Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.07: ‘Wear A Very Big Hat’ (BBC1, 17 February 1965)

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

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

02.07: Wear A Very Big Hat (BBC One, Wednesday 17 February 1965) 9:30 – 10:35pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Eric Coltart; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Peter Kindred.

The Radio Times explained this latest Wednesday Play was a story where an evening out is spoiled by an ‘incident’, suggesting this would be common experience for ‘MOST people’ (11 February 1965, p. 35). This revolves around Ann (Sheila Fearn) buying a new hat – ‘a daring stetson’ – for a night out with husband Johnny (Neville Smith) (ibid.) “Seriously. It’s gear,” is Johnny’s verdict on it, as they go out for a meal followed by a drink with friends in a local Liverpool pub (ibid.).

The RT continues thus:

When they meet Johnny’s mates, Harry and Billy, a very pleasant evening seems to be in prospect. But then something happens. Two rather foppish men are standing by the bar when Ann passes – with her striking new hat still perched cockily on her head. What follows is a small, slightly disagreeable ‘incident.’ It passes over inconclusively, but it leaves a mark – particularly on Johnny’s mind. Endlessly he broods over it; he plays and replays the scene in his imagination; the mods he thinks about it the more determined he becomes not to let the matter rest (ibid.)

The RT emphasises this as ‘a play about ordinary, very human people’, ‘social insecurity’, ‘honour and a sense of humour’, ‘being stubborn and being reasonable’ and the ‘untidiness of life compared to the simplicity of the world of the imagination’ (ibid.). It was Eric Coltart’s first TV play after two Z Cars scripts, and stresses the ‘regional authenticity’ of its dialogue, Coltart being ‘a Liverpool toolmaker’ (ibid.). I know Coltart’s name from his decidedly offbeat Play for Today Doran’s Box, screened eleven years after this and which doesn’t have a particularly clear geographical location. The Aberdeen Evening Express noted that Coltart was working on a selection of short stories, which he had began while on National Service in the Army (17 February 1965, 2).

Interestingly, this loving tribute to Coltart implies that he was a father to someone now closely associated with the weird pop band the KLF.

The Liverpool Daily Echo promoted local lad Neville Smith, born in Liverpool’s Cornwallis Street, as having gone from Ellergreen Commercial School to Hull University to radio drama to this leading role (16 February 1965, p. 6). Smith, from a working-class background – ‘the son of a fitter’s mate’ – didn’t have theatre training but did amateur acting at University and was now living in London, the main regret being ‘He doesn’t see Everton very often.’ (ibid.). The Liverpool Echo also emphasised local angles, like the play being shot in Liverpool itself, ‘against the backdrop of all our familiar Merseyside scenes’: it is a safe bet that ‘the scouser slang will be gear’ (16 February 1965, p. 2). It also reveals that Smith spent some time teaching drama, and his parents are outed, in pre-data protection days, as currently residing at 8 Caledonia Street, Liverpool 7 (ibid.)

Fascinatingly, the Echo carried an advert the same day by local Speke firm Whiteley Lang & Neill Ltd., mentioning that the BBC filmed part of Coltart’s play on their premises and jokily disclaiming that any of their workers resemble Johnny Johnson, while also offering work for any aspiring toolmakers, toolroom machinists, tool draughtsman or planners (ibid., p. 10). All a sign that Britain’s economy was doing very well in 1965 in terms of offering people skilled work. The intense local flavour of this play is clear in its adoption of a local saying:

“If you can’t fight, wear a big hat. The brim might protect you.” (Aberdeen Evening Press, op. cit.).

Coltart seems to be addressing a masculinity in flux, with old toughness vying with more peaceful attitudes, within the protagonist Johnny, who ‘prefers discussion to violence. But what is the manly thing to do when a “hard case” insults you in front of your wife?’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17 February 1965, p. 2).

Sheila Fearn probably as in *Wear A Very Big Hat*. Image courtesy of *Coventry Evening Telegraph*

While the cast has a few quite familiar names – William Gaunt, David Jackson – I can’t picture too many of them. An exception is Alan Lake, an interesting actor of incredibly varied screen roles, latterly married to Diana Dors. Lake is specifically mentioned as ‘busy filming and rehearsing’ as Harry in Wear A Very Big Hat (Television Today, 4 February 1965, p. 11). I know Neville Smith from the Play for Today Long Distance Information which he wrote and starred in; fellow lead Sheila Fearn is mostly known for sitcom roles, including as a regular in The Likely Lads. Helpfully, we are informed she was a member of The Scaffolds, the group ‘that brought a touch of TW3 to Gazette, the late night ITV show from which The Eamonn Andrews Show was obviously fashioned.’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 17 February 1965, p. 9). William Holmes plays the ‘Liverpool tough who wants to pick a fight’ with the play’s ‘hero’ Johnny (Daily Mirror, 17 February 1965, p. 14).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.0%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton – part 4 / The Hollywood Palace), ITV (Night Spot, with Frank Berry, Christine Holmes and The Seekers / The Fall and Rise of the House of Krupp*)

*’The story of two generations of German arms barons’, who armed Germany in both World Wars.

On radio, the Third had a symphony concert, the Light the cloying-sounding Time for old Time, and Luxembourg had David Jacobs’ Plays the Pops.

Audience Reaction Index: 48%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: A fairly scant number of reviews, by and large. However, the reaction it elicited from the critics who mention it was highly positive, certainly better than usual. Reaction from (the many) viewers was polarised.

Johnny Clive and Neville Smith in *Wear A Very Big* *Hat*. Image courtesy of *Radio Times*.

Anon of Times-shire helpfully places Johnny as a Mod and indicated that Ken Loach had used much ‘nondescript “pop” type’ music to root the play in Liverpool, in what they found an ‘absorbing and effective’ TV play (18 February 1965, p. 16). They feel that initial difficulty in hearing the dialogue against ‘the twang and jangle of electric guitars’ was overcome by an unusual story deftly directed by Loach:

risking sequences of unusual slowness for the sake of truthfulness rather than for the degree of suspense they might carry. (ibid.).

Fearn – in a ‘charmingly grotesque hat’ – and Smith are said to have given ‘unassailably truthful’ performances, and the play’s final message is approved of: ‘his honour cannot be destroyed by a mindless drunkard.’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood found the drama’s focus on an unpleasant incident relatable: ‘a good human situation’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1965, p. 19). While she was a little worried by its effect on ‘the sensitive ear’, ‘What with the authentic, hot potato in the mouth accents and the medley of background noises, my mind was reeling more than a little towards the end’, she ultimately liked an ‘extremely well acted’ play (ibid.) While this clearly falls prey to metropolitan sociolinguistic prejudice, it’s far from the worst TV critic instance of such that I’ve encountered in my PfT research.

Patrick Skene Catling saw the play as ‘skilfully harrowing account of Liverpool pub bullies and the underdog’s consequent Mitty reveries at a Sillitoe lathe’ (Punch, 24 February 1965, p. 290). Catling’s admiration for this and Cleo Laine on Jazz 625 (BBC2) far exceeded that for Dr. Who – ‘The Web Planet’, not unreasonably, I feel! :

a series that has descended from the wonder of daleks to the ludicrous bathos of giant cardboard ants. (ibid.)

Continuing the acclaim, Bill Edmund reflected on it having ‘some of the most genuine characters I’ve ever seen on television’, with a textbook realism discourse praising ‘real words and real actions’ (Television Today, 25 February 1965, p. 14). Edmund liked how it stayed focused on ‘the way a small incident can rankle and get out of proportion’, and expounded in greater detail on the plot than any other reviewer (ibid.). He clarified Ann and Johnny were out to celebrate their wedding anniversary, while lapsing into a fetishistic ode to Ann’s hat: ‘If was rather a startling hat but it looked very attractive perched on the top of her blonde hat.’ (ibid.).

Edmund admired Smith’s acting range, from ‘haughty and proud’, to ‘loud-mouthed and bullying’ and ‘calm and sarcastic’, and Holmes at the snarling Snapper Melia: ‘Here was a man toh longed to see dealt with as he deserved. I revelled in the scenes where Johnny dreamed his victories over Snapper.’ (ibid.). Loach’s direction was admired as perfectly putting us in Johnny’s position, ‘sharing’ his ‘doubts and puzzlement’ over what was going on (ibid.).

Frederick Laws was somewhat grudging, echoing the brickbat about loud music at the start, while also describing it as not being ‘major treatment of great passion’; however, he admired its sanity, wit and ‘shrewd’ observation, with a ‘detailed atmosphere’ evoked from its pub and Chinese restaurant scenes (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347).

Outside London, reactions were also largely positive. A.B. gave a rare mixed reaction, feeling unsure whether it was ‘a sermon about pride and violence, with real people as props for the message, or about a young man who had the misfortune to become the enemy, temporarily, of a psychopath’ (Leicester Daily Mercury, 18 February 1965, p. 8). The first of two Liverpool critics, anon in the Daily Post, felt that Coltart gave the production a ‘splendid Merseyside flavour’, commending Loach for the ‘very live’ feel and Stanley Spell for documentary style photography (18 February 1965, p. 3).

They also note the ‘foppish’ young man Peter (William Gaunt) who steals Ann’s hat – a description implying the toughs are teddy boys – while emphasising how Johnny’s nagging insecurities are resolved ‘only by a sense of humour’ (ibid.). W.D.A. in the Liverpool Echo was surprised more plays hadn’t ploughed this one’s original furrow, given its universality (18 February 1965, p. 2). While they felt it was slightly overextended in length, they loved a ‘thoroughly and convincingly explored’ situation, and a satisfying ending, though felt let down somewhat by how the Liverpool locations lacked specificity: they ‘could have been shot in almost any large city’ (ibid.).

Peter Quince liked how it was ‘in no sense a “significant” play (thank goodness) or an exciting piece of drama. It was a play about ordinary surroundings told in ordinary language that held the attention from start to finish and kept one viewing to see what happened next’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 20 February 1965, p. 5). Quince praised a most ‘agreeable’ play, especially singling out William Holmes’s ‘character acting’ as Snapper and ‘his cronies’ (ibid.). Further North still, Michael Beale found the dialect ‘painfully real, but also rather boring’, though he admired Fearn and Smith’s performances, noting how it ‘showed how easily a little incident could lead to a pub punch-up.’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 18 February 1965, p. 2).

The audience response from another very large Wednesday Play viewing public was decidedly, even archetypally mixed: evidence of James MacTaggart’s good sense to know that producing plays which would delight a third, and disgust another third of a large audience, would be proper Public Service Broadcasting. That telling adjective ‘sordid’ appeared among negative responses, which betrayed a partiality: ‘yet another unsavoury picture of Liverpool and its ‘semi-illiterate’ inhabitants’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/87). Coltart’s play clearly hit that significant spot, later achieved by many Plays for Today, whereby realistic scenes of working-class life were either refreshing or distasteful to see, depending on the viewer.

About a third of the sample really liked the play, admiring its capturing of Liverpool’s mood, with a Night Sister and a Sales Representative admiring its identifiable, human qualities and an ending – Snapper, flush with a darts match win, does not even recognise Johnny – ‘exactly right’ (ibid.). Others could not deny how it was horribly realistic, but didn’t find it ‘particularly edifying or entertaining’ with one Machinist enjoying it up to a point but bemoaning, ‘What about showing us the other half of Liverpool some time!’ (ibid.). The play’s earthy freshness is clear via how a few question a scene in a gent’s toilet, alongside ‘jerky’ visuals, though there was some praise for the dream sequences (ibid.).

One public letter from a H. Merrick of South Harrow, Middlesex, complained of the ‘monotonous guitars’ in the opening sequence, which ‘nearly succeeded’ in driving him ’round the bend’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 February 1965, p. 20).

Overall, I’m sad that Ashes to Ashes exists and this doesn’t. Pubs are great settings for contained dramas of human diversity and conflict, much like train carriages or broken down lifts. It’s a real shame that Julia Jones’s and Eric Coltart’s first TV plays, both Northern-set, aren’t available to watch. They would present evidence of precisely what-happened-next after British New Wave cinema in 1959-63 to go alongside The Beatles’ films and Albert Finney and Shelagh Delaney’s Charlie Bubbles (1967) and John McGrath and Jack Gold’s The Reckoning (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.🙂

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

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.

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. 🙂

Film review: Tish (2023)

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.