Place – Page 2 – May’s Britain…

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

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

01.05: Mr Douglas (BBC One, Wednesday 25 November 1964) 9:25 – 10:35pm

Directed by Gilchrist Calder; Written by John Prebble; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Peter Seddon

You’ve got the best costume designers from the theatre coming in, set designers, directors [who] were really, by that time realising that television could be a proper art form. They were realising the possibilities of it. As an actor, it was a rather special feeling: it’s always very exciting to work with people who really know their jobs, who are really expert, because it makes a marvellous atmosphere.

Claire Nielson, interview with author, 10 March 2021

This play has a straightforward enough, historically intriguing plot. In London, 1761, a mysterious garrulous, drunken man calling himself Mr Douglas (Michael Goodliffe) turns up and inveigles his way into the household of a wealthy merchant Mr Grant (Laurence Hardy), who has migrated from Scotland. The events take place on Coronation Day, 1761, as the Hanoverian George III takes the British throne. The Grant abode is based in the City of London, the capital’s historic financial centre. “Douglas” boasts of having cuckolded three men before in a previous location and goes onto cuckold the conscientious young James Nash (Gary Bond) who he describes as “good but dull”.

Douglas, after an unpleasant unreciprocated pass at Alison Grant (Claire Nielson) soon sleeps with Alison who consents sexually due to her romantic attachment to the Jacobite cause of 1745. She clearly takes to Douglas as a symbol more than as a man, even given his “big breaker” like worldly advantages over Nash. We learn, after early intimations, that Douglas is this mountebank’s created identity and he is really Charles Stuart, former Prince of Wales: “Bonnie Prince Charlie” himself.

Amid business difficulties with his ship, the doddering softie Grant is compelled by his formidably blunt battleaxe wife Mrs Grant (Jean Anderson) to report Charles’s presence to the authorities. James does this, but, in a rather neat conclusion, he returns without any authoritative nobleman to arrest Charlie. Thus, Charlie is humiliated by official indifference. As a new king is crowned, he is an irrelevant man of the past, lost to drink and regarded as a figure of “comedy”, not as a genuine threat, as Nash reports.

Mr. Douglas‘s writer John Prebble (1915-2004) must stand as perhaps the most significant figure behind history on screen in 1964, advising on BBC2’s Culloden and co-writing the screenplay for Zulu with director Cy Endfield, based on his original article ‘Slaughter in the Sun’ (1958) for the Lilliput magazine. This London born writer and journalist, who also spent many years in Canada, was also widely known for writing several popular Scottish history books, including about the Highland Clearances. Director Gilchrist Calder was to be a regular presence behind The Wednesday Play, helming a further 9 plays from 1965-70 and would later direct 8 episodes of When the Boat Comes In.

It is framed in press previews beforehand as a story ‘based on fact’ (e.g. Coventry Evening Telegraph, 25 November 1964, p. 2). The production clearly aims to appeal to authenticity through costume and set design in studio spaces. The scenes of “Douglas” witnessing the royal crowning in the streets, which might have been highly dramatic and visually striking, are simply recounted as occurring off screen, which implies BBC budgetary restrictions.

Rating ** 3/4 / ****

I find Mr. Douglas so deeply out of time a drama, in all senses. Watching it 60 years on, you feel an incredible distance from a sardonically melodramatic representation of a period 203 years before that. I enjoyed this for being so utterly different, even to the familiar patterns of recent period dramas.

Prebble’s script here is far from being uncritically romantic Scottish nationalist, as some have said of his books. Indeed, he seems to take relish in depicting Bonnie Prince Charlie’s desultory state sixteen years after the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion. He also satirises a rich family of Scottish migrants to London, whose patriarch is a merchant – fortunes are gained and lost via various ships, which is potentially, but not explicitly here, linked to the slave trade.

Alison may be said to embody the romantic Scottish nationalist position, but is shown to be naive, and surrenders her innocence to the worldly man she takes to be the Jacobite hero. She comes across as a blithe, passionate fool. Yet, interestingly, the song she sings, ‘Bonny Moor Hen’, carries resonances of class conflict and feels more in tune with subsequent Jacobinism associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution rather than past Jacobitism.

The play’s small cast of six works effectively; it deserves some credit for its 50:50 gender split. Like others in this Festival/Wednesday Play run, you feel like you fully get to know each character. There’s a steady, perhaps slightly faster editing pace than the average at this moment in TV history: the video studio sequences have a 9.6 ASL, to the brief film sequence’s 4.3.

I do feel that Prebble could have included more ideological depth, in exploring the sources of Grant’s wealth, and further addressing clashing sets of ideas: Catholicism vs. Protestantism, Jacobite traditionalism vs. Jacobin revolution. However, there is a richly theatrical flavour of Georgian London in its Hogarthian harshness and bawdiness.

I don’t quite feel director Gilchrist Calder makes this as visually interesting as it might have been; say, in comparison to A Crack in the Ice and In Camera. It does lack visual artistry and feels at times a worthy object of Troy Kennedy Martin’s scorn in his famous ‘Nats Go Home’s polemic (1964). Its short film sequence, fireworks and an alleyway encounter only slightly enliven the overall texture. The Donald McWhinnie directed version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1977) for BBC1 Play of the Month is rather more visually lively than this is.

One thing that strikes me so often in 1960s TV drama is middle-aged or older men repeatedly calling elder teenaged or grown women in their 20s “child”. We’ve been watching Season 2 of Doctor Who (1964-65) on BluRay and William Hartnell’s Doctor constantly calls Susan and Vicki this, conveying ingrained patriarchal assumptions. I know Alison is meant to be a callow innocent, but she is clearly an adult: indeed, Claire Nielson herself was nearly 27 when she gave birth to her daughter on 3 April 1964, ten days before the filmed sequence in Richmond Park was shot (interview with author, 10 March 2021). The majority of scenes were shot after this in the study. It indicates her subordinate power position within her home that she is called ‘child’, and notably her mother is harder on her than her father.

I agree with Claire Nielson that the production stands up well today. She feels the costume, production design and use of real paintings meant ‘it looked like the bloody 18th century, didn’t it?’ (ibid.) She puts this down to the influx to TV of skilled people from the theatre, alongside Prebble’s ‘daring’ script. (ibid.) Nielson recalls Alison as being a ‘very good part’ and Michael Goodliffe being a ‘very nice person’, but how frightened she was of him when in character as Charlie (ibid.).

Expressive finger-pointing gesture from Goodliffe!

Best Performance: JEAN ANDERSON

Margo Croan does well as servant Elspet, though it is a part coded as minor: being a potential sexual conquest of Charles, and her attraction is summarily dismissed by Mrs Grant. Claire Nielson has a hard job in playing Alison, a limited but crucial role. She imbues her with a convincing idealistic zeal and brilliantly incarnates a highly cosseted and gullible woman. Nielson is an excellent comedic player, and she knows when to underplay and when to enlarge. Her musical performance on a harpsichord and singing the folk song are excellent.

Gary Bond, also in Zulu as Private Cole and the arrogant teacher John Grant in Ted Kotcheff’s remarkable Wake in Fright (1971), has a headstrong force that toughens a part which could easily have been bland. Michael Goodliffe plays the wily, decaying Charlie with ripe, James Mason-esque relish, filling the screen and belting out choice lines with a roguish swagger. It’s a performance of volume very much in line with Gainsborough melodrama or Tod Slaughter horror. Laurence Hardy is splendidly weedy, dominated by his wife.

Indeed, I’m nominating Jean Anderson (1907-2001) this week for her performance as Mrs Grant. Anderson’s performance feels Wildean in its pithy, outspoken force, and fully earns Charles’s wry comment about the Grants’ marriage. I’m not at all surprised to see that this Eastbourne-born actor with Scottish roots was in James Broughton’s The Pleasure Garden (1955) and three Armchair Theatre plays (1961-71).

Best line: “Ha! Wine and brandy mature. Men decay… and rot…” (“Mr Douglas” to Alison)

I also rather like the bonny ‘un’s sourly realist takedown of heroism, when Alison proclaims that “He [Bonnie Prince Charlie] will come again…!” :

Like the Messiah, do you think […] in a paper hat, waving a wooden sword like a play hero with an army of dolls that spare your feelings by bleeding sawdust only…

Audience size: 4.90 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 34.5%

The opposition: BBC2 (International Soccer: England v. Rumania Under-23, second half of match played at Coventry/Curtain of Fear – serial, part 3), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Glad Rag Ball/Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 67%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 75%

There were no TV reviews at all directly following this broadcast in the Times or the New Statesman.

Reception: The reception was one of the more starkly divided of the Wednesday Plays we’ve analysed so far.

Interestingly, Gerald Larner reflects on how viewers now want self-identification with characters in TV plays, being less interested in the ‘fate of kings’ (Guardian, 26 November 1964, p. 9). He found it ‘boring’ compared with ‘the scruffy and up to date or the smooth fantasy of the ad-man’s world’ (ibid.) Similarly, Peter Black felt it needed ‘a hotter level of drama than was offered’, being ‘a cool, mild, stylish piece, not interesting enough in its thoughtt [sic] to make up for it’s studied avoidance of the obviously romantic line.’ (Daily Mail, 26 November 1964, p. 3)

Lyn Lockwood diverged, finding the play a ‘fascinating’ speculative journey into past events where ‘by some strange urge to be present at the coronation of George III in 1761’ (Daily Telegraph, 26 November 1964, p. 19). She admired Nielson and Goodliffe as the ‘pockmarked lecher’; acclaiming ‘one of the best costume dramas I can remember seeing on the small screen’, with a ‘superbly ironic climax’ (ibid.)

Maurice Wiggin concurred about this ‘credible’ and ‘beguiling entertainment’, finding Goodliffe ‘superb as the middle-aged, brandy-sozzling, pock-marked, lecherous Charles, with flashes of his young charm and dash but no illusions about his own nature’ (Sunday Times, 29 November 1964, p. 44). Now, I’ve tended to far prefer the other Maurice’s (Richardson) reviews to Wiggin’s, but on this play I am, for once, somewhat less in agreement with Richardson, who called it ‘a total vacuum’, ‘a corny little costume piece’: ‘nearly one for the padded viewing-room’, though he produces one of the funniest endings to a review I’ve read:

The Prince, though commendably unbonny […] wooed the daughter of his unwilling Scots merchant host with all the elan of an exhausted hairdresser. He must never be allowed to come back again.

(Observer, 29 November 1964, p. 25)

John Russell Taylor shrewdly pinpoints the play’s weaknesses, seeing exiled Charlie as believable but the other characters as ‘pasteboard’, and, in contrast to his praise of Philip Saville in the same article:

Gilchrist Calder’s evocation of eighteenth-century London curiously wan and unconvincing, especially in its unfortunate excursions into the (very sparsely) crowded streets and in the absurd stock-shot interlude of some sort of military manoeuvres taking place, allegedly, in one of the London parks.

(The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915)

Outside London, there was a more positive consensus about the play’s merits. Norman Phelps only briefly mentions Mr. Douglas in implied favourable terms (Liverpool Echo, 28 November 1964, p. 8). Hastings Maguinness found it ‘sad, but entertaining’, loving how Goodliffe played Charlie as ‘an absolute degenerate’: shattering the ‘illusions’ of ‘whatever remnants of Jacobite supporters there may be in Northern Ireland’ (Belfast Telegraph, 28 November 1964, p. 8). Similarly, Peggie Philips in Edinburgh found this an ‘enjoyable anti-Jacobite entertainment’ with Goodliffe lacking finesse, but achieving ‘a wonderfully good facial resemblance to a sort of amalgam of eighteenth century Stuart portraits’ (Scotsman, 26 November 1964, p. 3).

As evident in its Reaction Index of 67, the play largely held strong appeal for its quite substantial audience, tapping into an existing taste for period drama, with most in the sample echoing the more positive critics’ praise of its credibility and truth (BBC Audience Research, VR/64/630). As with certain other plays, it was commended as a change from ”kinky’ modern plays’, being ‘message-free, beatnik-free and entertaining’. (ibid.) A few found it slow or disliked Charlie being debunked; amusingly, a librarian is quoted as saying, ‘It didn’t rouse me’. (ibid.) Mostly it was well enjoyed, with Goodliffe ‘a joy to watch’ and Jean Anderson ‘giving her usual sterling performance.’ (ibid.)

— With many thanks to Claire Nielson

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. 🙂

Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.

It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.

Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.

As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, Daniel Blake: none of this fitted to the individual.

Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.

It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”

Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.

Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.

The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.

Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.

To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.

This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.

Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to a Knave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.

Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.

Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.

Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?

There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.

The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.

Category: Place

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.05: ‘Mr Douglas’ (BBC1, 25 November 1964)