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.

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more of an anomaly than ever (Mark Fisher, ‘a spoonful of sugar’, in Darren Ambrose (ed.), K-PUNK: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 – 2016), London: Repeater Books, 2018, p. 107).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. 

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[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.🙂