Category: The Arts

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 04.01: ‘The Boneyard’ (BBC1, 5 January 1966)

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.

04.01: The Boneyard (BBC One, Wednesday 5 January 1966) 9:05 – 10:00pm
Directed by James MacTaggart; Written by Clive Exton; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram; Music by Norman Kay

The story concerns a policeman whose devotion to duty makes him a man apart and an outcast in society (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 5 January 1966, p. 13).

SIR – After watching the Wednesday night play on BBC1 on Jan. 5 I slept on my wrath, anxiety and indeed unhappiness for several nights hoping that with reflection would come some understanding or excuse for showing the “Boneyard,” advertised as the first of a series of “comedies.”

No such enlightenment has come and my anger has fermented (Lady Laycock, letter to Daily Telegraph, 28 January 1966, p. 23).

We end (as a regular weekly blog series, anyway!) with where we began: Clive Exton’s The Boneyard being scheduled as a play on BBC One on a Wednesday. Originally, it was due to go out on 30 September 1964, but it was replaced at the last minute by the adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s Catch as Catch Can: yep, the one featuring Kenneth Williams playing Napoleon Bonaparte.

Before its originally scheduled broadcast, Sydney Newman defended the decision to replace single plays on Sunday nights on populist grounds, noting how Dr. Finlay, Maigret and Z Cars simply drew bigger audiences so we’re better suited to the slot, a lesson US networks had learned earlier (Peterborough Evening News, 24 September 1964, 3). Single play enthusiast James Green was critical, wryly noting he didn’t want BBC executives claiming they had ‘no real interest in the size of audiences’ anymore, though he detailed how single plays were coming back in a new Wednesday slot, being hopeful considering ‘BBC drama has been disappointing for too long’ (ibid.).

In his preview of The Boneyard, Michael Gowers acclaimed writer Clive Exton as ‘one of the most original and exciting of television dramatists – and also one of the most controversial’, with a ‘brand of satire which cuts savagely and deep’ (Radio Times, 24 September 1964, p. 43). Gowers terms The Boneyard ‘a black comedy’, centring on PC Miller (Neil McCarthy), ‘a simple man with a sensuous wife and a puzzling preference for night duty’ (ibid.). It all sounds really quite intriguing:

The reasons for his secret nocturnal visits to the churchyard at once make him cuckold, buffoon, blasphemer, madman, and saint, and turn up in the process the dark side of human nature in the lecherous Inspector Potter (Colin Blakeley [sic]) and the rest of the characters who surround him. (ibid.).

Producer Peter Luke reflected deeply on Exton’s intent with the play: ‘What Clive is always sniping at are the crypto-fascist attitudes which lie behind much of what passes for ordinary, decent, conventional behaviour.’ (ibid.). Gowers details how Exton himself was currently in Venice, ‘writing the script for a film starring ex-Queen Soraya and the British actor Richard Harris’ (ibid.).

Douglas Marlborough reported how it had been dropped ‘because of the present inquiry into former Detective-Sergeant Harry Challenor […] A few hours before the play was due to be screened’ (Daily Mail, 1 October 1964, p. 11). Hampstead-dwelling Clive Exton, 34, was told by the BBC his ‘black comedy […] was being withdrawn for vaguely legal reasons’ (ibid.). For once, there was no playwright’s protest: Exton claimed the BBC ‘is quite right, but I hope they will show it eventually’ (ibid.). Marlborough reflected that the BBC legal department were wary due to ‘possible similarities’ in the TV play – written six months ago – with the Challenor affair (ibid.). The Observer reflected on Exton’s bad luck, his other black comedy The Trial of Dr. Fancy having been ‘in cold storage for two years’, likening Exton’s experiences to those of Johnny Speight over The Salesman – about a man who sells door-to-door psychiatry – and If There Weren’t Any Blacks You’d Have to Invent Them (4 October 1964, p. 23).

Further contextualising the decision not to show the play, Simon Farquhar reveals how Exton was unhappy with the original version, feeling MacTaggart’s approach had been too visually extravagant and busy when he visited the TV studio: ‘The play should have had this mundane background with startling things happening at the front. But they’d filled it with hundreds of little busts of Napoleon, it looked like Madame Tussauds! I didn’t know what to say’ (Exton quoted in: Simon Farquhar, Play for Today: The First Year 1970-71, Self-published: Lulu, 2021, p. 126). Exton also recalled attending a preview screening in Ealing and telling Sydney Newman in a car journey back to Television Centre: ‘you can’t put it out, you’ll ruin me’; while Newman defended the music, Farquhar implies this may have had an impact on the decision not to show The Boneyard in its original form (ibid.). Fascinatingly, Farquhar claims the original version still exists in the archives! (email to author, 6 January 2026).

Thus, the play was entirely remade, shot in autumn 1965, and eventually scheduled to be shown in the first of a new Wednesday Play series to be produced by Peter Luke, ironically directed by Luke’s predecessor as strand producer James MacTaggart. Adrian Mitchell trailed Exton’s play as ‘Essential viewing’ (Sunday Times, 2 January 1966, p. 33). The Radio Times billing indicated that Colin Blakely, originally Inspector Potter in the September 1964 billing, had been replaced by Nigel Davenport (1 January 1966, page unclear).

On 3 January, BBC Head of Plays Michael Bakewell had announced at a press conference at Broadcasting House that the new series of plays would start with The Boneyard, while also pointedly and relevantly noting how of the 9.5 million people who had watched the controversial’ Up the Junction, a mere 400 ‘registered their embarrassment’ (Guardian, 4 January 1966, p. 2).

Notably, Peter Luke is quoted that the new series will be ‘less class conscious and it will not have such an accent on the examination of proletarian mores kike ‘Up the Junction’ and ‘less politically concious [sic], like ‘Nigel Barton’, and that he hoped ‘that every play will be abundantly clear, and what it is about will be made manifest not only through the writing but also through the direction’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 4 January 1966, p. 1).

Luke’s rhetoric seems to promise a decidedly new, more conservative broom – at least in terms of form and content, seemingly trying to counter regular criticisms of The Wednesday Play for including jerky, modish visuals or for not having clear meanings. However, Luke did promise that plays ‘will not be cleaned up from the point of view of sexual content’, at the same press conference Bakewell spoke at (ibid.).

Previewing The Boneyard himself, Luke noted his ‘friendly takeover’ from MacTaggart, claiming this play ‘is indicative of the tendency of the 1966 season towards irony and humour’, while not mentioning it being a postponed play from 15 months before (Radio Times, 1 January 1966, page unclear). Luke claimed ‘humour is probably the nodal characteristics of the new series and we are offering it in every shape and size : black and broad, sweet and sour, tragical, comical, pastoral comical, etc.’, albeit with ‘serious’ themes and ‘strong’ stories, while hoping ‘none of the plays’ are ”earnest’ or pretentious’ (ibid.). Luke felt the writers had shaped the style of 1966 Wednesday Play: ‘self-mockery, wit, the spoken word, sophistication’, while terming Exton’s play a ‘grey’ rather than ‘blue’ comedy, set in a police station ‘where the most extraordinary things happen that neither Newtown nor Dock Green ever saw’ (ibid.).

This tantalising prospect of a play expanding beyond the limitations of drama series was matched by its representational equity. The play contained a cast of ten, according to its Radio Times billing, pleasingly split 50:50 gender wise (1 January 1966, page unclear). The Shropshire Star features two images from the play, one a close-up of Neil McCarthy’s angular features beneath a police helmet and another of him ‘on the receiving end of Marje Lawrence’s wifely anger’ (5 January 1966, p. 7). PC Miller’s decision to work continuously at night ‘arouses the suspicions of his wife and the mistrust of his colleagues’, who all ‘get involved in his persecution’ (ibid.).

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

This is impossible to rate in any rational way! It is quite simply one of the oddest single TV plays I have ever seen. It’s a mixture of the inexplicable, the risible and the inspired; its success for each viewer will depend on your own attitudes and beliefs.

On initial reflection, Clive Exton’s play felt a slight and fundamentally cynical satire. It does not seem to make any attempt to load the dice against the senior policemen. Inspector Potter (Nigel Davenport) basically performs an elaborate practical joke on PC Miller, while also implicitly bedding his attractive wife. That’s about it really. Miller’s colleagues are laddish men who aren’t being satirised with any great force or wit; while they aren’t exactly vindicated, they aren’t caught out in any way.

Whereas Miller ends up in sad turmoil, as he faces the crowd of women, his illusions shattered. The said practical joke is that, for weeks, during Miller’s curious nocturnal work shifts, spent in a boneyard, his superior puts on a deep commanding voice and pretends to be a statue of Jesus talking directly to Miller!

Exton’s play rather anticipates his oddball Play for Today folly, The Rainbirds (1971) in how it is a scattergun lark, with a seemingly deliberate lack of depth in the characterisation. As in that play, The Boneyard presents familiar attitudes and behaviours, while not wanting you to humanly identify with anyone who is on screen. One woman who wants to use Miller’s supposed connection with Christ to communicate with her dead child isn’t portrayed with the slightest empathy, but as an unnerved figure to be ridiculed. She tries to force her into the Millers’ home in a loaded representation of myopic fanaticism born of grief.

This has some quite lengthy filmed inserts, mainly in the ‘boneyard’, or graveyard itself. These sequences tend to be accompanied by Norman Kay’s ruminative underscore, which includes woodwinds, a drum and harpsichord. This music lends an air of bathetic absurdity to the proceedings, which, interpreted charitably, do perform an indictment of the police as a bunch of glib, cocky bullies led by an absolutely loathsome Inspector.

Best performance: NIGEL DAVENPORT

Neil McCarthy, rather than being in the Boneyard for illicit sexual encounters as his fellow policemen believe, gets embroiled as a credulous witness of prank ‘wisdom’. Marjie Lawrence isn’t given much to do, and is subjected to an objectifying skirt and legs-centric shot at one point.

I’d pondered singling out John Barron, already performing here as Superintendent Melchior in mock-sagacious tones and with a drive and pomposity anticipating his great regular turn as C.J. in David Nobbs’s The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (BBC, 1976-79). He is fine here, making a relatively small part count, enacting the clipped, non-self conscious voice of authority.

Overall, though, it really has to be Nigel Davenport, this week. Davenport performs smarmy, domineering and annoying with a bravura verve. This is an extraordinary turn which shatters pre-existing depictions of the police inspector and decades yet to come, revealing a freshly despicable exhibitionist, a larking bully. When left on his own in an early scene, he bursts into utterly maniacal laughter: a compelling televisual tableau shattering natural ism’s falsely glossy pane, breaking through a deeper, stranger mirror. Davenport is particularly well cast, performing a masquerade of nastiness in a way difficult to imagine Colin Blakely managing, given that Blakely tended to inflect most of his roles with an innate bluff kindness (at least as far as I have seen, and can recall!).

Best line: “It is written that the seagull does not need sandals” (Potter, pretending to be Jesus)

These are good too:

“Cause we’re prone to it, we have to guard against it, policeman’s melancholy… In constant contact as we are with society’s aberrations.” (Potter)

“Then did you caution this alleged voice that it if was some sort of joker, then it might be committing a breach of the peace?” (Melchior)

Audience size: 10 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: The Awful Truth (1937)), ITV (News / Hope and Keen: ‘Casablanca’ [comedy series]) / This England: 2 – ‘Plague Village’ (Eyam, Derbyshire)

Audience Reaction Index: 34%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: c.50%

Reception: The play was rather widely reviewed both in and outside of London. It achieved a notably more positive reaction from metropolitan critics, with several Arts luminaries extolling its utterly unique qualities. Non-London critics tended to side more with the groundswell of opinion against it from viewers, though an intrepid band of enthusiasts appreciated it highly. Such a sui generis play is bound to make a mockery of Reaction Index scores and the smaller number of forward-looking responses should not be ignored in a heady utilitarian veneration of the mean average data.

James Thomas welcomed the new Softly, Softly to TV, condemning its characterisation and ‘semi-documentary coppers’, who he noted ‘will never see a police station like the one in’ The Boneyard (Daily Express, 6 January 1966, p. 4). Thomas gave a ‘salute’ to this ‘hilarious play, delighted that The Wednesday Play ‘has decided at last to lean towards comedy’ (ibid.). The anonymous Times reviewer discerned that the play was concerned with ‘the organization, and not the actuality of police work’, such as which beats constables are assigned to (6 January 1966, p. 8). They felt that Miller’s wife leaving him and the vicar disbelieving him show Exton ‘rebuking the world’s materialism not mocking its religion’, and noted how the priest is a simplified but accurate presentation of ‘familiar’ views (ibid.). They also identified Exton’s grotesque characters and its ‘cynical funniness’, with ‘The nocturnal pursuit of Miller by lonely old women who take his experiences seriously was a beautifully judged piece of fantasy’ (ibid.). McCarthy convinced as the ‘solemn, tongue-tied and embarrassed’ Miller, while Davenport ‘became an oddly disturbing spirit of denial’ (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell self-mocked his own rational exegesis of the play by noting that its two most powerful images left ‘scorch-marks’, even being a televisual equivalent to theatre imagery in key plays by Brecht, Beckett and Arden:

One is the picture of a police constable opening his door to see the luminous faces of old women waiting beyond his gate for a revelation. The other is of a dapper police inspector, left alone in his vestry-like office, hurling himself into a dance routine like a maladroit Fred Astaire (Sunday Times, 9 January 1966, p. 22).

While Mitchell also liked Alun Richards’s Armchair Theatre play, Ready for the Glory – ironically featuring Colin Blakely, with a ‘Steptoe junior accent’ – he exulted most in The Boneyard: ‘It is a wonder that a vision as naked as Mr Exton’s can survive in a muddled, worried medium like television. His play, which should be repeated in a series of his plays, was as simple and mysterious as a glass of water’ (ibid.).

T.C. Worsley felt as exasperated at a play he noted as widely acclaimed but which to him was like ‘all modern sculpture, and especially sculpture in metal’ (The Financial Times, 12 January 1966, p. 20). I must admit my initial feelings were close to this crusty critic, who felt the ‘bone-headed beat-basher’ Miller’s predicament lacked either ‘humour, insight truth or even a modicum of interesting development’ (ibid.). On deeper reflection, I’d say I inched much closer to others’ more positive appraisals, able to perceive it as a daringly rare caustic depiction on TV of the police as an institution, with Miller and Potter coming across as pathetically gullible and smugly vindictive, respectively.

J.C. Trewin, usually a theatre critic, noted how Potter’s office resembles ‘a draughty Victorian Gothic Hall’: a useful description given how poor the visual quality was of the copy I had to watch! (The Listener, 13 January 1966, p. 73). Trewin loved how Exton portrayed Potter as ‘a vain, sneering exhibitionist who happens to be the police inspector’, acclaiming a ‘fierce little fantasy from which I shall recall an ultimate chase through the midnight street, the victim pursued by a gang of alarming women, prepared to be fanatically possessive believers and chasing their new idol ‘athwart the place of tombs’ (ibid.). Trewin praised ‘Uncommon television indeed’, and could not imagine the play in any other medium, also delighting in ‘the complex camera-work’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson referred back to The Boneyard when reviewing the latest Wednesday Play, A Man on Her Back, a William Sansom adaptation and ‘quite viewable, which was more you could say of’ Exton’s play, also branded ‘an intolerable imposition’ (The Observer, 16 January 1966, p. 25). R.G.G. Price was similarly disappointed: ‘The grotesque policemen who capered round a sincere, if dotty, cop who had heard a voice from a crucifix in a churchyard may have been making some statement about materialism; but I found the effect sub-T. F. Powys’ (Punch, 26 January 1966, p. 134). Price lamented missed opportunities: the ‘chorus of mourners who shadowed the visionary suggested there was a powerful televisual imagination unemployed’ (ibid.).

In a non-national press London Evening News and Star, James Green was angry at Programme Controller Huw Wheldon for allowing back-to-back ‘police dramas’ in the BBC One schedules: Softly, Softly and this (6 January 1966, p. 11). Nevertheless, Green grew to like Softly, Softly, though didn’t feel it yet had ‘the punch and character drawing’ of Z Cars, and was, like me, in several minds about The Boneyard, but from a different perspective: ‘A disquieting and vaguely embarrassing play which attracted, yet repelled still more’ (ibid.). Alan Frame was unamused by ‘a macabre little jaunt in and around the headstones and tombs that the B.B.C. in its dizzy post-Christmas madness thought fit to offer us as the Wednesday play’ (Belfast News Letter, 6 January 1966, p. 10). Like ‘some of the most exotic cocktails the light-headedness never came’; nor did Frame feel it had ‘a message’ – seemingly one of his expectations – other than not to join the police force! (ibid.).

Argus accurately grasped that Exton’s play was ‘a macabre affair clearly intended as an affront to the conventional mind’, while liking its setting and ‘intriguing’ plot (Glasgow Daily Record, 6 January 1966, p. 11). While he found the characters ‘impossible’, Argus countered that certain moments ‘almost added up to dramatic rapture’, with a ‘finely written’ script and a production marked by ‘a touch of genius’; concluding that it was ‘an unusually excellent play’ (ibid.). Contrarily, N.B. disliked ‘a piece of malicious nihilism’, which in its ending, with Miller wifeless and besieged by the ‘unhappy’ and ‘unprivileged’ women, made out his newfound Christian faith ‘to be hollow’ (Leicester Mercury, 6 January 1966, p. 20). N.B. was annoyed at an inconclusive ending as to whether Miller had actually been addressed by Christ, actually feeling that the play ‘stressed this’ was the case! (ibid.).

Also in the East Midlands, F.C.G. hated the play, feeling it was un-British ‘rubbish’, with ‘sick humour’, a ‘demented’ policeman and ‘the zaniest police inspector even the BBC has ever conjured up’ (Northampton Evening Telegraph, 6 January 1966, p. 2). This was another of ‘so many unfortunate excursions into off-beat drama’ from the BBC (ibid.). Slightly further south, perhaps in Northamptonshire, perhaps Cambridgeshire depending on the era (!), GTL in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph was left ‘wondering what it was all about’ (6 January 1966, p. 2). Aye, that old chestnut. They noted Potter’s obsession with sex and darts and how he even had a dart-board on the wall of his office, and was prone to doing soft shoe shuffles on tables (ibid.). GTL certainly far preferred Softly, Softly before it (ibid.).

K.H.H. also noted this was ‘police night’ on TV, feeling Exton had ‘overdid it’ with the mourning women and (apparently) ‘an inspector like nothing the Metropolitan Police ever saw in Nigel Davenport’s Inspector Potter, who was using the Constable’s nightly graveyard communion as a lever for lovemaking with the copper’s wife’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 6 January 1966, p. 4). They found it had some ‘shrewd observations about some of the clergy’, but ‘left a rather nasty taste’ (ibid.). As the Merseyside-set Z Cars had shifted to the Bristol-set Softly, Softly, so doth our coverage head south! A.H.R. Thomas was surprised ‘a play with such an unpromising title’ had ‘earned the peak viewing time’ (Bristol Evening Post, 8 January 1966, p. 5).

Peggie Phillips admitted not to having seen Exton’s play, but recounted receiving ‘letters of complaint’ about the play’s ‘sick jokes at the expense of the police’, at ‘a time when it is becoming a hazard to walk in city streets after dark’ (The Scotsman, 10 January 1966, p. 4). Tom Gregg found little humour ‘in this peculiar piece’, though regarded Nigel Davenport as ‘rollickingly magnificent’ and admitted it may not have any more meaning but being ‘a big joke whose point I was too obtuse to grasp!’ (Runcorn Guardian, 13 January 1966, p. 6).

A Mrs. Grace Hamlin of 35 Druid Hill, Bristol 9, wrote a letter excoriating the play for being ‘in the worst possible taste, even bordering on blasphemy’ (Bristol Evening Post, 8 January 1966, p. 16). Hamlin claimed that such a ‘scurrilous’ programme had caused her to discontinue her licence fee payment as a means of ‘protest’ (ibid.). Jessie Stephen, Acting Secretary of the Bristol Cosmo Group, 27 Chessel Street, Bedminster. Bristol 3, wrote to counter ‘self-appointed censors of what appears on our television screens’, like Hamlin (12 January 1966, p. 32). Stephen argued The Boneyard was ‘credible if a little macabre’ and ‘In its context it was neither blasphemous nor profane’, telling Mrs Hamlin that, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction as any psychiatrist could tell her’ (ibid.). Stephen righteously assailed the likes of Hamlin’s self-righteousness in demanding ‘to fix standards for the rest of us’, terming them ‘both impudent and intolerable’ (ibid.).

These busybodies seem to live in a cloud cuckooland of fairy tale existence which has no relation at all to life as it is lived by the great majority (ibid.).

Stephen quoted Robert Burns’s poem Holly Willie’s Prayer as a further corrective, while urging ‘more tolerance and less bigotry, more understanding and less interference in the pleasures of our fellow men’ (ibid.).

A Mrs. Elaine Harvey of 12 Bilbury Crescent, Westbury-on-Trym, Bristol, responded to ‘Miss Jessie Stephen’ with an even more forthright endorsement of the play, terming it ‘riotously funny’ and enjoyable, while wryly correcting Stephen’s claim that ‘it raises a mirror to what is happening all around us, as I should not think the situation is all that common’ (18 January 1966, p. 27). While this is true and funny, the play does portray common real behaviours: adultery, bullying. Harvey offered ‘some advice to the ladies who objected’, cautioning them not to watch any play labelled a ‘black comedy’ ‘as it will surely raise your blood pressure’ (ibid.).

A world away from these two varied worldly Bristol women, came two moralistic, broad brush attacks in the North East-based Sunday Sun. A Mrs Elizabeth Sinclair of Parkhead Farm, Bishop Auckland, found The Boneyard the most ‘revolting’ thing she had ever seen on BBC TV (9 January 1966, p. 10). Sinclair claimed it was ‘degrading’ in how it ‘mocked at religion on television screens. No wonder we have a lot of mixed-up kids nowadays’ (ibid.). Above this in the same newspaper was another letter, signed simply: ‘MUST BE DRUNK (or I wouldn’t have watched it)’ (ibid.). This attacked the play as ‘utter drivel’, questioned the Inspector’s characterisation and saw it as a ‘sacrilege to the Church’ (ibid.).

A Mrs. Allison, Victoria-road, Oulton Broad, Lowestoft, Suffolk also found it ‘deplorable’ and ‘downright blasphemous’, though took a wordlier view than N.B. in perceiving Miller’s auditory graveyard visions as being ‘a practical joke by a police chief’ (Sunday Mirror, 9 January 1966, p. 22). Allison pre-echoed Nancy Banks-Smith’s review of Philip Martin’s Play for Today Gangsters (1975): ‘To call such a play a comedy makes one wonder who finds such bad taste enjoyable. A comedy ? A crime !’ (ibid.).

A P.H. Arnold of 154 Oldfield Road, Coventry, noted that they had complained to the BBC about the play, which presented the police with ‘no sense of decorum or standards of discipline […] All this on a night when much feeling existed in the police force over pay claim rejections !’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 22 January 1966, p. 8). Arnold claimed the portrayal of the vicar was also denigrating, as they were ‘unable to withstand materialistic attacks on mystical happenings’; showing he sided with N.B. in interpreting the visions as real (ibid.). Most interestingly, Arnold, elsewhere setting himself up as ‘a very ordinary man’, details how the BBC replied to his complaint: including ‘photographic copies of reviews all very favourable to the play’ (ibid.).

A Lady Angela Laycock of Doncaster wrote a letter, deeply troubled by the play’s irreverence and hard-edged nihilism:

Even in these days of popular sick humour how can anyone laugh at the tender performance given by Neil McCarthy standing bewildered at the feet of Christ crucified ? And even the most hardened and scornful of the irreligious can surely find no merriment in a woman crazed with grief at the death of her child. (op. cit.)

Laycock, in ‘advanced middle age’, noted how ‘almost all my friends of a very wide age group’ shared her ‘perplexity at TV drama’, personally reflecting she was not only ‘shaken’, but ‘frightened’, by The Boneyard (ibid.).

Showing a pretty full suite of conservative stances, Lady Laycock recounted primly responding to programmes ‘dealing sympathetically with homosexuality, lesbians, abortion, venereal disease and drug addiction’, but that this had affected her most of all: ‘being invited to laugh at the fundamental agony of men’s souls I can keep silent no longer’ (ibid.). She ended censoriously, cautioning against an amoral age where nothing was sacred:

Take care, BBC, or we may one day all be asked to split our sides at a farce called “The Goons in Buchenwald.”

While Lady Laycock’s specific attack on The Boneyard is misguided, it is at least a sincere human response and Daniel Rachel’s new book reveals a wilfully ahistorical flippancy towards Nazi symbols as a long-term cultural tendency in Britain.

The play received one of the lowest Reaction Indices we’ve seen: 34! (BBC WAC, VR/66/12). While a reasonable number of Plays for Today scored even lower, this was the second lowest of five Exton plays (other scores 26, 50, 47 and 56, with The Big Eat attaining the lowest) (ibid.). An Engineer hated it, desiring to ‘hear the comments of any member of the Police Force’, while a Printer derided ‘pure rubbish’ (ibid.). A Salesman, not reflecting at all on their own work, also attacked ‘A flippant story concerning a divine visitation, [which] even when a hoax, is in very questionable taste’ (ibid.).

The report indicated Exton’s play had touched on two extremely sensitive points for many in how it was perceived as ridiculing religion and the police, with the decision to use Christ as ‘a medium’ questioned when another figure could have been used (ibid.). Other comments can be summarised by key adjectives: ‘warped’, ‘disagreeable’ and ‘idiotic’ (ibid.). Even a group who liked it ‘fairly well’ felt its development was poor: it ‘dejenerated into farce […] a cross between a music-hall act and a witch hunt’ (ibid.).

A smaller group of enthusiasts loved its shift from jokey to sad, declaring the scene in the canteen where the lady kneels to Miller to have ‘pathos’ (ibid.). This group admired it’s ‘originality, oddity, ‘intriguing off-beat subject’ and ‘rich comedy’ (ibid.). A Housewife applauded it’s ‘novel’ and ‘amusing’ qualities yet also reflected that it was not a shift to ‘clean, non-kitchen sink plays’:

This was adulterous, sacrilegious and lushly immoral with that delightful, cruel Inspector being so bad and reaping all the rewards. Somebody surely will complain – not that I am. (ibid.)

While a Priest called the material ‘ghastly’, this above Housewife’s response seems the more telling of a certain quiet majority of appreciative Wednesday Play viewers. The acting of McCarthy and Davenport was admired, the latter as a ‘gem’ of a portrayal.

The crypto-fascist Davenport enacts is revealed in all their petty abuse of power and utterly lack of any sense of being unaccountable to anyone. Yep, Clive Exton’s flawed oddity The Boneyard is a play for 2026 and all that, while also being impossible to imagine being unleashed today on TV or via streaming services.

I personally would advocate for this play to be restored, remastered and released as part of a Wednesday Play box set anthologising its first year. It is crying out to be seen properly in a pristine, non-timecoded version. In line with the BFI’s three Play for Today sets, I propose these seven:

N.b. I am leaving out the six Wednesday Plays from 1965 previously released on DVD in the UK: Three Clear Sundays, Up the Junction, The End of Arthur’s Marriage, Alice (I think included on a release of Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, 1966, am I right?) and the two Nigel Barton plays.

1: The Boneyard (1964/66).

2: A Tap on the Shoulder (1965)

3: Fable (1965)

4: Horror of Darkness (1965)

5: Moving On (1965)

6: And Did Those Feet? (1965)

7: The Coming Out Party (1965)

Of course, I’d also really rather like A Crack in the Ice, In Camera, The July Plot and The Big Breaker among the late 1964 plays… And The Interior Decorator (1965) for another Jane Arden fix! Alan Seymour’s neglected pair Auto-Stop (1965) and The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (1965) would also be great, as would The Bond (1965) and Tomorrow, Just You Wait (1965).

But, these are the major ones we need first: all those by the key writers John Hopkins, James O’Connor, David Mercer and Clive Exton. It’s such a shame neither of Julia Jones’s 1965 Wednesday Plays exist.

Anyway, that’s it, for now. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please get in touch!

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.🙂

— With thanks to John Williams, as ever, for providing the copious press cuttings. Thanks also go to Simon Farquhar for identifying an oversight: the original version of this text had missed key facts about how the play changed between 1964 and 1966. I’m also grateful to Oliver Wake for clarifying the recording dates.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:11: ‘The Coming Out Party’ (BBC1, 22 December 1965)

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

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

03.11: The Coming Out Party (BBC One, Wednesday 22 December 1965) 9:05 – 10:10pm
Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Jimmy O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Michael Wield; Music by Stanley Myers; Nemone Lethbridge (lyrics)

Story of a little boy’s search at Christmas (Daily Mail, 22 December 1965, p. 10).

TWELVE months and thirty-five plays ago, James MacTaggart, Roger Smith, Ken Trodd, and myself began one of the most exciting years of our lives. The freedom of the screen was ours and we were determined to use that freedom. We were bored with the conventional ways of making plays – and wanted to give a number of new writers, who had something to say about the world, a chance to say it without pulling any punches or going soft. But above all we wanted to try to entertain and stimulate a large audience (Tony Garnett, Radio Times, 16 December 1965, p. 33).

Criminals are still being manufactured by the social conditions in this country. The police become the natural enemy as do the dreary streets and the bad housing. It happened to me a long time ago, it’s still happening and it happens in my play (James O’Connor, quoted in The Kensington News & West London Times, 24 December 1965, p. 1).

Play for Today and its predecessor The Wednesday Play have an image of being “worthy” and even moralising, which is invariably totally wide of the mark. If anything, most writers and directors of this long-term project were careful to avoid moral judgements of individual people, though social environments and economic systems would often be scrutinised via a critical lens. Echoing Charles Dickens’s popular closeness to the people that Arnold Kettle observed (see David Craig ed., Marxists and Literature, London: Pelican, 1975), Tony Garnett, reflecting on the strand’s first year, told viewers: ‘You have usually been a lively audience – at times even a stormy one. But always encouragingly large’ (Garnett op. cit.).

Thus, James O’Connor’s The Coming Out Party is an entirely apt conclusion to a remarkable year, ending where The Wednesday Play began with an O’Connor play. The strand had thoroughly inherited Armchair Theatre’s mantle, enabled largely by the ABC strand’s former producer and now BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman and its own producer James MacTaggart. O’Connor’s play is a typically entertaining and revealing depiction of ‘rough’ working-class London life totally anathema to a certain section of Mail reading middle-class viewers, and perhaps also to “respectable” working-class viewers, but which clearly struck a chord more widely. This play is another which, like Hopkins’s, Mercer’s, Dunn’s and Potter’s work, was at the forefront in portraying new visions of Britain, a nation changing fast. Its twin approaches – a neo-realist fable-like quality and a populist joie de vivre – come across in Garnett’s summary:

It is almost Christmas, and a little boy begins a search – a sad search which leads him into trouble. But on the way there is a glorious knees-up comedy which should put us all in a Christmas spirit (op. cit.).

The Observer noted how Three Clear Sundays (1965) ‘broke viewing records’, and that The Coming Out Party ‘may do the same’ and that ‘Three more [O’Connor plays?] have been commissioned’ (19 December 1965, p. 19). Interviewing O’Connor, he emphasises how little he knew the Arts when he was in Dartmoor prison: “I’d never heard of Shakespeare – he could have been a horse”, and took a drama course by post from Ruskin College, Oxford and a job in the prison library (ibid.). Once out of what in this play is termed “Chokey”, O’Connor freelanced as a journalist, wrote some short stories and ‘did some “ghosting”‘; by 1965, he apparently lived in Bayswater, ‘in a large, opulently decorated flat, previously occupied by BBC chief Huw Wheldon’ (ibid.). O’Connor stated his two vices were drink and Greece, having a villa on Mykonos which was good for working; he is said to be ‘busy with the film script of the Great Train Robbery’ for, Garnett claimed, ‘a major Hollywood company’ (ibid.; op. cit.). The Shropshire Star noted that he was ‘building up a strong reputation’, and this play was ‘Set in the lively mix-up of London life that abounds on the slopes of Notting Hill’ (22 December 1965, p. 7).

A ‘warm-hearted comedy’ was trailed, featuring 12 year-old Dennis Golding (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 22 December 1965, p. 2), who ‘has never been in front of a camera before (Daily Record, 22 December 1965, p. 12). In a substantial Daily Mirror article by Clifford Davis about the play, it is termed a ‘crime play’, while Golding is said to be 13 and ‘son of an electrician’, part of a family of thirteen who live in Notting Hill (22 December 1965, p. 12). His character Scimpy was said to turn ‘shoplifter in the hope that he can join his parents in prison’ (ibid.). Apparently, O’Connor heard about Golding at a party and was so impressed by his acting potential that he took him to BBC TV Centre and Ken Loach auditioned him; O’Connor recalls he was such a natural that he ‘was reminding the rest of the cast of their lines’ (ibid.). O’Connor recalled his own shoplifting as a child, and it was noted how his wife Nemone Lethbridge gave up her legal career and wrote lyrics for the songs in this production (ibid.). There isn’t yet any sense of the challenge to O’Connor’s conviction for murder as a miscarriage of justice, as featured in a recent BBC Radio podcast here.

The O’Dells in one of their rare meetings!

The Christmas setting was often emphasised in previews, as was its Notting Dale – or Notting Hill Gate – London, setting, where author James O’Connor ‘was born and where he still lives’ (Peterborough Evening Post, 22 December 1965, p. 2).

In a happy pre-echo of the recent Channel 5 announcement in December 2025 of more new Plays for Today to come in 2026, the Radio Times emphasised in italics that ‘Another season of Wednesday Plays, produced by Peter Luke, will begin in the New Year‘ (op. cit.).

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

The socially extensive slice-of-life play with an inconclusive conclusion is open-ended and that’s the point: that’s life, for most of us. The Coming Out Party is a fine example of this, depicting social behavioural cycles: recidivism, interlinked with disorderly, hedonistic behaviour. If this was the Bullingdon Club acting like this, it would have been socially permissible. As with A Tap on the Shoulder, there’s a sense that O’Connor is gleefully sending up “straight” values when the supposed “betters” within the societal hierarchy are disregarding any ethical rules in order to get, and remain, ahead. Alan Bleasdale later picked up the same thread in The Muscle Market (1981) and Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), in a more brutal era as Thatcher’s restoration kicked in, when survival humour became essential.

This play is interesting in how much it holds up the central married couple Rosie (Toni Palmer) and Ricketts (George Sewell) to be, if not celebrated, then certainly understood and empathised with. This is a bold move, given how easily their behaviour would have been perceived as ‘feckless’, say, or irresponsible by a large number of viewers. Indeed, there is a moral voice in your head when watching this which questions their behaviour, and O’Connor’s play is wise enough to depict how the boy Scimpy O’Dell (Dennis Golding) is headed himself towards just the same life of petty crime and limited horizons.

Conversely, the vigour of the portrayal of the community life around the pub is shown to be justification enough in itself for these cycles of behaviour. Prison doesn’t seem unduly onerous, and Ricketts tellingly says he isn’t worried about his son, as the “welfare” will provide for him. Yet the authorities – in the person of a young bouffant-haired implied bluestocking bureaucrat, or social worker – are intent on saving money and perhaps wisely want him in the custody of the family elders, as the least worst option.

The social worker

The Princess (Carol White) adds to this, noting that if Scrimpy gets sent to Borstal he will become ever more hardened. Sadly, his path now seems inexorably set.

The play feels like it is goading the moralists of right and left, with its brazenly amoral standpoint, and this is a strength and a limitation. While the tone is drastically different, there’s something of the scenario of a runaway child at large in London we see in William Trevor’s Play for Today Eleanor (1974). Barrie Keeffe’s Nipper (1977) is an altogether darker, more mordant imagining of this scenario, more directly indicting negligent parenting, and exploring many specific effects on the teenager, in a starkly melodramatic and maximalist manner.

While O’Connor’s play feels a touch more slight than these, and indeed for coming right after the Nigel Barton plays, the choral (and occasionally more modern sounding) music from Stanley Myers, with Nemone Lethbridge’s playground chant or carol-ljke lyrics, provides a unique choric element similar to that in Three Clear Sundays. This adds a kind of folkloric, anthropological feel, influenced by Iona and Peter Opie, to the already heady wry comedy of the narrative. For me, this is a somewhat more successful play, overall, than The End of Arthur’s Marriage (1965), as it enables a reading against the grain of O’Connor’s intent: ambivalently conveying how transitory hedonistic joy bound up with cyclical lives of crime and the ‘almost suffocating warmth’ of its particular working-class environment, to quote Dennis Potter.

Best performance: DENNIS GOLDING

Children smoking scene anticipates Nipper (1977)

Rita Webb, George Tovey, Wally Patch and the rest of the O’Connor/Loach repertory lot do a good job again in conveying an overpowering, loud hubbub of London, or even London Irish voices. The community itself is the formidable stuff of this play, so it seems almost perverse to try to single out an individual ‘best’ performance!

Webb, Toni Palmer, Hilda Barry, Carol White and Fanny Carby are a gallery of lively, varied women. George Sewell, following his memorable appearance in Up the Junction, has a kind of strangely crooked earnestness here, like a photocopy of the Tallyman’s acted persona to the punters in Dunn’s plays. Whether bursting into song in the boozer, enjoying a very brief sexual intimacy again with his wife, or musing on how he will definitely be going ‘straight’ and into the haulage industry, it’s a finely grained performance from an actor who feels like a ‘tache-less variant upon James Beck’s spiv Walker in Dad’s Army, enjoying life in Sixties London. Sewell was to play another right wrong ‘un of a father in Joyce Neary’s excellent, overlooked Play for Today Taking Leave (1974), a play in which his domestic wrongs and defenestration are given great emphasis!

Ultimately, it does have to be Dennis Golding, for a brilliantly subtle and plaintive performance, having the sort of reined in understatement Play for Today would often elicit from child actors.

Best line: “It’s just that, y’ know, all these people around him. Y’ know, it’s there from the beginning, innit? He doesn’t ask to be brought into this world. From the moment he’s speaking, what is he here?” (The Princess to Policeman about Scimpy)

Audience size: 10.69 million

The TAM Top 20 incorporated The Coming Out Party in joint nineteenth place, with 4.8 million households viewing: roughly equivalent to 10.56 million individual viewers, indicating little gulf at all between the two audience measurement systems (Television Today, 6 January 1966, p. 18). It didn’t appear in any of the regional Top Tens listed (ibid.).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 64.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (New Release [Arts magazine] / Vintage Years of Hollywood: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch [1934 film]), ITV (News / Hope & Keen [comedy series] / World Tonight Special: Peace on Earth – Vietnam)

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 28.6%

Reception: O’Connor’s play elicited a reasonably warm reception from most critics who assessed it, though not that many did! There was some interesting divergence of opinion which showed contesting visions of what The Wednesday Play should be. Viewers watched in their droves and there was a broad positivity in their reaction to the play, expressed – as ever – via an admiration for its realism.

Critic Peter Black felt O’Connor’s gifts ‘for sardonic comedy are being sadly pulled back by this compulsion to put across a false and sentimental philosophy’ (Daily Mail, 23 December 1965, p.3). He mused sceptically on ‘a pub stuffed with kindly crooks and Rita Webb’, termed Scimpy’s grandmother [played by Hilda Barry] ‘a kindly old fence’ (?!) and O’Connor’s ‘continuing thesis’ being ‘that honest folk are no more honest than crooks’ (ibid.). Black was dismayed to find himself agreeing with Mary Whitehouse, whom he termed ‘Big Sister’:

Big Sister will probably claim that its effect will be to encourage viewers to go out shoplifting and boozing. While I can’t agree that it could possibly influence any but imbeciles, I am exasperated to have to admit that it doesn’t do any good. (ibid.)

Lyn Lockwood found the play to be from the ‘same school of drama as that slice of life’, Up the Junction, also analogising it to a modern version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, ‘with strong undertones here and there of Damon Runyon’ (Daily Telegraph, 23 December 1965, p. 11). Lockwood noted how Scimpy was well on his way to ‘keeping the family tradition going’, being likely to end up ‘in the “nick”‘ himself (ibid.). She appreciated Ken Loach’s camerawork and ‘careful casting’ for giving the play ‘an unrehearsed look’, but distrusted O’Connor’s observation ‘through a glass sentimentally just on closing time’ – though did like Dennis Golding’s ‘present-day Tiny Tim’, Scimpy (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris noted the strand’s title sequence with ‘shots symbolising the vaunted up-to-the-minute qualities to be expected to follow’ and how Ken Loach was ‘the way-out wiz-kid if the documentary approach and the hand-held camera’ (Television Today, 30 December 1965, p. 10). Norris felt the play was as ‘sugary and sentimental as Little Lord Fauntleroy, nothing like as brutally realistic as East Lynne, with a band of crooks as lovably harmless as Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves’ (ibid.). She did enjoy it ‘all right’, finding it fun, but claimed it did not expose anything, stating she would give a ‘horse laugh’ to anyone claiming it ‘in any way posed a serious problem of the present day’ (ibid.).

As with some other critics, Norris noted the aesthetic appeal of Loach’s approach, but beneath this, felt it hard to believe in the characters’ ‘existence outside a musical comedy’ (ibid.). Thus, Norris liked its ‘vitality’, but felt it as ‘limp as a string of sausages […] as a play of social conscience’ – tellingly indicating this was now a core expectation of The Wednesday Play (ibid.). She mused that two ‘seemingly very real welfare officers discussed the boy with every sign of embarrassed awareness of the camera’, feeling most interest was aroused by Wally Patch, Alistair [sic] Williamson, Tommy Godfrey, Rita Webb, Dickie Owen, Fanny Carby, Toni Palmer and Alec Coleman, among the cast (ibid.).

Toni Palmer and Fanny Carby

She ended on Golding’s ‘natural talent’ and prophetically – with Kes (1969) on the horizon – about how Kenneth Loach ‘achieves wonders with juveniles’ (ibid.).

R.G.G. Price gave a bald, short review which seemed to synthesise many of the others’ points: ‘I also remember enjoying the acting’, in ‘a slightly sentimental piece about the inevitability of delinquency for the son of two rather jolly crooks’ (Punch, 5 January 1966, p. 28).

Outside London, N.B. loved the heightened aesthetic added to the neo-realism of the scenes of Scimpy on the streets: ‘He went in a quest. The magical freshness even of that world, through Scimpy’s eyes, was excellently conveyed. The voices of London schoolchildren singing carols were used to great element’ (Leicester Mercury, 23 December 1965, p. 14). They noted Golding’s natural performance and Cockney accent and ‘solemn courteous manner of speaking well observed’ by O’Connor, Big Al’s ‘patriarchal authority’ and Toni Palmer for giving Rosie ‘the right mixture of warmth, rumbustiousness and irresponsibility’ (ibid.). They also liked Inspector Brisby’s ‘fatherly, kind’ qualities as portrayed by Alister Williamson, and Loach’s smooth direction for making it a ‘good entertainment’ (ibid.).

W.D.A. admired how ‘The two strands of pathos and gusto were skilfully interwoven to make a memorable drama’ (Liverpool Echo, 23 December 1965, p. 2). In a very tellingly nuanced reading of an ultimately pleasurable text, they felt that despite the author’s ‘first-hand knowledge’, the play’s ‘hearts-of-gold image of the underworld seemed rather over-sentimentalised. But when a play is like a breath of fresh air you can forgive it much’ (ibid.).

Peggie Phillips was notably admiring of O’Connor’s play’s depths, perhaps especially in the context of the Christmas TV schedules offering a ‘diet of glossy idiocy’, including Ken Dodd making ‘stomach-turning gags like the corn-and-bunion gambit when our stomachs are seasonably queasy’ and the ‘not all that good’ Bruce Forsyth (The Scotsman, 27 December 1965, p. 7). Phillips felt The Coming Out Party had the ‘realism’ of Up the Junction in its ‘near documentary treatment of settings and characters’ and she regarded it as containing more ‘valuable social comment’ than Nell Dunn’s play. Phillips interpreted the play as reflecting ‘upon the plight of small children in the care of loving but feckless and criminal parents’ who are prone to a ‘maddening uselessness and egotism’ (ibid.).

Phillips was the only critic to note the ‘menacing aspect to the boy of the final lorry-hopping sequence’ (which also contains an irony in terms of Ricketts’s vague work aspirations) (ibid.). While I feel Phillips’s reading is slightly wish-fulfilment, texts are open to different meanings and clearly many will understandably react with concern as she did, and she reflects on the play’s ‘humanity, insight and wry humour’ (ibid.). I would say there is more of this than in Logue, Myers and Loach’s musical a month earlier. Phillips acclaimed Golding’s ‘natural brightness and innocence’ and how Palmer and Sewell ‘struck exactly the right note of affection and irresponsibility’ (ibid.). She added, in what must be an archetypal response to The Wednesday Play welcome to its makers:

This was a play to make social workers of us all [my emphasis] (ibid.).

A very large audience, clearly drawn to O’Connor’s work for its authentic autobiographical and entertaining elements, enjoyed it, by and large. An RI of 64 continued the appreciative responses following Potter’s Barton plays, with the majority enjoying its ‘mixture of ‘down-to-earth’ humour and pathos’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/715). Its truthfulness was commended, as was how it made ‘its point without moralizing’, featuring ‘real people with the right dialogue to match’ (ibid.). According with Peggie Phillips and my own readings, this human story left one thinking about it ‘long after seeing it; it had both a sad and a humorous touch without being morbid’ (ibid.).

While a few found it ‘too sordid, vulgar and unpleasant’, more accepted this is ‘part of the play’s veracity’, giving the viewer ‘plenty of insight into the behaviour of such people’ (ibid.). The moralistic minority rejected the play as not being their personal idea of ‘entertainment’; others complaining of dialogue in the noisy pub scenes being drowned out (ibid.). An especially virulent comment saw O’Connor’s play as ‘another load of muck which adds to the ego of this type of individual’, inflicted upon viewers like them (ibid.). However, nobody complained about the production itself and Dennis Golding was frequently regarded as ‘outstanding’ as Scimpy, among an ‘excellent’ cast who acted incredibly naturally (ibid.). If anything, the blending of the 16mm filmed inserts of street scenes and studio interiors was felt to be superior and more ‘authentic’ than Up the Junction, with no comments recorded about disjointed visuals or jarring shifts; this was seen as ‘completely ‘life-like” (ibid.).

A sole, touching news story emerged from this play: ‘TV-BOY GIVEN A GO-KART’ (The Kensington News & West London Times, op. cit.). In it, Golding from Barlby Road, North Kensington, was said to have ‘had a big Christmas surprise’, when writer Jimmy O’Connor called at his home and took him by taxi to Harrods store in Knightsbridge (ibid.). There he bought 4 ft. 4 ins. tall Dennis a £20 go-kart as a present to thank him for his ‘star performance’ in the play’; apparently, the writer saw him eagerly looking at the go-kart while filming and the ‘cast chipped in’ to buy it, keeping it a secret (ibid.). The article noted other local residents involved in the play: Rita Webb of Chepstow Road, and three other Notting Hill boys – Roy Thomas, Ted Peel and John Formosa – who were all also given gift vouchers (ibid.).

Overall, The Coming Out Party is another welcome shock of the new, which we can look back on from a distance as signifying a nation loosening up and viewers becoming more acquainted with, and aware of, the diverse types of people who lived in society. It signalled the tension in The Wednesday Play between earthy entertainment and social conscience, but also how these facets simply weren’t mutually exclusive. If you take the views expressed by Marjorie Norris, Peggie Phillips and the viewers together, you can observe how O’Connor’s play was generating very different thoughts and feelings. The dial had already been shifted by others among the 35 we’ve covered in 1965. Therefore, this one went without excessive controversy; despite what Black said, Whitehouse did not complain about it – or at least, the press did not disseminate her bleating. It marked how this sort of challenging, yet accessible, human drama was now established in prime time and could even run to a Christmas theme, while not sacrificing the strand’s trademark edge.

This sort of thing would be a fixture on BBC TV for the next two decades. Sentimental? Sometimes, but not in a dreary or obvious way. Socially extensive, in the way that Raymond Williams claimed drama was becoming more inclusively democratic? Invariably. This play is an implicit sardonic corrective to the conservative establishment’s obsession with privileged debutante balls, sometimes indeed known as ‘coming-out parties’.

This 1965 run has been remarkably diverse in terms of age and class, with women figuring better in the autumn and winter than before. While, regionally, it’s not quite as diverse as Play for Today would get due to Rose, Trodd, Maclaren, Zeiger and Parr, and London (and at times Oxford) dominates, what a marvellous range of London people we see…

Road safety poster at the cop shop subtly prefigures Scimpy getting on board the lorry…!

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

— Many, many thanks again to John Williams for supplying the press cuttings which have made these posts’ scope possible.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:10: ‘Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton’ (BBC1, 15 December 1965)

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.

03.10: Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (BBC One, Wednesday 15 December 1965) 9:45 – 11:05pm
Directed by Gareth Davies; Written by Dennis Potter; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editors: Rogert Smith and Tony Garnett; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram; Music by Ronnie Hazlehurst

Have you ever seen a party political broadcast that was even remotely honest? (Anne Barton)

It has long been recognised by politicians that undiscriminating cynicism about politicians is not in the public interest and leads to fascism. It may have been an unjust fear/suspicion this play would be thought cynical that delayed its production (Frederick Laws, see later citation)

Stand up Messrs McTaggert [sic], Smith, Trodd and Garnett and take a bow. (Michael Unger, see later citation)

The context of this play, set in the fictional West Barsetshire constituency, centring on the town of Barset, began well in advance of December 1965, and indeed Stand Up, Nigel Barton, covered here last week. Dennis Potter’s play, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton was commissioned – along with The Confidence Course – in July 1964, while still a TV critic and prospective Labour candidate for East Hertfordshire (Hertfordshire Mercury, 24 July 1964, p. 6). Exterior sequences were shot in Horsham (for market town atmosphere), Broadbridge Heath (for the council house estate) and actor Donald Hewlett’s home at Farthing Hill for fields, horses and riders, with the frontage of the Les Abbey getting office in the Carfax also used (West Sussex County Times, 23 April 1965, p. 6). This detailed article conveyed how the location shoot took four days and will ‘occupy no more than 10 minutes in the play’ (ibid.).

The studio sequences were shot on 12-14 April, while as W. Stephen Gilbert details, the budget ballooned to £13,611: a very high figure, which subsumed the budget for a whole other Wednesday Play slot (Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter. London: Sceptre, 1995, pp. 116, 119).

The anonymous Radio Times preview noted this was in ‘the world of politics’, but not Westminster, and the novelty of the play’s subject matter being dealt with in a comedy, and Potter’s use of his own experience (17 June 1965, p. 35). It previewed the narrative structure:

And as the dreary days pass, his will to do what every politician has to do gets weaker and weaker until he does what no politician can ever afford to do. (ibid.)

While the play had originally been mooted for a 6 May screening, it became fixed as 23 June instead. Potter was interviewed, noting how ‘People look on a candidate as roughly equivalent to a door-to-door salesman’ (The Gloucestershire Citizen, 19 June 1965, p. 7). The Peterborough Evening Telegraph trailed a ‘breezy farce’ (19 June 1965, page unclear); similarly, the Sunday Post previewed it as a *** / ***** proposition: ‘Potty politics! This is a farce about intrigues in rural elections’ (20 June 1965, p. 12).

Reports circulated that it had been taken off air ‘about three and a half hours before it was due to be shown’, with an existing play Colin Morris’s well-regarded With Love and Tears repeated in its place (The Birmingham Post, 24 June 1965, p. 1). The Daily Express reported that ‘the buzz at Broadcasting House was that the play’s theme of intrigue in rural politics might give offence to politicians’, and that Harold Wilson and Alec Douglas-Home were referred to in the play; while Potter was quoted as ‘very disappointed, but not surprised’ (24 June 1965, p. 7).

The Daily Mail reported that ‘three members of the script staff’ working on The Wednesday Play resigned in protest on 24 June at the decision to note show Potter’s play, but that they had withdrawn their resignations the same day after meeting Sydney Newman. Newman is quoted:

We fight all the time on a series like this. This squabble was of a serious kind. We aired the whole problem and an understanding has been reached. (25 June 1965, p. 9)

The Daily Mirror emphasised how in the script, Anne Barton ‘sneers: “What is your brave new society all about ? Harold being buddy-buddy with Lyndon Johnson, Polaris on the never-never”‘, also citing agent Jack’s dig at Sir Alec Douglas-Home (25 June 1965, p. 11).

For much of the play, Anne is more caustic than Nigel!

The Observer noted how producer James MacTaggart’s ‘jocular remark’ to Head of Plays Michael Bakewell that the play “had a go” at politicians led Bakewell to warn Newman, who, having recently made ‘soothing noise’ to Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV Campaign was alarmed and called in Head of Current Affairs, Paul Fox (27 June 1965, p. 18). Fox is said to have taken ‘the line that politicians should not be mocked and that the play was too accurate’! : a claim the newspaper mocked in the light of DG Greene’s recent claim that the BBC wanted to “talk about life as it really is”‘ (ibid.). Huw Wheldon was then called in, who congratulated Newman’s intervention, while Director of TV Kenneth Adam made the final call to order the play off (ibid.). The article further claimed that Potter was placated by Newman and told not to speak to the press, with a statement being put out blaming the withdrawal on unspecified production troubles, while story editor Roger Smith and his two assistants Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd handed in their resignations, which Newman refused to accept and were later withdrawn (ibid.).

While it was clearly something of a random case of bad luck or perfect storm timing, it’s hard not to feel that the postponement did a lot to increase Potter’s profile, already growing through his two books, journalism and other 1965 Wednesday Plays. The cause celebre element increased with Lord Ted Willis and Eric Paice of the Screenwriters’ Guild attacking the BBC’s ‘political censorship’, while Newman had drawn up a list of changes he wanted Potter to make (Daily Mail, 29 June 1965, p. 3). Potter’s prolific TV dramaturgy was to continue unabated, with Message for Posterity‘s commissioning for BBC Two confirmed (29 June 1965, p. 20).

Labour MP and future Arts minister Hugh Jenkins felt the BBC had ‘erred on the side of over-caution’ by taking off the play a few hours before it was due to be shown (Daily Telegraph, 1 July 1965, p. 27). Jenkins claimed: ‘The Director General should be told by the House that the BBC is perfectly at liberty to criticise us’ (Television Today, 8 July 1965, p. 9). John Woodforde claimed that the play had been taken off due to ‘the activities of campaigners’ (Sunday Telegraph, 4 July 1965, p. 11). Huw Wheldon, Controller of Programmes, flatly contradicted Woodforde, claiming Newman had watched it at the request of MacTaggart and had ‘decided it was not ready for transmission’, which Wheldon himself agreed with and ‘confirmed decision’: asserting there was no pressure whatsoever from ‘any source at all, other than Newman’s professional judgment and mine’ (Sunday Telegraph, 11 July 1965, p. 11).

The play was announced as given the go ahead after changes which purely involved Nigel and his agent Jack, ‘but 30 minutes of new dialogue have been recorded’, while Stand Up was announced too as Don’t Go Back, with its planned scheduling before Vote, Vote, Vote now clear (22 July 1965, p. 18).

The Stage‘s Light Entertainment column noted how Fred Berman, actor and toastmaster was ‘back in circulation’ following two months in hospital and would soon be seen as a toastmaster in Vote, Vote, Vote as well as in the new Frank Ifield film (18 November 1965, p. 3). The specific days the two plays were to be scheduled was clarified in the Birmingham Post (29 November 1965, p. 7).

The Sunday Post gave it a four-star rating (five was the maximum score, obtained by Play of the Month, The Joel Brand Story), trailing how Nigel’s ‘nerve cracks at a Council dinner and he causes a national scandal’ (12 December 1965, p. 12). The Daily Telegraph revealed that there had been three cuts to last week’s Stand Up: two references to sex and a different four-letter word to the one used by Kenneth Tynan that a comedian in the working men’s club used (13 December 1965, p. 17). Norman Hare reflected how even in the ‘course of about 30 seconds’ during Vote, Vote, Vote‘s trailer, there were ‘three different expressions that I doubt are ever heard in the Greene household – except, of course, from the TV set’ (ibid.). Manchester Evening News and Chronicle termed the play an ‘ironic farce about rural politics’ (15 December 1965, p. 2).

The Daily Record claimed the play was depicting ‘an important by-election’; while it isn’t as the result is never in doubt, and indeed we don’t even need to see the result, unlike in David Edgar’s Destiny (1978), its usage in this play has much symbolic significance, one of which being the unrepresentative nature of the First Past the Post system, with all such “safe” seats having a tranche of voters who will basically never have their views represented (15 December 1965, p. 18). Another preview mentioned Anne as Nigel’s ‘beautiful, well-bred wife’ and Nigel having established a career as a journalist, echoing Potter’s own post-university trajectory (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 15 December 1965, p. 3).

This time in the Radio Times, Tony Garnett introduced the play, reminding readers of Stand Up and quoting party agent Jack Hay’s wry lines about Barton being ‘A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one’ (9 December 1965, p. 41). The article had the same picture of Barton confronting the Tory candidate at the civic dinner as had appeared in the June edition. Garnett notes how Barton may be ‘a mere three weeks away from the comfortably padded benches of the Best Club in the World’, but that he ‘finds himself on every front page in a way he certainly had not planned’ (ibid.). The story editor also revealed this play ‘completes – for the time being at least – the vivid story of Nigel Barton, miner’s son, on the slippery ladder of success’ (ibid.).

Before my own review of the play… Potter expert Professor John Cook writes:

While Stand Up, Nigel Barton may have been the more sophisticated play structurally, it was the earlier-written but later-transmitted Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton that gained Potter the most decisive plaudits, winning him the Society for Film and Television Arts and the Screenwriters’ Guild awards for best TV play of 1965.

Certainly, there is a ‘zip’ to Vote, Vote, Vote which may be partly ascribed to the energy of the direction by Gareth Davies and to the performances (Keith Barron as Barton and
John Bailey as election agent Jack Hay are particular stand-outs). Yet it is also in the
way Potter, as writer, treats the audience as intelligent. Via the various conversations
and interactions of the main characters throughout the electoral campaign, the play
dramatises debates and tensions between idealism and pragmatism in party politics,
where there are no easy answers and where all sides may have something of a point.

It was a brilliant conceit by Potter to make Nigel’s election agent, Hay, the deeply cynical narrator. This distances us from the main character, Barton, providing us with a space and opportunity to judge him, while at the same time drawing the audience in as insider confidants and to a certain extent, accomplices with Hay. It is an extension of the cynical voice-over narrator Potter used in his immediate predecessor TV play (in terms of date of composition) The Confidence Course. This time, however, the narrator
is embodied and on-camera.

As an avid viewer of TV plus newspaper TV critic, Potter well understood that individuals who meet the camera’s gaze on television wield considerable authority and power – which is why, conventionally, the privilege of addressing the audience directly via TV tends to be reserved for newsreaders, reporters and presenters; the Royal Family and their Christmas messages, or politicians speaking to voters directly in party political broadcasts (PPBs). Potter later wrote his narrator device was intended to be a savage  parody of a PPB and could not believe his good fortune, when, on the night of the play’s eventual transmission, Vote, Vote, Vote was preceded by such a broadcast from then Conservative Party leader Edward Heath! On discovering this, Potter apparently spent some time on the telephone trying to persuade the BBC to go straight from Heath to the play itself with no intervening trails or title credits – but to no avail.[1]

The use of a cynical political operative as narrator continues to make the play feel very
modern to us today, not least because Potter’s device in Vote, Vote, Vote would later influence Andrew Davies’ acclaimed 1990 BBC TV adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ novel, House of Cards, through the cynical to-camera asides of Tory party schemer Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson). Twenty years later, this would be successfully retranslated into a US context for the hit series of the same name for Netflix (2013-2018) via the persona of Washington DC political operator, Frank Underwood, played by a pre-scandal Kevin Spacey.

Vote, Vote, Vote has other contemporary resonances too. The 1965 production captures well the growing disillusionment, sixty years ago, of sections of the progressive British Left with the then new Labour Government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson which had gained power at the October 1964 General Election with only the slimmest of majorities, following thirteen long years of Conservative rule. As Nigel’s ‘Hampstead socialist’ wife, Anne (Valerie Gearon), expresses her visceral disappointment to Nigel in Vote, Vote, Vote: ‘Labour colonial secretaries hobnobbing with corrupt old sheikhs. Labour defence secretaries paying for Polaris on the never never. Harold being buddy-buddy with Lyndon [US President Lyndon Johnson]… That’s your “signpost for the Sixties”’.

Rewatching the play in 2025 is to be struck by some of the similarities and parallels with the current UK political situation: not least, hopes and expectations following the election of a Labour Government after many years of Conservative rule quickly coming to be replaced with disappointment that nothing seems to have changed very much. There are other uncomfortable resonances too – when Nigel goes canvassing with his agent on the doorsteps and is asked by one woman what he is ‘going to do about the blacks’, we have disturbing echoes and parallels with the waves of anti-immigration
feeling circulating around certain quarters of UK society today. At one point, the play splices in 1920s newsreel footage of Oswald Mosley to remind that the future leader of the British fascists was once a rising star of the Labour Party. Warnings about the dangers of ‘man of the people’ populism may have felt relatively remote, even unlikely, to viewers watching in 1965. They feel less so now.

[TM: This all also presages how Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher were able to appeal to large sections of the working-class with their talk of “Rivers of Blood” in 1968 and being “swamped by an alien culture” in 1978, respectively]

Newsreel footage of Mosley is contrasted in the play with footage of the famous charismatic Welsh Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan, seen protesting at a 1956 rally in Trafalgar Square against the Conservative Government’s handling of the Suez Crisis. Throughout the play, Bevan is held up as the very apogee of socialist idealism against which modern party politics is found to be wanting. Indeed the name of Potter’s ‘working class hero’, Nigel Barton, is a lexical, and perhaps also literal, corruption of ‘Nye Bevan’. There may be ‘a lot of good’ in Nigel as his agent tells us but even his wife Ann acknowledges there is a ‘little bit of the charlatan’ in Nigel as well. To Hay, he is ‘a splendid candidate’ for the modern electoral process: ‘The sort of bloke I’d never buy a
second-hand car from’.

Here, the play dramatises and captures well the eternal dilemma of Labour Party politics from at least since the Second World War. From Bevan to Wilson; Foot to Blair; Corbyn to Starmer, Labour, throughout its history, has frequently oscillated between purist ‘Red Flag’ commitment to founding principles – which greatly appeals to the party grass-roots but often struggles to win wider traction and ultimate power with the so-
called ‘mainstream’ UK voters (and is largely crucified by a hostile media). Or, there have been the alternative attempts to go all-out for what Jack Hay calls in the play ‘the floating voter with his house, his car and his 2.8 children’. ‘Compromise, compromise. That’s the way for you to rise’, as Anne teases Nigel at one point. But at what cost all this compromising to win power if it threatens to betray the very goals and principles which led to one wishing to stand for office in the first place?

As has been well documented, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton ran into a censorship row when it was originally planned to air in June 1965.[2] During my PhD research into Potter’s work, I had the interesting experience of asking one of those BBC management ‘censors’, former Head of BBC TV Drama Group, Sydney Newman, precisely what he objected to about the original version of Vote, Vote, Vote. Here is what he had to say:

It posed a problem for me because it was about a Labour Party candidate… I was  terribly worried about this and I had some of it modified and maybe incurred the wrath of Potter… The word ‘censor’ is lousy but if you’re running a department, you’re making judgments. You can call those judgments ‘censorship’ or you can call them judgments. My judgment was that we would get into trouble if we alienated the Labour Party… I brought that to England with me, my Canadian puritanical stuff… And of course I never had it with [Potter] directly – I had the big fight with Jimmy [MacTaggart] and Jimmy defended Potter which was good and so
did the story editor [Roger Smith] defend Potter.[3]

Within his personal creative notebooks housed in the Dennis Potter Archive, Forest of Dean (https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/dennis-potter-archive) is the original intended ending for the play that provided such a focus for many of the BBC management objections. This original ending comes after the dissolve between Anne and Jack Hay and the separate prompting of both to Nigel that in order to get on in politics, he must learn to compromise and ‘become a dutiful party hack, ha ha’:

HAY: Never mind, Nigel. Never mind. You ought to have guessed that we’ve got things all buttoned up by now. We’re very proud of our traditions in this country, old mate.

(To audience)

Oh yes. You might care to know the result of the by-election. Well, what do you think? I mean, would you vote for a candidate who went like this to his opponent?

Barton gives the two-fingered salute to Hay, who roars with laughter.

BARTON: I’ll have the last laugh anyway. (To us). Because if you object to this play,[4] folks, the only thing you can do is WRITE TO YOUR MP (voice savage) And the best of British!

While not to condone the original censorship, Potter in the end was probably better-served by the requirement to change the conclusion to the version we now have. In the revised version, Nigel’s direct address to camera; his pausing over the word ‘privilege’ and his automaton-like rehearsal of the play’s title line, all make the same point as the original ending but much less explicitly so. Keith Barron’s performance and Gareth Davies’ direction, especially the latter’s rapid intercutting between Nigel’s face and the
big, bright yet meaningless campaign poster, now carry more of the weight of the meaning compared to the original ending and this is dramatically effective. Potter would later come to agree: the revised ending was probably ‘more powerful. But because it didn’t say it in one sentence [the BBC managers] could pick on, it was let through’ for transmission.[5]

Postponing broadcast until one week after Stand Up also did Potter, ultimately, a great favour. If, as Humphrey Carpenter has stated, scheduling the play after Stand Up, Nigel Barton helped ‘subtly soften the impact of Vote, Vote, Vote, presenting it as a second chapter of Nigel’s story rather than letting it stand alone as an anti-political tract’[6]; at the same time it helped create a sort of ‘mini-series event’ of linked plays that got Potter attention and made his work stand out from the normal televisual flow. In Vote, Vote, Vote, when Nigel discusses his time at Oxford or reminisces about his coalminer father, now the audience are able to have a greater context for understanding and sympathy, based on the fact they viewed the companion play the week before. The censorship row over Vote, Vote, Vote in June of 1965 had been well covered by the British press – with Potter astutely making sure he got his side of the story in first to his colleagues in Fleet Street before BBC management had a chance to respond; a pattern he would learn from and come to repeat throughout his career. As a consequence, there was somewhat of an air of expectation and anticipation in the press by the time Vote, Vote, Vote was eventually transmitted. All of this positioned Potter very well indeed for awards season early the following year.

As the writer himself would later recall, only then, as he was sitting at the awards tables,
did he begin to think we ‘could manage. We would be able to survive’.[7] With a wife and
three young children to support (including a baby, Robert, born earlier that year in March
1965), plus coping with a serious debilitating illness (severe psoriatic arthropathy) that
made regular employment difficult, Potter had given up a promising journalistic and political career to pursue the somewhat riskier venture of trying to make a name for himself as a television playwright; reliant, always, on being able to gain regular commissions to pay the bills and survive financially. But as 1965 drew to a close, he could look back at no fewer than four of his television scripts having been produced and transmitted within the space of a single year as Wednesday Plays: two of which would later come to be nominated for awards. And more commissions were on the way.

At one of the awards ceremonies he attended in the spring of 1966, after a toast was called for the various winners and nominees, Potter raised his champagne glass: ‘”You don’t toast yourself!” hissed a very big, very powerful TV executive… “No? [Potter] thought, “That is what you bloody think !”’[8]

[1] Dennis Potter, Introduction, The Nigel Barton Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p.17.
[2] For example, see accounys in Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography, London: Faber and Faber, 1998, pp.158-164; John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, rev 2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 37-9 and notes 57-59 in Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams (eds), Dennis Potter The Art of Invective Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94, London: Oberon Books, 2015, p.337.
[3] Sydney Newman, personal interview, recorded 28 February 1990, London. Cited in Cook 1998, p.38. Indeed The Wednesday Play’s first story editor Roger Smith – Potter’s closest friend from Oxford days who had also been best man at his wedding – resigned in protest at the censorship of his friend’s script.
Though as Smith freely admitted, he had been planning to quit anyway owing to the pressure of having to find and commission so many new play scripts for The Wednesday Play. Smith would be replaced by Tony Garnett, assisted by Kenith Trodd. Over the next few years, Smith would go on his own radical political journey away from Labour party politics, attending the May 1968 riots in Paris and joining the Socialist Labour League (the forerunner of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party).
[4] ‘Play’ was later changed to ‘documentary’ in the original version of the ending that went into initial production.
[5] Dennis Potter, interview, in Paul Madden (ed.), Complete Programme Notes for a Season of British Television Drama 1959-73. Held at the National Film Theatre 11 – 24 October 1976, London: British Film Institute, 1976, p.35.
[6] Carpenter, p.164.
[7] Cited in Carpenter, p.174.
[8] Ibid., p.174.

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

In its way, this is a similarly focused play to its predecessor in broadcast terms, Stand Up, Nigel Barton. However, clearly its vaulting ambition in tackling the political system and social organisations and processes behind politics will be harder to make humanly appealing.

Potter manages it by emphasising Barton’s inner and outer battles against the pervasive cynicism and settling for small victories within the system, as represented by his agent Jack Hay (John Bailey). You gradually grow to understand and respect Jack rather more, due to the play’s depiction of voters – some are themselves cynical about all parties, one housewife meekly and blandly relays his working-class, Labour voting husband’s racist attitudes, all in the old people’s home are totally oblivious. Earlier on, a chat with agent Jack depicts him noting how the racism of many voters cost them, pointedly signifying how certain Tory candidates in 1964, like Peter Griffiths, openly espoused racism. The play admirably confronts this context and dares, rightly, to blame the voters. This scapegoating segment of them, anyway.

This, combined with Barton’s wife Anne’s development into a more Machiavellian, even Lady Macbeth-like figure, seems to signify Potter feeling a resigned accommodation with Jack’s perspective is needed. Anne’s late shift is not necessarily her reneging on her left-wing beliefs, indeed she is inspired by how fired up Barton gets at the Civic dinner even, even mimicking his v-sign to the assembled dignatories. A third play, or a series even, with Anne herself standing or being the power behind the ‘throne’, could have been highly compelling. Surely, the Bartons moving to a Labour seat would have been crucial: you can imagine them becoming urban gentrifiers in London a few years down the line.

While this play feels a tad overextended, there is effective use of newsreel footage of an anti-Suez invasion speech by Nye Bevan, and later, Oswald Mosley in the early 1930s. The play’s deep political heft is further enforced by contrasting speeches by Cyril Luckham’s Tory candidate and Keith Barron’s Labour candidate at the Civic event: deeply contrasting, showing Barton speaking from the heart to shatter the rosy and complacent – and casually nasty and exclusive – vision of Britain the Tory espouses.

Potter creates mordantly funny scenes here. The one in the old people’s home has some of the perceptively surreal edge of certain scenes in The Singing Detective (1986).

The droll opening shows none of the fox hunting people in Lincolnshire being concerned in the slightest that the sitting Tory MP Harry (same name as Nigel’s father!) has dropped dead! All are far more concerned with the horse’s well-being, several of them even laughing at his demise! A more working-class voter later expresses concern for the fox…!

Potter’s gift for barbed comedy continues in his portrayal of Nigel’s wife Anne (Valerie Gearon), a delightfully haughty leftie, from a well-to-do background who is initially even more politically purist than him, concerned with matters like alienation and speaking the leftist lexicon very naturally. We don’t hear about when, how or why they got married, but clearly socialism has been the go-between for this pair! His Midlands/Northern mining background and her bourgeois “Hampstead socialism” seems symbolic of the fairly solid alliance of groups of voters tending to go for Labour throughout the next few decades, but gradually less so from the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike on, especially, and whose descendants seem close to total estrangement today.

This play didn’t quite feel as gripping, overall, as last week’s, perhaps because not all that much happens (I know this shouldn’t necessarily matter to a Beckett fan like myself!). But then the human encounters with voters I’ve mentioned are sharply drawn and the climactic Civic event is well etched, conveying the wretched Tory complacency and then Nigel’s articulate, heartfelt challenge but which seems doomed. I’d recalled the play as despairing and succumbing to the same cynicism Jack expresses, but perhaps Anne’s excitement at Nigel’s new honesty in taking on the establishment suggests a new opportunity? Albeit one where he would have to rein in his real passions in order to get elected, first…

So, overall, I liked the rather more open-ended implications in this play than I’d recalled from my previous viewing, probably 20 years ago when the 2Entertain DVD I own was released (or maybe via a BBC Four repeat)? It’s actually suggesting the way forward may be a form of ‘entryism’ before its time, with Anne and Nigel’s anti-establishment democratic socialism predating the Militant Tendency, or the Corbynite insurgency of 2015, though the particular tactics involved may cleave closer to Jack Hay’s way of doing things, at least initially…

Best performance: VALERIE GEARON

Keith Barron is again excellent, managing to be perhaps more likeable here even, and in his set piece speech, he seems to have fully achieved a full identification anew with his father’s values, and is not letting him down anymore. While it may have been vainglorious self-sabotage, it at least allows him to feel true to himself again, and gets Anne believing in him again, after both of them have clearly been utterly despondent at his bland, glad handling persona.

John Bailey is also brilliant, emotionally keeping the lid on, masking through cynical humour, but himself from a rather tougher social background than Nigel was. There’s a touch of the self-hating charlatan Archie Rice at times, but who is perhaps doing some incremental utilitarian good, though, actually, the remoteness of Labour having any chance of ever winning this particular seat makes his calculated approach absurdly quixotic. Cyril Luckham performs a Tory blowhard exceptionally well, destroying the myth that One Nation types were always dominant in their Heath-led era. His command of political “bromides” shows why he would be such ideal casting as a key character in LWT’s excellent dystopian serial, The Guardians (ITV, 1971).

But, oh, the accolade this week has to go to Valerie Gearon, a performer new to me. I thought Potter made Anne a character with far more depth than, say, Jill Blakeney, who Vickery Turner did a valiant job in interpreting. You can fully grasp why an idealistic, intelligent man like Nigel would fall for someone like the bookish and sophisticated Anne, who is the epitome of the progressive “modish” thinking of the 1960s, but who also feels superior to the practical realities of grassroots politics. Brainy Anne has read probably as many words about politics and society as whole estates worth of people who her husband canvasses.

Valerie Gearon makes you fully believe that bookish Anne is an analytical lover of Brechtian theatre, seeing through illusions, and that she most certainly has read Dennis Marsden and Brian Jackson’s Education and the Working Class pelican tome. Gearon has a wonderful array of wry facial expressions and the sort of gently sardonic, warm and knowing voice not too far away from Barbara Flynn as Jill Swinburne in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Trilogy (ITV, 1984-88). The absurdities of politics playing out and affecting people’s lives, including Nigel’s and her own, provokes many an Anne eye-roll, while her evidently well calibrated positions on every issue makes her a formidable equal partner in the home environment. A relationship unable to contain political discussion, argument and yet overall accord isn’t really going to last!

Best line: “You are more deeply upset by a bad review for a Brecht play than a Labour by-election defeat” (Nigel to Anne)

The following from Jack may be the deepest, cutting to the core of what Potter is communicating, but the above is just so funny and helps define Anne’s character just as we are seeing Gearon’s exquisitely detailed portrayal build.

“You may despite me. But don’t blame me. ‘Cos it’s all your fault. There’s a lot of good in him, a lot of good, but you’d never vote for a Nigel Barton in a million years…” (Jack)

“Rolling Stones gather no votes”: perhaps sometimes for the best, as some of the evidence in Daniel Rachel’s new book details, though they improved in the 1980s, as another new book Justin Lewis recounts!

Audience size: 7.87 million

The Financial Times carried a TAM Top 20 ratings feature, also revealing that Heath’s PPB was seen by 3.5 million homes on BBC and 5.65 million on ITV – a rough estimate in total of 20.13 million individual viewers (30 December 1965, p. 12). That would be utterly unthinkable today: despite what Potter’s play observed, people were still clearly paying relatively high levels of attention to leading politicians. 3.8 million homes tuned into Vote, Vote, Vote, inferring an 8.36 million audience according to TAM data (ibid.).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 69.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: Easy Living), ITV (Great Temples of the World: Chartres Cathedral / Wrestling)

Significantly, the play followed a Conservative Party Political Broadcast (9.30pm)! At some point in the play, the wrestling on TV is actually mentioned! Showing ITV’s kaleidoscopic variety of tones, the previous programme was a ‘reading’ of Chartres by Sir Kenneth Clark, no less.

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed or mentioned after broadcast in London press publications consulted: 71.4%

Reception: I am going to call this as the best received Wednesday Play by press critics of any we’ve covered so far, and it was received almost as well outside London as within it. There were some especially insightful reviews from Julian Holland, Adrian Mitchell, Patrick Skene Catling and Frederick Laws, who all thought a bit more deeply about the play than the average response. Viewers were largely very positive too, and there were many of them!

Lyn Lockwood did an abrupt about-turn, praising the play’s ‘wit, spontaneity and heart’, where usually The Wednesday Play did not in her view deliver these qualities (Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 17). It was ‘hugely entertaining’, ‘all written with enormous, sometimes Rabelaisian gusto and given the performances it deserved’ by Barron and Bailey (ibid.).

Just as positively, Julian Holland noted how the play showed ‘we must be growing up’ by allowing such a play without any disclaimers or censorship (Daily Mail, 16 December 1965, p. 3). Holland grasped more than many of the critics when he claimed that Potter had a deep understanding of politicians: ‘Perhaps, he adds, they need to lie and cheat and humiliate themselves if they are to change the world’ (ibid.). Holland applauded its ‘merciless ridicule’, not just of the system, but of ‘the compromising sneering at ideals’, while citing Barton’s incisive line: “you try to be honest through the amplifier of a loudspeaker van” (ibid.). Holland liked how Potter made points, in a sledgehammer way, while being very funny: ‘his plays have an old fashioned narrative gaiety that is now rare’ (ibid.).

James Thomas loved the play’s ‘irreverent digs’, then and now always a position Tory papers find easier to publish when a Labour government is in power (Daily Express, 16 December 1965, p. 2). Thomas extolled a ‘caustic’ and ‘inspired piece which reeked of high experience and disillusion’, Bailey and Barron’s ‘Superb performances’ and ‘Bold, unusual strokes’ from director Davies, while typically closing with the comment: ‘But definitely the writer’s play’ (ibid.). In the same edition, Martin Jackson reported that BBC Governors were aiming to take a tighter ‘grip’ on programmes; this can only be seen, I’d argue, as a risible censorious approach few critics or viewers would have wanted in the case of Potter’s play (ibid., p. 7).

Mary Crozier felt this was ‘much better’ than the earlier televised Barton play, noting that Nigel still had a ‘chip’ on his shoulder, still being ‘a bore recounting his class struggle to his […] beautiful middle-class wife’ (Guardian, 16 December 1965, p. 6). Crozier especially admired the ‘sardonic reflections upon the whole process of the by-election’, and how Nigel was ‘eventually persuaded to retail rubbishy claptrap to the electors’, while the canvassing interviews ‘will remain in the memory as comic episodes of the first order’ (ibid.). Despite this high praise, she felt it wasn’t all consistently brilliant and hoped this ‘political cartoonist’ would improve (ibid.).

Mary Holland was more sceptical, finding it ‘far too obviously subjective to be convincing’ (The Observer, 19 December 1965, p. 21) – a truly bizarre argument, given Potter’s whole non-naturalistic mission and desire to get to the real through subjectivity! Yet, Holland cleaved to the critical consensus: applauding its design and direction’s ‘huge panache’ and the actors’ ‘obvious gusto’ (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell argued that ‘During 1965 dramatic electricity has leapt most often’ from The Wednesday Play, claiming most of the 35 plays had been ‘to wildly varying degrees, successful’ (Sunday Times, 19 December 1965, p. 31). Its basic policy ‘tended to work. Its story editors chased authors who were writing about 1965, but who usually had guts enough to avoid modishness’, though he felt they were likelier to have welcomed Ibsen’s Ghosts, but not Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, suggesting establishing ‘different, but equally enterprising production teams’ (ibid.). Mitchell’s panegyric continued:

But consider the achievements. David Mercer’s superlative script “… And Did Those Feet?”, Anthony Page’s direction of “Horror of Darkness”, Kenneth Loach’s work on half a dozen plays including “Wear a Very Big Hat” and the Logue/Myers musical, “The End of Arthur’s Marriage.” (ibid.)

Mitchell also noted the prominent parts James O’Connor and Dennis Potter had played. He felt the opening sequences of Vote, Vote, Vote – as when Nigel deals ‘with the holy Marxism of his wife’ – were witty, but ‘comparatively pain-free’ (ibid.). He admired the incisive shift into dramatising pain in the move from the old people’s home to the civic after-dinner scene:

It was at this point that Mr Potter unleashed his heat and his eloquence and honed the whole play down to a gleaming cutting edge. As the speech was overwhelmed by the noise of dinner guests bashing their silver cutlery on the tables in a bland prison riot, it became clear that Mr Potter is not a promiser or a tumbler. He is a genuine lightning-manufacturer. (ibid.)

Mitchell was inspired to express ‘The fervent hope that the televising of Parliament [not to happen for another 23 years?] will force the PPB to lay down its head, die and make room for more urgent, honest programmes’, implicitly situating Potter’s play alongside stage works like Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig (1963), Theatre Workshop’s Oh What A Lovely War! (1963) and Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965), and his highest valued TV programme of all, Peter Watkins’s Culloden (1964). In contrast, D.A.N. Jones had yet to see Vote, Vote, Vote, but his mentioning it when reviewing Stand Up again show its cultural centrality (New Statesman, 17 December 1965, p. 981).

Patrick Skene Catling bluntly claimed Potter was practising ‘the art of invective […] with such bitterly comic inventiveness and vehemence’ that hadn’t been even since John Osborne’s early days (Punch, 22 December 1965, p. 935). Catling accurately noted how Jimmy Porter ‘had given up’ and was ‘a mere commentator, a backward-looking one at that’, with Look Back in Anger full of a negative energy and defeatism (ibid.). In contrast, Barton finally assumes a ‘defiant dignity’ with his barnstorming, honest speech, and the play’s following Heath’s PPB gave it even greater charge: ‘the play’s attack was so comprehensive that it had a damaging effect on the credibility of political promises of every tincture’ (ibid.). In a superior review, Catling noted Gareth Davies’s ‘keen appreciation of the value of extreme close-ups on television’, utilising them for Jack’s ‘confidential asides’; he was one of very few to even mention Valerie Gearon’s fine performance, making ‘some richly literary lines sound naturally spontaneous, such as: “You make Machiavelli seem like Godfrey Winn.”‘ (ibid.). Catling then detailed a range of scenes ‘depicted with the passionate hyperbole of genuine indignation strongly felt’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws regarded Nigel as ‘a more likeable and active hero’ than in the previous week’s play and extolled Aimee Delamain’s ‘remarkable performance as an idealistic old lady who could see the sincerity behind the agent’s cynicism’, which Laws then sets in context of both Nigel and Jack’s fathers’ hardships and medical ailments and the old people’s home scene (The Listener, 23 December 1965, p. 1047). Laws felt the climactic speech ‘a bore’, but loved the follow-up scene where Anne flattered Nigel, saying his indignation was “a marvellous political weapon”, and her face merged with that of the agent’ (ibid.). Laws rightly identified how the play’s scepticism was ‘well buttered with surprise and sentiment’, and how the contrasting uses of Bevan and Mosley ‘made good points quickly’ (ibid.).

Outside the capital, D. McM. termed it a ‘contentious play, but stimulating’, critical of how Potter drew his Labour characters realistically, but made the one Tory a caricature, albeit a cunning one (Belfast Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 9). Perceptively, they noted how voters were also indicted:

Anyone who has tramped the streets as a canvasser will have recognised, with mixed feelings of amusement and frustration, the accuracy of his descriptions of doorstep interviews. (ibid.)

Argus went so far as to proclaim the current series of Wednesday Plays ‘totally magnificent’: ‘None of the plays have been conventional, stereotypes or easily acceptable’ (Daily Record, 16 December 1965, p. 15). They loved ‘every cynical second’ of Vote, Vote, Vote, with its amusingly convincing insights into party politics, Barron and Bailey’s performances, and how Barton’s line about party political broadcasts commented on Edward Heath’s preceding one! (ibid.)

N.B. praised Barron ageing cleverly as Nigel, Gearon as a ‘delightfully cool daughter of a rich Hampstead socialist’, while reflecting how those of Nigel’s generation or any who are ’embattled in the class war’ would be entertained by the play, but that it may struggle to appeal more widely (Leicester Mercury, 16 December 1965, p. 13). GTL went further in praising Barton’s speech at the Barset council dinner as ‘superb’, alongside John Bailey’s performance, acclaiming the play as being ‘as fine as anything I’ve seen in years’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 16 December 1965, p. 2).

Rodney Tyler liked a better than average episode of US drama series The Fugitive, but found the fugitive Nigel Barton ‘far better’ still (Reading Evening Post, 16 December 1965, p. 2). Tyler felt Barton ‘cracked and gave into his wife’s style of politics – Hampstead and dry Algerian sherry – only to realise that his wife did not know what she wanted either’ (ibid.). Tyler garlanded ‘one of the funniest pieces of anti-political satire that I have ever seen’, admiring Nigel’s truthful final speech that we all know our form of politics is the biggest sham going, ‘but we all take part in it and follow the rules just the same’ (ibid.).

Linda Dyson liked how Barton’s passion returned: ‘He made the speech of his life, lost his temper and probably his deposit’, and Jack’s genuflections at an earlier meeting – a very funny scene – every time Nigel mentions old age pensioners! (The Birmingham Post – Midland Magazine, 18 December 1965, p. IV). Dyson applauded how ‘Every political witticism and cynicism was packed into the script’, including Anne’s caustic remarks about party political broadcasts and Jack’s earning that if you start dragging in honesty, everybody will stay at home watching the wrestling (ibid.).

Bill Smith felt this comedy was ‘excruciatingly funny’, exposing our democratic electoral system’s ‘phoniness’, unsubtly but with ‘a clever sincerity it lifted the lid off party politics just enough to let out sufficient odour to make apathy towards political claptrap and smooth, glib-tongues and glad-handed power seekers a stand worth fighting for’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 18 December 1965, p. 9). I would say this was a misreading of Potter’s underlying position as ‘damn them all’ cynicism; it is a scathing depiction of the system, but his sympathy is clearly with the Bartons and, even, Jack to a degree. Smith thought this was ‘even more enjoyable’ than Stand Up, liking Potter’s unique voice, conveyed through Barton (ibid.).

There was even an editorial mentioning the play in a Newcastle-upon-Tyne based newspaper, which saw its significance in how it ‘sums up the nation’s developing dislike for politicians’, an ‘unhealthy state of affairs’, stemming ‘fron the non-participation of the electorate in the process of democratic government’ (17 December 1965, p. 8). Interestingly, this editorial sided with Barton’s critique of the affluent society, claiming it breeds ignorance of those struggling and ‘completely non-political [values]’ (ibid.). The article ended by claiming most politicians remain ‘honourable and deserving of our respect’, noting pithily that Nigel Barton is fictitious ‘and we would do well to remember it’ (ibid.).

There was a local press report that Lincoln MP Dick Taverne had appeared on BBC TV show Points of View, interviewed by Kenneth Robinson on reactions to Vote, Vote, Vote (Lincolnshire Echo, 18 December 1965, page unclear). Taverne is said to have liked the play but not Barton as a character as he wasn’t ‘sincere’ (did he actually watch right to the end?!) and ‘certainly did not like the image of the party agent’, while also reflecting that he himself was embarrassed about asking electors to vote for him personally (ibid.).

The audience research report showed a high RI of 64, four up on Stand Up, and comfortably above the norm for The Wednesday Play (VR/65/702). The large audience size and significant ratings win can be attributed partly to Sir Kenneth Clark’s highbrow ITV offering, though the Wrestling was also part of the mix that Potter’s play defeated! 60% gave it the highest two scores, with only 16% awarding it the lowest, with the play appealing ‘very much to a substantial majority of those reporting, who evidently regarded it as a hard-hitting and thoroughly entertaining expose of electioneering techniques’, and thought it ‘intelligent, original and highly amusing’ (ibid.).

The blend of ‘lifting the cover’ on politics with ‘humour and humanity’ made for ‘excellent entertainment’, with viewers hoping ‘the next is as good’ (ibid.). The fraction who disliked it were typically resistant to ‘bad language’, crudeness or vulgarity, or indeed that it had been ‘unpleasantly cynical’: a misinterpretation taken much more positively by several of the aforementioned critics! (ibid.). A few found it ‘tedious and wordy’, lacking in action, but generally most found the canvassing scenes and the after dinner speech ‘brilliant’ (ibid.). Viewers appreciated agent Jack’s ‘pungent asides’ to them, with one arguing the play ‘Should shake people’s faith in the so-called democratic principle – but I doubt whether it will’ (ibid.).

There was deep, wide admiration for Bailey and Barron’s performances and their ‘struggle’, with ‘a small group’ also referring ‘appreciatively to Valerie Gearon’s and several claiming the minor roles were ‘particularly well played’ (ibid.). The production was commended, with a few feeling the vintage newsreel footage out of place but others found this ‘effective’, while all interiors and exteriors were ‘considered realistic’, following the typical viewer expectations of verisimilitude (ibid.).

In the press, Mrs. E. Radcliffe, Pilgrims-way, Lenham, Kent wrote in to praise ‘the best play I have seen this year’, calling Bailey ‘superb’ and finding the Bartons’ relationship ‘so true, earthy and sometimes downright crude, but it had an impact that came over beautifully’ (Sunday Mirror, 19 December 1965, p. 22). In Glasgow’s Sunday Post, a Miss Sheila Miller was just as effusive, stating: ‘Nigel Barton was one of the best characters we’ve had on the screen for ages. Let’s have a series about him’ (19 December 1965, p. 12).

‘Let’s have a series about him’ (and Jack and Anne!)

Journalist Michael Unger commanded The Wednesday Play team, going so far as to give them an ‘Ungery for the Best Television of the Year’, saying the strand had ‘woken us up to the full capabilities of the medium’ (Reading Evening Post, 24 December 1965, p. IX). Unger listed Up the Junction, Dan, Dan, the Charity Man [wrongly printed as ‘Sam, Sam’], The End of Arthur’s Marriage, Stand Up and And Did Those Feet? (ibid.)

There was also an extensive interview published on Christmas Day (!) with producer James MacTaggart, who is said to speak in a ‘flat-vowelled Glasgow accent’ (Daily Record, 25 December 1965, p. 6). He lucidly rubbished the pearl clutching tendency of the moralistic minority:

They say that ‘the public’ won’t stand for plays that attack authority, for instance.

What they mean is that THEY won’t stand for it, because they have the ludicrous idea that authority is some sacred cow that must never be challenged. (ibid.)

In a key statement, imbued with deep credibility after plays by O’Connor, Dunn and Potter in particular, MacTaggart added:

What I find so refreshing about the current crop of playwrights is that they can represent working-class characters as real people who can suffer as much as any Shakespearian king (ibid.).

This touches on the whole nature of dramatic tragedy* being previously biased towards protagonists of high class and power: a central faultline in cultural history that the new form of TV was well equipped to challenge (*the overall subject which one of my English Tripos degree papers was concerned with, but which wasn’t entirely inclusive of screen media).

MacTaggart and his wife Ann are said to live in a house near the River Thames, to have no children, and that they would love, for sentimental reasons, to return to Scotland, but we’re remaining for practical reasons (ibid.). MacTaggart was now coming to the end of his two years as a BBC TV producer, in order to return to directing, which he declared ‘my main love’ (ibid.). Ellen Grehan’s article again stresses his major achievement as a producer, looking forward to more ‘interesting’ work from him as director (ibid.).

In The Fife Mail, an anonymous column ‘Do You Believe In Christmas ?’ recorded how Rev. John Stevenson, B.D. of St John’s Church spoke to Leven Rotarians after their Christmas lunch and styled himself as a Nigel Barton like teller of hard truths: i.e. that ‘idealistic talk about peace and goodwill and hope’ is empty talk, being simply what people want to hear, while bearing no relation to life as actually lived in homes and workplaces (29 December 1965, p. 8).

Kenneth Eastaugh looked back on 1965, which included referencing ‘veteran Northern actor’ Jack Woolgar as having given ‘one of the memorable performances of the year as Harry Barton’, also praising John Bailey as giving the best comedy performance of the year as agent Jack, with Eastaugh even feeling a 1966 series ‘featuring Mr. Bailey in this role would surely be a hit’ (Daily Mirror, 1 January 1966, p. 11). Eastaugh also singled out Potter as standing out among TV playwrights, with Vote, Vote, Vote being ‘the best BBC-1 play of the year’ (ibid.).

Two days later, L. Marsland Gander relayed Lyn Lockwood’s six best plays of 1965: three of these were Wednesday Plays, one being the conventional thriller Ashes to Ashes, the other two the more biting Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and Vote, Vote, Vote (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17). The play’s influence continued with it being quoted to open a Comment piece on the front page of the Daily Mail: which riffed on the forceful voter’s rebuke to social forces telling people they ‘ought’ to do various things (8 January 1966, p. 1).

The anti-“ought” lady elector Nigel canvasses

This piece branded Labour government ministers like James Callaghan and George Thomas as ‘Them’, telling ‘Us’ what to do in a puritanical way: the former telling people not to take holidays abroad and the latter urging folk to stop gambling (ibid.). This generally tiresome right-libertarian argument fails to acknowledge the deep harms caused by gambling addiction.

In addition to the successes John Cook and I have documented, W. Stephen Gilbert indicates the Barton plays were ‘sold abroad’ (op. cit., p. 133). Potter’s words to the Daily Mirror – the paper Barton’s parents read – reflected satisfaction with the eventual scheduling and his comments on the ending support my own idea that the play’s conclusion contains the seeds of a more optimistic third potential Barton play:

“I didn’t expect them to be screened one after the other – it’s worked out very well.”

How does Barton fare?

“We don’t know when the play ends, but I would like to think, with the aid of the speeches he makes when he becomes completely honest, he could get in.” (15 December 1965, p. 16)

It is a shame Potter never continued the Bartons’ narrative, since his work to that point was, as John Cook observed, finely balanced between idealist and pragmatist traditions, exploring that space with unusual depth, gravity and incisive humour. Had I been there at the time, I would happily have joined Sheila Miller and many others viewers in wishing for more!

In 2025, when a sizeable portion of the British electorate elevates Reform UK and the Labour government too often echoes Farage’s rhetoric and priorities, plays like this feel urgently necessary. Their intelligence and passion insist on looking past cynicism and on imagining a more demanding, generous democracy, even when the odds appear unpromising. Vote, Vote, Vote’s lesson is less about easy cynicism than about choosing one inheritance over another, and about us putting its sharpness to constructive, not corrosive, use.

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

Hit the North podcast

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

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

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

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

#001: Introduction

#001: Matthew Kelly (NORTH WEST)

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

#002: Ruth-Ann Boyle (NORTH EAST)

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

#003: Justin Lewis (WALES)

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

#004: John Howard (NORTH WEST)

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

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

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

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