it to a filmed documentary which avoided staginess:

Never once did one get the impression of cardboard sets and puppets mouthing lines; so powerful was it all that the mood of the viewer was of complete belief and absorption. (ibid.)

Linda Dyson found all the characters ‘obviously authentic’ and loved the ‘street songs’ and made a rare direct political comment:

It was a bitterly tragic human story. And if public opinion isn’t ready for Mr. Silverman’s Bill to abolish capital punishment – as has been said – it must have shifted towards a more civilised view as a result of this play (Birmingham Daily Post – Midland Magazine supplement, 10 April 1965, p. IV).

Bill Smith felt he had made the wrong choice in opting to watch ATV’s The Tigers are Burning, after watching the last thirty minutes of O’Connor’s play: ‘I laughed, felt sad and, by play’s end, very sorry and emotionally disturbed […] A more crushing indictment of capital punishment has yet to be seen’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 April 1965, p. 15).

Peter Quince praised a ‘savagely eloquent tract’ but joined some of the London critics in finding it less successful as a play (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Quince would have liked a more odious murderer, as ‘the case against hanging is not selective’, but this was retrospective reflections; when it was on ‘I had been capable of nothing but stunned, horrified concentration on the screen’ (ibid.). He felt this ‘strong meat’ needed a warning beforehand for ‘viewers of a nervous disposition’, ending with praise for Rita Webb: ‘quite ‘outstanding’ as ‘his dreadful old bag of a mum’ (ibid.).

A review from the US was similarly positive. Rich. in Variety found O’Connor less a skilled playwright than ‘observer and shrewdly savage commentator on villainy’, with ‘vivid characterizations, punchy dialog’ and realistic settings (14 April 1965, p. 35). While Rich. regarded the cast as ‘unnecessarily large’, they admired an authentic tragedy, finding Selby’s performance ‘fascinating’ and the scene with the priest movingly acted (ibid.). There was further praise here for Webb as ‘his raucous, unscrupulous hoyden of a mother’, whole O’Shannon was said to give the most ‘haunting’ performance (ibid.).

Rich. regarded the scene with the Executioner (Howard Goorney) and assistant ghoulishly discussing their job unnecessarily ‘overloaded’ the anti-capital punishment argument, where a more implicit approach would have been better, but this was another largely positive review (ibid.).

Viewers regarded it as ‘a moving, dramatic and powerful play’, which brought home the ‘full meaning and horror’ of capital punishment, with one wise comment: ‘An eye for an eye does not solve anything – it just confirms man’s inhumanity’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/185). One comment picked up on a doubt I felt when watching: ‘whether a boy with Danny’s background and upbringing would be quite so gullible’ (ibid.). Tellingly, however, a Housewife declared that ‘All the scenes of prison life and crime depicted in other plays suddenly seemed bogus and one realized that this was the reality’ (ibid.). This matched the majority opinion in favour of a ‘warm, down-to-earth’ play, with only a minority complaining of dialogue that was ‘a bit too “natural”‘ (ibid.).

Most felt there was a truth underlying Britannia and ‘her brood’, seeing them as ‘typical denizens of the East End underworld’. The ballads came in for a mixed reception, with some finding them overdone and breaking up the continuity, others feeling they were ingenious and built up the right atmosphere (ibid.). Another Housewife eloquently revealed just why this had scored a RI 12% higher than the recent Wednesday Play average, and which had nearly matched that of O’Connor’s first play:

The play had the resemblance of a modern Beggars’ Opera and had a spark of brilliance both in writing and treatment (ibid.).

There were several letters to the press. M. Kelly of Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh wrote into the Daily Record calling for it to ‘be made compulsory viewing for everyone who favours hanging a murderer’, and expressing hopes the government will help us ‘start recognising crime as an illness that a rope won’t cure’ (12 April 1965, p. 2). B. Howells of Glamorgan, South Wales claimed to have been swayed totally against the death penalty by the play; previously undecided, they now saw it as a ‘barbaric act’ (Daily Mirror, 12 April 1965, p. 6).

In contrast, and in an interesting anticipation of a few responses to Adolescence sixty years hence, Miss E.M.V. Watford of Hertfordshire called for ‘a play giving the other side’, showing ‘The victim struck down; the news being broken to his wife; her struggle to keep the home together. Why does the killer corner all the sympathy ?’ (Daily Mirror, 17 April 1965, p. 4).

The People viewing panel notably championed Three Clear Sundays, with nine of the ten participants rating it ‘tip-top’ (2 May 1965, p. 4). The paper reflects how much better it went down than ‘phoney attempts at daring and tough plays which irritate viewers and the kinky, “way-out” stories drive them to despair’. They claimed that O’Connor’s play provided a corrective moral to TV producers: ‘People will take “tough stuff” so long as it is true to life, and has understandable characters – as this play had’ (ibid.).

On 16 July 1965, the play was repeated on BBC Two at 8:20pm in the Encore slot. A further repeat planned in summer 1966 was cancelled, the BBC claimed due to the World Cup and international horse show (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1966, p. 17).

More broadly, the play contributed to a climate of significant legal change. The last hanging for murder in the UK was on 13 August 1964. Sydney Silverman MP’s The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 received royal assent on 8 November 1965, suspending the death penalty for murder, which was made permanent in 1969.

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.🙂