Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:07: ‘Tomorrow, Just You Wait’ (BBC1, 24 November 1965)

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

This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all Wednesday Plays up to the end of 1965, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis. A selected number of plays from 1966-1970 will be covered.

03.07: Tomorrow, Just You Wait (BBC One, Wednesday 24 November 1965) 9:00 – 10:15 pm
Directed by James Ferman; Written by Fred Watson; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Tony Abbott

Jimmy is young, picking up good money, and he has a smashing bird. What more could a man want ? (Daily Mail, 24 November 1965, p. 18).

Along with other plays in series 3 Wednesday Plays by Julia Jones, Terry Wale and Dawn Pavitt – and, viewed a certain way – Dennis Potter, Fred Watson’s Tomorrow, Just You Wait had a domestic focus. Its theme is said to be ‘the strain and stress modern society imposes on family life’ (Leicester Mercury, 24 November 1965, p. 7).

Janina Faye plays Sheila, the 16-year-old girlfriend of 19-year-old Jimmy Gorbet (James Chase), with their romance carrying on against the background of Jimmy’s family life ‘where his elder brother, university educated, has run into criticism from his parents from improving his position in life’ (Daily Mirror, November 1965, p. 18). A scenario reminiscent of a certain Kenneth Barlow?! The Shropshire Star described ‘the jaundiced attitudes of Jimmy’s home background’, with his brother ‘alienating’ their parents ‘with their staunch old fashioned ideas of social betrayal’ (24 November 1965, p. 7).

Tony Garnett explained the play’s relatable theme of obsessive young love: ‘It is very painful and very beautiful – and there will be nothing quite like it ever again. Tonight we follow their love affair and catch a glimpse of their future’ (Radio Times, 18 November 1965, p. 43). Garnett noted that Jimmy’s mum is preoccupied still with Second World War air-raids, while his dad is ‘always remembering when England was great’ (ibid.). Apparently, the cards are stacked against Jimmy in ‘a way he is only just beginning to understand’, and Garnett indicates it is a comedy that to me seems to share a theme with Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936):

a man can work all day on his machine and not know what he is making. What are they going on about automation for? They’ve got it, haven’t they – using mechanical men (ibid.).

The play featured a relatively average cast size (10), with 4 women actors, including Judy Parfitt, who has enjoyed an utterly remarkable stage and screen career, and is very much still going! The Radio Times billing emphasised Janina Faye being a National Theatre player, while, significantly, noting Tony Selby ‘is appearing in Saved‘ at the Royal Court Theatre, London (18 November 1965, page unclear). Selby was interviewed in the Derby Evening Telegraph (25 November 1964, p. 14). This piece noted it had taken Selby 15 years and 30 small parts in TV before appearing in The Wednesday Play, Three Clear Sundays, a performance which ‘won him rave notices’ (ibid.). Apparently, two more ‘stark dramas are lined up for him’: Watson’s play and ‘a play about the life of Trappist monks which goes into rehearsal soon for transmission in the New Year’ (ibid.).

Selby is cautious, never taking anything for granted, clarifying he once experienced two years without work; this son of a London cabbie is said to have a ‘Cockney philosophy’ in arguing: ‘But if it’s something you really want to do, you see the bad times though’ (ibid.). His versatility is clear: a good tenor voice would qualify him for a ‘gutsy’ musical, while he likes being involved in Edward Bond’s Saved as it has ‘something important to say’ (ibid.).

Writer Fred Watson did another six TV plays or series episodes, culminating in A Serpent in Putney (1969), also a Wednesday Play, an off-beat romance in bed-sitter land, starring Tony Britton, Angela Browne and Frances White. Little, if any, information seems to circulate online about Watson’s life.

This play does exist and I have access to a copy… Tremendous stuff!

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

I found this play rather good, expansive beyond, and through, its focus on the domestic and familial. Fred Watson assesses education, work, class, money and power amid the clanging modern world. To say it is a Southern-set Coronation Street crossed with J.G. Ballard fiction would be making it sound more exciting than it is, yet it does have a charm in its mixture of dowdy domestic awkwardness and deferred conflicts with hints of inner psychological states and urges. Most successfully, it portrays the libidinous pull the modern world of cars and motorbikes has, but also conveys its dangers and sensory oppressiveness.

The play has a shift that I didn’t seem coming, whereby there is intra-couple attraction, as Tom teaches and puts his arm around Sheila, and Dorothy makes a lustful, abortive pass at the younger Jimmy. While it’s a more leaden play in its dialogue and characterisation than key forerunners Pinter or Owen, there is something to be said for the interplay of its archetypal figures, recognisable types of this era.
There are limitations in how the drama doesn’t build enough to a crescendo, and at least until the aforementioned entanglements, very little seems to happen. Yet this sort of play’s sociological observation and, even, imagination is greatly interesting to anyone vaguely interested in this time period or to the vagaries of the British class system, then and now.

Interior studio scenes of sustained dialogue provide us with clear pictures of the familial clashes, evasions and most characters’ political leanings – with the script taking in the legacy of the Second World War and Attlee’s postwar settlement with a serious heft tough to imagine in many primetime TV dramas today. Watson writes the women characters far better than many did in 1965, with Dorothy, Ada and Sheila all entirely distinct and memorable. Sheila has a steely aspiration for education and to become a scientist, loving Chemistry, and being taken under the somewhat dubious wing of 40 year-old Tom, the grammar schooled Ken Barlow type, who she earlier terms a “cold fish”.

I loved the scene in the coffee bar whereby Jimmy’s philistine limitations are laid bare. Sheila takes him to see Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) (1952) and he moans about foreign films, subtitles &c., and made them leave despite Sheila clearly getting into the film. This scene, where the fissures in their young love become clearer, is underscored by the yearning and dramatic diegetic pop hits of the day we hear playing: Dusty Springfield’s ‘Some of Your Lovin” and The Walker Brothers’ ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’. This scene, alongside other aerial, factory workplace or dreaming spires shots, lend a verisimilar sense of place and time, and engages on a deeper level, bringing thoughts of one’s own faltering early attempts at relationships and the centrality of cultural tastes at that age.

Overall, I thought this another fine window into 1965 culture, clearly situating a fairly routine kitchen sink scenario into a wider social canvas. It had me thinking of Wilson’s White Heat of the Technological Revolution, the Snow-Leavis ‘two cultures’ controversy and how Barbara Castle faced vociferous. It would probably have stirred deeper reactions had it included, say, a fatal road accident, but then Up the Junction had featured just such an incident three weeks earlier. This feels like another engagement with where we were at, as a country struggling towards change and liberalisation. (Relative) peace and progress had been achieved – as the elder generation’s harking back to the War highlights – but contentment didn’t seem on the cards.

*Strong pre-titles opening whereby Ada Gorbet (Amelia Bayntun) sings the Vera Lynn standard diegetically…*

Tom’s progressive views are portrayed as simply part of his lecherous tactics to seduce Sheila – 24 years his junior – while Jimmy’s shallow blankness grates. How easy these times were, economically, is clear in how he easily gets another job before the end. The play’s final scene has a subtly sardonic critique of Harry and Jimmy’s narrow horizons: these are far from characters to be identified with, but they clearly would be recognisable in some viewers’ social worlds. I feel the play has some of that Osborne-like angst, but shading into a numbness about how people’s lives are materially vastly better than they were, but spiritually a gulf has opened up between generations, and within them. Whether or not we are meant to see Sheila as taking the better path in life than Jimmy, then that’s my reading, whether preferred, negotiated or oppositional! As is the depiction of pervasive masculine arrogance, entitlement and torpor across pretty much all male roles.

Thus, Watson’s play gets somewhat closer to the calibre of John McGrath’s Play for Today The Bouncing Boy (1972), a piercing blunderbuss of a Marxist humanist melodrama, than to, say, Roger Smith’s appalling yet fascinating Marxist melodrama-come-exploitation picture The Operation (1973).

Best performance: JUDY PARFITT

Janina Faye, Joss Ackland and the elder pair are also very good, but there’s no question it had to be Judy Parfitt.

What an actor, now and, indeed, then. Watson doesn’t really give Dorothy all that much to say or do, but this is a performance very close to Vivien Merchant, say, in a Pinter drama or that would have fitted into the bleak hellish plenty of The Pumpkin Eater (1964). Parfitt is a master of gesture, movement and glance and her sharply nuanced, extraordinarily felt performance here etches itself into your memory, as she did in Brian Clark and Roy Battersby’s Centre Play, Post Mortem (1975), a superb instance of the confined half-hour studio play, with perfect mise-en-scene and performance. Parfitt’s gaunt features and long face convey Dorothy’s awareness of the faintly chic emptiness of her existence and shell of a marriage. Her poignant drifting rather logically extends to her making a pass at Jimmy, who has surface attraction, but perhaps even more of a cold fish than she is.

Best line: “But, but, formal education isn’t enough! One, one of the things you’ll learn is that life doesn’t have to be a meaningless round of outbursts and recriminations. We… We can bring intelligence to bear, even on the passions. Everything becomes a source of pleasure for educated people. Intelligent people are free.” (Tom)

Tom finishes this speech and puts his arm on Sheila’s shoulder: textbook example of manipulative rhetoric from a man of this era, conjuring necessary freedoms, but which he aims to exploit every inch… Joss Ackland plays it brilliantly in terms of conveying Tom’s shifts between bookishness and underhand lothario.

In excellent cross-fade, we see the ‘COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY’ environmental print superimposed over the image of the balding Tom with his arm around Sheila:

Audience size: 8.81 million

Very impressive and notable figure, that!

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (New Release / The Vintage Years of Hollywood: The Glass Key), ITV (News / Frank Ifield Sings / Walk Down Any Street)

Audience Reaction Index: 61%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 14.3%

Reception: This was one of the most meagre critical receptions yet for any Wednesday Play, with just two London press organs (out of those I’ve examined) bothering to review it – which reminds me of the contemporary silence that greeted Martha Watson Allpress’s strong new Play for Today, Big Winners (Channel 5, 2025) last Thursday. However, possibly rather like the reaction to Big Winners on social media, viewers seemed largely rather more appreciative of this drama, admiring its truth as conveyed by strong acting.

Among the critics, Robert Waterhouse felt the play was part of how drama being extended to include working-class environments had become an ‘eternal self-parody’ (Guardian, 25 November 1965, p. 7). Waterhouse perceived that the family being portrayed were ‘caricatured’ in their attitudes to ‘sex, class and change’ and were ‘written off’ by Watson’s play (ibid.). He also decried ‘clever flash-abouts from person to person’ and a pretentiousness of style (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood had hoped for a tender romance, but regarded this as just another of the strand’s ‘slices of life’ (Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1965, p. 19). While Lockwood felt that Watson’s script on its own had sufficient rawness and heart, the production’s fragmentary scenes and ‘jerky technique’ ultimately gave it ‘not much more heart than the jukebox machine’ (ibid.).

Outside London, Peter Forth thought it a ‘true-to-life story of the “little people” and their problems as they lived in the industrial section of Oxford’ (Western Daily Press, 25 November 1965, p. 7). Forth noted it was a ‘story of unhappy people’, admiring Janina Raye’s performance and making a notably pro-road safety comment to conclude:

I think the director, James Ferman, might have backed up the campaign against road accidents by having his motor-cycling young man and the girl in crash helmet’s [sic]. They set a bad example, burning up the roads bare-headed. (ibid.)

Michael Beale felt Watson had several good ideas, but his play lacked ‘dramatic discipline’, also – interestingly in light of certain plays to come in December – regarding the idea of the educated son growing apart from his family as having substance, but feeling its effect was decreasing with each generation (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 25 November 1965, p. 2). Beale felt Watson often seemed as if he was going to say something, but it flattered to deceive and was bitty – e.g. it seemed like it was ‘taking a jaundiced view of the new millennium that the Welfare State had ushered in’, but such ideas were never pursued far (ibid.).

Kenneth Cooper termed it ‘The Wednesday Bore’, claiming the characters lacked depth and its attempt to show the ‘strains of modern society on family life’ merely amounted to ‘trotting out a series of social platitudes’ (The [Newcastle] Journal, 25 November 1965, p. 5). Cooper felt it ‘so glib and soggy that it might have been the joint product of the script writers of Coronation Street and Peyton Place writing in a Turkish bath’ (ibid.).

The audience like it notably more than the critics, with an above average RI of 61, with a characteristic comment praising its ‘natural and truthful attitude to real-life’, over certain other plays (BBC WAC, VR/65/666). Many felt moved and involved by the story, while a University teacher proclaimed it had ‘a good deal of relevance to modern young people’ (ibid.). Notably, the sizeable minority who didn’t like it found it too ordinary and everyday, a ‘disconnected series of happenings’ or were unhappy to find a play dealing with young people perhaps too similar to their own offspring! (ibid.). ‘Here and there the play was dismissed as sordid and distasteful’ – again, much documenting of this minority moralism! (ibid.). Acting was admired, alongside the authentic views, including the opening aerial bird’s eye shots of Oxford (ibid.).

Overall, I find my own largely positive reaction to this play well mirrored by most viewers’ measured, largely impressed responses. Certain critics revealed more about themselves than the play in trying to write off working class representation altogether as some sort of stale fad, when Watson and James German’s play is another varied and detailed mimetic depiction of working-class life. It was, indeed, exactly what the BBC should be doing, in presenting the fictionalised lives of the many in all their variety.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.23: ‘The Pistol’ (BBC1, 16 June 1965)

02.23: The Pistol (BBC One, Wednesday 16 June 1965) 9:50 – 11:05pm
Directed by James Ferman; Written by Troy Kennedy Martin and Roger Smith; James Jones (novella – 1959); Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Richard Henry

17 years before the first Film on Four, and 7 before the first filmed Play for Today from Pebble Mill, came a key instance of the TV single play’s cinematic aspiration.

L. Marsland Gander trailed ‘a drama scoop’ wherein for the first time, a James Jones bestseller had been adapted as a play, by Troy Kennedy Martin and Roger Smith, with an ‘all-American cast’ (Daily Telegraph, 24 May 1965, p. 19). Among ‘ambitious location shooting’ – presumably filmed – Fairlight Glen near Hastings was being turned into Makapuu Point, Pearl Harbour, with studio recording finishing the previous week (ibid.). James Jones (1921-1978) had served in the Second World War as a Corporal in the US Army, and this play was based on his 1959 novella, also entitled The Pistol.

The narrative is set in Hawaii just before the Japanese Attack in December 1941. Standing guard ‘and feeling very important’ is 19 year-old Private First-Class Mast (Clive Endersby), then the bombing starts and panic sets in; Mast offers to hand back his pistol to the arms sergeant who tells him to keep it (Glasgow Daily Record, 16 June 1965, p. 14). Mast’s company is sent to ‘a bleak part of the island and all the soldiers try to get the pistol by fair and foul means’ (ibid.). Word has spread that the pistol ‘has special qualities’ and Mast ‘becomes determined to keep it’ (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 16 June 1965, p. 3). The same article stresses Jones’s credentials, authoring films like From Here to Eternity (1953) and Some Came Running (1958). The Coventry Evening Telegraph highlighted actor Lionel Stander having being seen recently on The Eamonn Andrews Show (ABC for ITV, 1964-69) (16 June 1965, p.2).

Roger Smith in the Radio Times indicates that TKM and himself first met James Jones in London in spring 1964, noting their nerves given his fame – also for The Thin Red Line (1962 novel; two film versions, 1964 and 1999) – and finding him ‘a stocky man with a rugged jaw and immense strength and dignity’ (10 June 1965, p. 39). After two days of talks, they were ready to go ahead, producing eventually this ‘tough story’, centring on Mast feeling ‘a real soldier, and something of a cowboy, too’ (ibid.). Smith notes the turn from total lack of interest in the pistol to everyone wanting it once they are waiting for the Japanese to invade, and the play’s ‘tough sardonic humour of G.I.s in a jam’ (ibid.). Smith admits the hard ask to create Hawaii near Hastings, but claims ‘The barbed wire, the sandbags, the fights, the guns, they’re all real’ and also how in the studio they built ‘a huge hill and dugouts’, promising a ‘good production’ and ‘an exciting experience’ (ibid.).

James Green noted a ‘£10,000 production’, with American James Ferman, ‘once a U.S. First Lieutenant and director of 14 editions of The Plane-Makers (ATV for ITV, 1963-65), who ‘has tried to make this drama look more of a film production than a TV play’s with two days’ location work at an Army camp and four days at Fairlight Glen (London Evening News and Star, 16 June 1965, p. 3). Green also claims that new characters were invented for a ‘play about a platoon’, which removed many four-letter words from the book, but which Ferman still feels is ‘tough and realistic’ and hopes achieves ‘a documentary feeling’ (ibid.).

After broadcast, the Harrow Observer highlighted a local resident Clive Endersby of 7 Elms-lane, Sudbury, as appearing in the play: at 20, remarkably having taken part in more than 200 English and Canadian TV productions already, this being his first lead, after starting acting at age 9 in a Canadian drama festival (17 June 1965, p. 2). This also emphasised his being from an acting family, naming his father Paul and four brothers Ralph, Philip, Eric and Stanley, some of whom were acting in England, the USA and Canada (ibid.). Jack Bell noted perhaps more accurately than the Telegraph that the cast of thirty included ‘many’ Canadians and Americans; Bell gave a minor eyewitness account of being on set during the production:

Holidaymakers at a spot called Fairlight Glen watched in astonishment as a platoon of grimy American GIs moved into position as a “suicide squad.” […]

Camouflaged US Army three-tonners lumbered down the cliff road beneath Lovers Seat, when I watched the filming, passing six potted palms which had been replanted to give a bit of hula-hula atmosphere (Daily Mirror, 16 June 1965, p. 16).

Actor Leo Kharibian who had spent 16 months in Hawaii as a real-life GI assured Bell it was ‘surprisingly close to the real thing’ (ibid.). Again, there are rather detailed accounts of the length of the filming shoot, how the actors ‘slogged more than a mile up and down the rugged cliff road each day’ and queued in a ‘chow line’ for food which they ate on bare trestle tables in the open air – apparently better quality food than army food, Kharibian confirmed (ibid.).

This one apparently does exist, but I’ve not been able to source it. If I manage to, I’ll update this post with an account of my own feelings and thoughts.

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 58.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Likely Lads – ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ / Jazz 625 – from Kansas City / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (Deckie Learner – A 15 year-old lad from Grimsby starts life as a trawler fisherman / Redcap – ‘It’s What Comes After’)

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: c. 21.4%

Reception: Interestingly, this was both universally favoured by those critics who bothered to write about and ignored by the vast bulk of critics. There wasn’t really appreciably much difference between London and outside here. Viewers were much more mixed, perhaps because we get a properly representative sample from this play’s rather large audience.

Clive Barnes emphasised the pistol’s ‘illegal’ status and how Mast comes to perceive it as a ‘lifebelt’, not just protection against Japanese samurai swords, but ‘a talisman’ (Daily Express, 17 June 1965, p. 4). Barnes sees Jones’s message as using the pistol as ‘a symbol both of human acquisitiveness and the will for survival’, and deeply admired a rare ‘convincing slice of America created in Britain’, with Smith and Martin’s ‘neat, crisp dialogue’ and good acting (ibid.). Relaxed, ‘authentic’ playing included Clive Endersby capturing ‘the right mixture of fright and determination’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood was similarly beguiled, taking up James Ferman’s filmic discourse, when seeing it as ‘an excellent attempt to rival the big screen’ (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1965, p. 19). In high praise, she felt the opening Pearl Harbour attack sequence was ‘almost as effective’ as a similar passage in the film version of From Here to Eternity (ibid.). ‘It was a highly effective mixture of pessimism, panic and humour – with humour uppermost – convincingly filmed’, giving ‘a fillip to the current state of the single play’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson acclaimed ‘an ambitiously cinematic production’, with ‘realistically rugged’ acting from the North American cast (Observer, 20 June 1965, p. 25). He felt the ‘symbolic significance’ of the pistol ‘a bit over-plugged’, but ultimately praised a play whose ‘technical level was most impressive, well above B picture standard’ (ibid.). These responses clearly indicate more ballast for Allen Wright’s argument a previous week that television was now regularly producing better films than those which got cinema runs.

Outside London, N.G.B. felt the milieu of American soldiers was over-familiar; however, the use of the pistol as ‘a symbol arousing envy, and the desire for security, brought a new slang to familiar wartime scenes’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 17 June 1965, p. 3). Also in Scouseland, W.D.A. found its ‘taking us out of studio propland into open country’ and lack of familiar faces in the cast refreshing (Liverpool Echo, 17 June 1965, p. 2). Tellingly, they also felt that ‘Hollywood never made anything quite like “The Pistol” which explores far too dry a line in irony to be good box office’ (ibid.).

B.L. admired ‘a compelling drama of terrified, bewildered men in whom ear brings out the worst’ (Belfast Telegraph, 17 June 1965, p. 11). They discern the theme of ‘envy’ and how ‘There is not the faintest hunt that patriotism, heroism, gallantry or comradeship exist […] Fear of the enemy […] Makes cowards of them all. All except the boy’ (ibid.). This had a rare ‘realism’ for TV, and such an account strengthens my impression that this play well reflects The Wednesday Play’s simultaneous balanced offering of the tough and the anti-heroic (ibid.).

Among viewers it was well received, if not massively enthusiastically, with a score of 56: just two above the overall Wednesday Play mean average of 1965 so far (BBC WAC, VR/65/325). Many viewers felt the central situation overly ‘incredible’, though somewhat more found it ‘compelling’, gripping or a ‘study of human frailty’ with ‘satisfying irony’ at the end (ibid.). While there was a core of satisfied viewers among the panel, many refused to accept soldiers ‘so gormless, spineless and self-centred’, and too schoolboy-like, and found the play slow, thin and unconvincing, per se, though there was sufficient ‘tension, truth and irony’ to interest many (ibid.). However, the vast majority admired its realism and seamless blending of studio and location work: seen as ‘lavish and enterprising’, while acting was mostly admired as having ‘pace and vitality’ even if a few found it ‘noisy and overdone’ (ibid.).

Viewers’ letters published in the press erred on the negative side. An S. Gordon of 25 Birkwood St., Glasgow, proclaimed ‘I doubt if anyone found Pearl Harbour as I found this play’ (Glasgow Sunday Post, 20 June 1965, p. 12). E.C. Powell, of Church-lane, Barton Mills, Suffolk felt it was ‘a flop’ and ‘all such a waste of time’, decrying ‘the phoney acting of the Americans all trying to be a John Wayne or an Errol Flynn’, and disliking how they’d been informed ‘the Pacific beachhead was part of our own coastline’ beforehand (Sunday Mirror, 20 June 1965, p. 20). However, a G. Farquhar, c/o Victory Club, 63-79 Seymour Street, London, W2, found it ‘Outstanding […] a masterpiece of tension and tragedy’ (Sunday Mail, 27 June 1965, p. 16).

This ‘war play’ was soon repeated on BBC Two on 10 September 1965 in the Encore slot of 8:20 – 9:45pm (Daily Mail, 10 September 1965, p. 16).

While I cannot really say I’d be especially excited to watch this, it was clearly a solidly successful attempt to keep The Wednesday Play embedded in mainstream cultural modes – the war film, popular prose fiction – while being one of many non-UK-set excursions we’ve encountered in our thirty-plus plays covered thus far. The viewers’ differing response indicates perhaps a certain fatigue with such screen material, and critical avoidance may reflect similar feelings or even high or middlebrow anti-Americanism. However, those most favourable among the viewers and critics found much to appreciate in its tough, vigorous non-heroism – a key strain running throughout 1964-65 Wednesday Plays and which clearly relates more to Sixties Britain’s iconoclastic mood – and British war films – than to Hollywood.

Notably, the Toronto-born Clive Endersby would appear as a trooper in Tony Richardson and Charles Wood’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), emphasising a transnational anti-war zeitgeist, while James Ferman would, in 1975, become a significant cultural gatekeeper for films in Britain for nearly a quarter of a century.

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.16: ‘Auto-Stop’ (BBC1, 21 April 1965)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: KEVIN STONEY

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.42 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 53.1%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 14.3%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you worked on or remember watching this play on TV, please email me at thomas.w.may@northumbria.ac.uk as I’m gathering oral history memories and would love to hear from you.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.07: ‘The July Plot’ (BBC1, 9 December 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.

01.07: The July Plot (BBC One, Wednesday 9 December 1964) 9:25 – 11:00pm

Directed by Rudolph Cartier; Written by Roger Manvell, adapted from Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (book – 1964); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Richard Henry; Music uncredited.

Following Mr Douglas, we have another play concerning a curio, a notable footnote in history.

This biographical drama concerns the events of 20-21 July 1944 wherein Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg (John Carson) leads, in league with several Wehrmacht generals, an attempted military coup in Nazi Germany: to be spearheaded by an assassination of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself in Rastenburg, via a bomb planted in a briefcase by von Stauffenberg.

There have been many screen versions of the real life story of Operation Valkyrie – a rebellion sardonically named after Hitler’s favourite opera: the tally perhaps even reaches double figures. This feels like the most expansive Wednesday Play yet in terms of cast size and technical aesthetics: being, I assume, all shot on 16mm film. The main setting is the German War Office in Berlin.

There is a triumphant moment when von Stauffenberg appears in the War Office, and claims that Hitler is dead. Gradually, it becomes unclear whether this is actually so, and eventually the abortive coup is easily quelled. Crucially, the Generals seem to have greater support in Nazi outposts Prague and Paris than in Berlin itself. Several of the ringleaders are summarily executed by the Army, led by the human weathervane General Fromm (Joseph Furst).

The July Plot is adapted from Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel’s non-fiction book of the same title published by Bodley Head on the plot’s 20th anniversary: 20 July 1964 (Bookseller, 5 December 1964, p. 2218). Fraenkel (1897-1986), a Polish Jew, emigrated from Nazi Germany to live in England, and collaborated with Roger Manvell (1909-1987) on many books about Nazi war criminals. Manvell did Ministry of Information work in the Second World War and became a grandee in the overlapping worlds of the media industries and film and communications academia.

Austrian director Rudolph Cartier (1904-1994) also left Nazi Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, arriving in the UK in 1935 after a brief spell in the USA. Cartier’s mother was murdered in the Holocaust. He is best known for directing The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and its sequels and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), but Firebrand (1967) about the 1933 Reichstag fire, Fall of Eagles (1974) and Loyalties (1976), are also highly significant works.

Notably, this play is said to have been introduced by left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg, but, as with The Big Breaker‘s intro, this is not part of the copy I’ve been able to watch.

Rating *** / ****

This wasn’t one I was especially excited to rewatch – after seeing it back in Middlesbrough’s North East Film Archive in 2019 via a copy the BFI posted up North. However, its skilled dramatic pacing and direction meant its merits shone through and it held my attention. Rudolph Cartier keeps us close in on the action and on the faces and reactions of the conspirators as the time passes and the highs of a potential coup are gradually surpassed by the lows of what becomes a washout.

Cartier’s direction ensures this has the tautness and compulsion of a thriller, while also being insightful about the politics, history and human personalities involved. Film cameraman Ken Westbury stays close in on individual faces or perhaps three faces in a room. Notably, it feels just as confined to enclosed rooms as a video-taped studio drama tends to be: this was surely the only way to shoot this narrative and keep it tense, claustrophobic and focus on the human personalities.

Again, I’m gratified at the lack of manipulative musical underscoring here. After a bombastic opening piece of stock music (?) as von Stauffenberg approaches the Fuhrer, we are mercifully spared any telegraphing of our emotions.

We witness this half-baked paper revolution as it dissolves into failure, while also being somewhat ambivalent about their motives. There has been much debate by historians about whether von Stauffenberg was genuinely motivated by Catholic ideals or not. It seems likely that these Generals would never have been able to unseat Himmler, Goring and Goebbels and their varied power bases, even had they succeeded in eliminating Hitler. Their motives seem to be patriotic disgust at military defeats to the Soviet Union rather than necessarily any altruism – however much this drama tries to paint their action as a laudable attempt to save lives which were subsequently lost during the War’s final year.

This play especially conveys the importance of controlling the media: the Nazis, led by propagandist Goebbels consolidated their hold over the media in order to wield total power. The rebellious Generals here have a good plan on paper, but don’t have the organisation or the steadfast allies who will seize the airwaves. It all reminds me of an inverse scenario of scenes in the British-Canadian film Power Play (1978), based on geopolitical ‘realist’ Edward N. Luttwak’s 1968 strategy book Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook.

Emphasising the drama’s biographical nature, there’s a coup-de-documentary at the end when three surviving officers involved in the Operation Valkyrie rebellion are interviewed on camera in Munich by Heinrich Fraenkel in 1964. They each explain how they escaped being killed by the Nazi regime and there’s a concise explanation that the former Captain Fritsche is now a government official in Bonn, Lt. von Kleist is a publisher in Munich and Lt. von Hammerstein is Controller of Radio and Television Programmes in Hamburg. The rebels are now power brokers.

We also see a plaque commemorating the Generals’ rebellion: clearly, part of the West German state’s post-1945 attempt to distance itself from Nazism. Given the scale of the quiet acquiescence of the German people en masse, it is inevitable this fascinating instance of doomed heroism would be used to validate a patriotism for the West German state that is distant from Nazism.

This epilogue, alongside Cartier and Fraenkel’s personal investment in the story, gives this production perhaps more of a complex, thoughtful edge than certain other fictional feature films of this story. History is never over.

Best Performance: JOHN CARSON

Within a very solid ensemble, where character actors like Peter Copley and Cyril Luckham distinguish themselves as the conspirators and John Abineri is a textbook evil Nazi Colonel, it has to be John Carson, as von Stauffenberg.

He conveys the bravery of a man willing to put himself on the line, though not one brave enough to ensure the assassination definitely works through suicide bomb tactics. With his richly honeyed voice – James Mason in an aristocratic finishing school – Carson is ideal as the eye patch-wearing maverick.

Otto John, who was involved in the Generals’ conspiracy, praised Joseph Furst as the vacillating Fromm and attested to Carson’s ‘curious smile round the corner of [his] mouth – it was authentic Stauffenberg’ (Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 1964, p. 11)

Best line: “Hitler was dead, the sky was blue, the sea was warm, like the hand of God in our hair!” (von Stauffenberg)

A line from a raging, burly leather-jacketed conspirator who tries to distance himself from them, saying “All your conspiracy’s on paper” is perhaps the key line. But I do like von Stauffenberg’s boyish grandiosity and buoyant hubris here!

Audience size: 9.31 million

Television Today reports the TAM ‘homes viewing’ figures for this and other recent Wednesday Plays, which differ in their mode of calculation from the BBC’s viewing barometers. Mr Douglas reached 2.17 million homes, Malatesta 1.9 million, while this gripped 4.06 million homes (7 January 1965, p. 19). I was once advised that this should be roughly multiplied by 2.2 for any 1960s-70s broadcasts to come up with an estimated actual viewership number, i.e. an average of 2.2 people per home.

So, Mr Douglas and Malatesta‘s implied TAM audience sizes are 4.77 million and 4.18 million (130,000 and 720,000 lower than the BBC estimates), respectively. The July Plot’s TAM figure is 8.93 million people, 380,000 lower than the BBC number; mildly surprising, as I’ve been given to expect TAM figures to be higher in general. Maybe this applies more to ITV programmes?

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 54.3%

The audience size appears to be the highest so far, but this shade is slightly lower than that for A Crack in the Ice.

The opposition: BBC2 (Top Beat/Amateur Boxing/Soccer: Holland v. England), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Sharon – An account of a “divine healing campaign”/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 75%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 70%

Reception: This play was widely discussed by critics but they were, surprisingly to me at least, mixed-towards-negative, though this is much down to their previous nitpicking over ‘mixing fact and fiction’ and all that silliness. Viewers actually liked this more than any other Wednesday Play thus far…

L. Marsland Gander found it an uncomfortable hybrid ‘haunted by an air of unreality’ and was bemused by Driberg’s introduction (Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 19). Alan Stewart felt the dialogue more fitting to the British officers’ mess than the German High Command (Sunday Post, 13 December 1964, p. 12). T. C. Worsley simply felt it ‘dull’, ‘a sad shambles’ lacking in ‘any atmosphere of place or occasion’ (Financial Times, 16 December 1964, p. 20).

Contrastingly, Peter Black was engrossed in the historical what-ifs summoned by this tense play, which he called ‘stupendous’, inspiring ‘pity and awe’, and identified it as part of Festival, not The Wednesday Play (Daily Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3). He singled out Peter Copley’s performance as conveying ‘the heart of this event’ (ibid.). The Times‘ anonymous reviewer admired how its ‘honest recreation of events’ transcended its dramatic qualities, indeed making it a ‘historical dramatized documentary’, directed by Cartier in his ‘usual, and admirable, sweeping romantic style’ (10 December 1964, p. 15). While I agree almost entirely with anon’s verdict here, they seem somewhat naive about the Generals, calling them ‘a group of humane and honourable men’ (ibid.).

Philip Purser was critical of clunky exposition, and also how ‘theatrical experience’ undermined what was sometimes very ‘affecting’ material (Sunday Telegraph, 13 December 1964, p. 13). Maurice Richardson bemoaned a ‘stiff’ start, but felt it improved and was ‘satisfyingly compulsive’, especially liking Joseph Furst’s and Barry Keegan’s performances, though feeling Carson was too ‘naively boyish’ as Stauffenberg (Observer, 13 December 1964, p. 25). Also among the more positive responses was John Russell Taylor’s, who was engrossed in the facts and admired its ‘ring of authenticity’, noting how the incompetence of the conspirators’ incompetence at key moments is supported ‘by the documents’ (The Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In Belfast, E. McI. felt the year of research resulted in a successful play, though their review’s sign-off is deeply perplexing: ‘Even two decades after, the horrific magic of the name Hitler and the attempts to erase it are still newsworthy’ (Belfast Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 13). R.S. was more critical, feeling ‘few of the characters carried conviction or conveyed the tension inseparable from such an enterprise’, though felt the ending was stronger (Birmingham Evening Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3).

Peter Quince echoed Gander, and anticipated some later criticisms of docudrama, feeling fiction provides more dramatic license and a ‘dramatised documentary’ would also have worked better (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 12 December 1964, p. 5). This is rather stupid, as the play offers just this, as the Times review noted! (op. cit.). Laurence Shelley felt it lacked the ‘conviction of a straight forward documentary treatment’, and he liked the epilogue better than the rest (Chester Chronicle, 19 December 1964, p. 11).

The BBC audience research findings must have greatly cheered producer Peter Luke and Head of Drama Sydney Newman. A RI of 75 exceeded even the previous three weeks’ strong figures, with viewers generally finding it enthralling entertainment and deeply educational (BBC WAC, VR/64/659).

A cliched national stereotype is aired through a viewer’s claim that the plotters’ ‘indecision did not seem to tally with the accepted idea of German efficiency’ (ibid.). While a few found Driberg’s introduction ‘dull’ and not adding anything, ‘more’ welcomed it for ‘putting one in the mood’ for the subsequent drama (ibid.).

A few in the viewing sample were tired of war plays ‘in any shape or form’, but clearly most couldn’t get enough of this one, especially due to its masterly realism:

‘Rudolph Cartier reigns supreme in this Field’, summed up a housewife (ibid.)

Interestingly, The People newspaper’s own reception study saw those within a panel of 500 TV viewers who watched The July Plot award it an average of 8/10, outscoring that week’s Coronation Street (6/10) (20 December 1964, p. 4). A glowing letter from Mrs I. Hall of Northampton praised its ‘magnificent’ acting and her final comment, well: it’s safe to say that TV commissioners have been acting on it since, for series anyway: ‘True life stories always make the best plays, so let’s have more of them’ (Sunday Mirror, 13 December 1964, p. 22).

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. 🙂