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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 03:05: ‘The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne’ (BBC1, 10 November 1965)

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

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

03.05: The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (BBC One, Wednesday 10 November 1965) 9:45 – 11:00pm
Directed by Peter Duguid; Written by Alan Seymour; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Natasha Kroll; Music by Stanley Myers

An eminent former diplomat mysteriously disappears from London Airport and a massive nationwide hunt begins. In fact he has been kidnapped by a young pop impresario called Wolf. (Lincolnshire Echo, 4 November 1965, p. 10).

After the realist juggernaut of Up the Junction changed everything, The Wednesday Play’s follow-up didn’t exactly play it safe, though it is certainly accurate to say that Alan Seymour’s The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne didn’t elicit anything like the same volume of reaction. It didn’t become a news item in itself, though I think it’s a very interesting, oddball play that deserves re-examination sixty years on from its original screening.

The Lincolnshire Echo emphasised the play included a ‘rare’ television performance by film star Jack Hawkins as diplomat Sir John Rampayne, ‘a most unusual role for him’ (op. cit.). Rampayne is ‘viciously and mercilessly arraigned by Wolf and his friends for the blunders and sins of his privileged class’ (ibid.). So far, this sounds like a class/culture war narrative highly in tune with our divided 2025.

Apparently, ‘Slowly, agonisingly, Sir John is stripped of his establishment figure image and brought face to face with the past and his real self with intense dramatic results’ (ibid.). This text is clearly part of a press release as parts are quoted word for word in Television Today (4 November 1965, p. 11). Notably, though seldom commented on back then, a 26 year-old Ian McKellen played Wolf. Someone hiding behind the moniker ‘Monitor’ of the Coventry Evening Telegraph, clinging to the old world, puts the pop in pop impresario in inverted commas: “pop” (10 November 1965, p. 2).

A local angle was conveyed in the Derby Telegraph, which promoted how three former members of the Derby Playhouse Company were appearing in The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne: Penelope Lee, Alan Mason and Richard Kay (8 November 1965, p. 5). Mason is said to write the scripts for the Playhouse’s pantomimes alongside his wife Diana Bishop (ibid.). Most emphasis was on Hawkins, however, with Ralph Slater being hopeful about the play, as ‘I can’t see Hawkins making one of his rare TV performances unless it’s a worthwhile effort’ (Reading Evening Post, 10 November 1965, p. 2).

Bill Smith described Hawkins as the ‘benevolent father-figure of the British cinema and the personification of all that is best in the Bulldog breed of British man’, looking forward to a play charged with suspense akin to the recent Wednesday Thrillers (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 November 1965, p. 11). Smith describes Rampayne as ‘A man of discretion, though an immense power behind the news’, making a doubtless unintentional link to Tony Garnett’s desire to make drama intervene in the national news (ibid.). Smith noted the twist that it wasn’t the usual Russian spy ‘equivalents of Amos Burke and Patrick McGoohan’, and relished this ‘off-beat’ and ‘unconventional’ plot (ibid.).

The Radio Times billing indicated a large cast of 28, eight of whom were women actors. Tony Garnett’s preview emphasised the play’s political theme and encouraged viewers to use critical thinking:

‘A distinguished and devoted public servant of our time.’ ‘An enemy of the people.’ The death notices are written. They are ready to roll. Which paper will you believe? (Radio Times, 4 November 1965, p. 35)

Garnett pointedly describes Rampayne as ‘one of that handful of men who went to the right school and belong to the right clubs, and he feels has the right to rule’, emphasising how he makes ‘decisions which affect all our lives’ (ibid.). Garnett stressed the play would reveal the ‘human being’ behind the ‘public mask’ and that he is ‘maybe not quite the one you expect to find…’ (ibid.). Garnett’s confident steering of viewers to question and distrust authority must have seemed highly bold in an era where deference still held much away. It notably conveys the proudly socialist intent of the strand at this stage, which offered some plays which presented a rare left-wing counterbalance to the BBC’s more small-c conservative news and current affairs output.

‘JACK HAWKINS’ is the big bold headline at the top of page 35, and he features on the front page, but anyone reading Garnett’s text will begin to doubt, ideas circulating, reassurance left behind…

Happily, I’ve been able to watch this play, whose trial and “torture” mainstay is set in Windsor, Berkshire, and it’s another fascinating entry in The Wednesday Play’s questioning, garrulous public mission.

Rating: *** / ****

I liked this, by and large; it was both an admirably serious direct interrogation of the British establishment, both in old (Rampayne) and new and future (Wolf) guises, and an offbeat camp caper of absurd theatrics, actually in the same ballpark as Diana Rigg era The Avengers, with its eccentric villains and occasional bizarrerie:

Alan Seymour is a writer deeply critical of militarism and imperialism, but who also maintains a belief in democratic values as opposed to a sundering revolution. This comes through via the play’s nuanced inclusion of distinctive ideological types: the (mostly) men who Wolf enlists for Rampayne’s trial include a “castrated liberal” and a “Bolshie”.

The New Statesman-style journalist reveals the embedded co-dependence within a media ecology with a settled, comfortable range of beliefs: “I realise that I’ve quite enjoyed despising Sir John for all these years. But, destroy him and what role do I take up?” This seems philosophically to reflect the idea of regarding political opponents as adversaries worthy of respect, not enemies to be crushed. The Freudian liberal with glasses and beard calls Rampayne “all that is best in England”, following Wolf’s denunciation of him as “all that is worst in the human race!” Seymour’s play is open to different readings, one of which is to deplore the cosy indulgence and staid thinking on display from the liberal as much as from Rampayne.

Wolf’s prosecution pointedly assails British imperialism in India and Kenya, exposing the British as “a cruel and vicious enemy”, as Rampayne’s old African clerk in his colonial days Manao’s (Harry Baird) says, in his impassioned indictment of Rampayne as being like a First World War general behind the lines, drinking whisky and oblivious to the inhumane acts the British forces are committing. After some brutal newsreel shots: “These are our white masters, and their civilisation” as Stanley Myers’s frenzied jazz broils on the soundtrack:

**Tortured image projected onto the floor – good direction from Duguid**

Seymour is another writer, well before M. John Harrison, to pick up on The Water Babies, situating Charles Kingsley’s text as one that Nanny reads to John as a boy. This play rather impressively exceeds its apparent all-video studio aesthetic with its concise and significant flashback sequences to John’s youth and to the 1926 General Strike, all of which establish how he succumbed to the reactionary group think and actions of his class, the ruling class.

The left-wing March (Milton Johns) comes up with several relevant statistics, countering Rampayne’s pseudo-Macmillan arguments that the masses have never had it so good: the top 1% of people own over 50% of the country’s wealth; 50% of Oxbridge places are taken up by those who went to fee-paying public schools, and over two million people still live in houses officially condemned as unfit for human habitation.

I feel this play is relatively progressive in its representations. There are many roles for women, mainly outside the blankly allegorical “court”, and who are thus not quite as central as in Up the Junction, but it feels something of an advance on many other 1965 plays.

It is a tad odd, though, that Louise (Myrtle Reed) appears late on as a witness, randomly clad in her undies and bra; she gets a worldly liberal humanist parting shot about us all being human.

Myrtle Reed had earlier appeared as a risque, subversive Britannia act slightly anticipative of Jordan in Derek Jarman’s bizarre, punk-era masterpiece Jubilee (1978). I really liked the way the courtroom scenes were introduced with hooded goon captors and Wolf initially wearing an animal mask straight out of Ancient Greek theatre or some bygone pagan past.

“You select so crudely!”, one of the dinner guests/witnesses tells Wolf. Manao is told at one point by Wolf he is going soft, and how this always enables people like Rampayne to get away with it. Yet, Manao reverts to a more radical position at the end: “why don’t they just pull out the plug and let this whole rotten island sink into the sea…?” Yet, in this, he seems to personally forgive Sir John as an individual, taking on Wolf’s earlier stated position that he was created by the public school system: the dominating and bullying traits were forced on him by the powerful.

The bluntness of the play’s message about base and superstructure determining the individual’s (Sir John) actions is oddly undercut by the way it seems to thus excuse him in a woolly liberal manner. But this can be read as a strength in terms of how this play tackles many political ideas to the table in an intelligent way quite unimaginable in our more simplified 21st century TV dramas. You can choose whose ideas and feelings you identify with the most, and Manao and March’s words seem most pertinent in 2025 with rising global fascism in the US and Argentina and a third of British voters seemingly happy to import this cruelty and bullying.

The ending, with the wild goose chase element of the authorities being misled to look for Rampayne on a beach, while Rampayne has been released in Windsor, feels like it is emphasising how Wolf – the new amoral pop establishment – now has the real underlying cultural power, with the police tiny hapless dots in a landscape. There’s a rather dry, chilly note about the ultimate meaninglessness of Wolf’s power. He promotes bands like the significantly named ‘The Rippers’ and a 1960s freedom without ethical socialist relations with other people is hollow.

As with Seymour’s earlier Auto-Stop, which I wrote about here, I feel it is a great strength of this play that it provokes deep and conflicting thoughts in me. It may ultimately be overly talky and too discursive a piece for some viewers today; however, it is fundamentally a very playful teleplay, and that makes it an enjoyably engrossing watch for me. Funnily enough, I’d say the collective hive mind of IMDb voters – 53 of them as of today – scoring this play 7.1 / 10 is spot on!

Best performance: JACK HAWKINS

This was Burnley-born Sir Ian McKellen’s second screen role at the age of 26, after an appearance in a series of Rudyard Kipling adaptations the previous year and with Lynn Redgrave in Peter Draper’s Sunday Out of Season (ATV for ITV, 7 February 1965) and as the lead in a nine-part version of David Copperfield (1966). His accent seems broadly Brummie to me, with at times short Northern vowels too. As perceptive Letterboxd reviewer gibson8 notes, there’s a definite slight resemblance to Malcolm McDowell’s performance as Alex De Large in A Clockwork Orange seven years later, with much the same truculence.

All other players do a good job (Harry Baird is a fine commanding and sincere presence, Milton Johns overdoes the emotion in a way totally acceptable in a piece diverging from realist tenets), but really, this has to be Jack Hawkins’s gong, this week!

He plays Rampayne as a simultaneously puffed-up but assailed figure, battered but never to be fully bowed. A lesser actor would have made him haughtier, more stolid. Hawkins clearly conveys how well he listens to all that is said in this trial, and he is humanly embarrassed by his faults – and his failure to take responsibility for his actions during the General Strike and in India and Kenya. Yet, the play itself doesn’t ultimately condemn him for this, marking its final, liberal humanist turn which shades into a Christian forgiveness. By thoroughly indicting him, it is echoing Michael Hastings’s For The West, though its final softness is also undercut by Manao’s final words. Hawkins is a brilliant symbol of the certainties of the British Empire and conservative stiff-upper-lip, and despite being credibly challenged on his past actions, the play depicts him as out of touch, but also with some residual individual decency to him.

**Amid some droll dialogue about jeroboams and magnums of champagne**

Hawkins’s voicing of effectively many of the criticisms leveled at Up the Junction and Saved gives them a real gravitas – given Wolf’s cocky amoralism – yet this is undercut by Seymour’s shrewd inclusion of his utter complacency about apartheid South Africa, which was indeed much in line with the often overtly racist Moral Rearmament and NVLA positions on that regime.

Wolf has indeed included Manao’s perspective, and while not a righteous figure, Wolf is a lord of misrule who is well able to expose the cant and humbug of the old establishment. I just love how Hawkins delivers Rampayne’s patronising final brush-off to Wolf:

“You’ve made some interesting points, young man, but of course I shall carry on…! As long as I can…”

Best line: “Taste? We’re not interested anymore, mate, in your dead-as-mutton ideas of good taste, bad taste…! We like bad taste, we want bad taste! We will use bad taste to prise open your mask of…” (Wolf, responding to Rampayne’s “I consider that to be in the most execrable taste…”)

I also liked:

“Oh, well! It’s a good nosh-up, anyway!”

“The amount spent on hats at Ascot last year would have paid for 10,000 old-age pensions for a year!” and

“I had not learned yet that he, and so many of his Englishmen, they liked that blood and superstition. They needed it. It proved that Africans were what they wanted them to be, and justified them. Yes, justified them in their own ways of putting us down.” (Manao to Rampayne)

Audience size: 5.89 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 49.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood – Duck Soup [1933, Marx Brothers]/Newsroom and Weather), ITV (Crime and the Bent Society 03: ‘Coppers Are People’ / Football: England v. Northern Ireland)

Audience Reaction Index: 39%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 23.1%

Reception: The critics’ response was meagre, mixed and mild, with a fair bit of appreciation matched by notable criticisms. Viewers were more broadly negative, feeling it was a disappointing play, some taking against its politics, others using a wearying, typical view against its supposed incomprehensibility.

In, as far as I’ve been to find, the only next-day review, Lyn Lockwood’s headline proclaimed that ”U’ DIPLOMAT FACES POP ACCUSER’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1965, p. 21). Lockwood argued this play was ‘very much of the present day’, presenting a clash between the ‘Righter than Right’ ‘diplomat at large’ Sir John and Wolf, ‘a member of the brave new “pop” world who had lured him away from a students’ society debate for a bizarre inquisition’ (ibid.). Rightly, Lockwood felt Seymour’s central idea of ‘a sadistic kind of “This is Your Life” ordeal was an excellent one’, but felt the drama was ‘lost in some diffuse writing’ halfway in, though felt it ‘a rewarding 30 minutes or so’ at ‘the crunch’, with ‘admirable’ performances from Hawkins and McKellen (ibid.).

Adrian Mitchell felt the ‘same prejudices and that same anger’ against materialism and advertising that came across in Robin Chapman’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying on BBC Two with Alfred Lynch ‘should have had a field day during’ The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne (Sunday Times, 14 November 1965, p. 44). Mitchell didn’t feel his ‘social conscience’ was stirred, gradually losing interest: ‘In its first half-hour [it] seemed to run out of Avenger-like visual sweets. From that point it became a panel game’ (ibid.). He felt there were ‘a few good comic ideas’, but, ironically, in view of some of the play’s dialogue, felt it amounted to ‘no more than a Rag Week sketch inflated by some brusque and unhelpful scenes which should be returned to the file marked “Motivation.” The file should then be destroyed’ (ibid.). As Mitchell watched Jack Hawkins sat, suffering, he ‘kept being reminded of a much shorter and surer piece of hatchery, the night when TW3 went for Mr Henry Brooke.’ (ibid.).

Quoting W.H. Auden’s The Dog Beneath the Skin, D.A.N. Jones picked up on the play’s camp allusions to the Profumo Scandal, noting how ‘Jack Hawkins, representing the Establishment, was wheeled into view by masked men in leather and compelled to watch a film of his secret visits to a sado-masochists’ brothel’ and how Sir John was made to kneel before ‘a girl in a black bra, who menaced him with a rubber dagger’ (New Statesman, 19 November 1965, p. 804). Jones reflected observantly how the play was based on the ‘popular belief that stiff-upper-lip and Britain-can-take-it values reflect an unwholesome national interest in the infliction if pain, closely connected with the education of our ruling class’ (ibid.). While Jones noted the clear depiction of his strike-breaking propensities and admiration for Hitler and Verwoerd, he felt the connection of these public activities and Rampayne’s sex life and education was ‘tenuous’ (ibid.). Jones was rather dismissive of the use of ‘Pop’ culture, regarding the play also as ‘much more droll than it was meant to be, illustrating rather than criticising the current desire to see cruel deeds performed’ (ibid.).

This seems slightly verging on the moralistic critiques that Edward Bond’s Saved received, and, as in that case, I’m not sure it really holds, especially given that Wolf’s supposed ‘cruelty’ is surely miniscule compared to the events in Rampayne’s past. Jones also stood up to be counted into 1965’s culture war by claiming ‘It was worth Ken Tynan’s while to challenge press-sponsored ‘public opinion’ with his stammered ‘obscenity’, even though the BBC saw fit to apologise on Monday’ (ibid.).

Argus pejoratively claimed it was ‘one of those way-out and slightly weird efforts which put the onus on the viewer to discern between right and wrong’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 11 November 1965, p. 17). Interestingly, this actually accords with how Up the Junction could be, and was, read differently by different viewers. Argus felt Rampayne was ‘viciously and mercilessly grilled for the sins of his life and the class of society in which he moved’ (ibid.). I would question whether it really is that vicious, compared with bringing the troops in during the General Strike or the sort of acts shown in 1950s Kenya. Argus seemed oddly put out that it wasn’t didactic about whether Rampayne was ‘a thorough rascal or a character who had merely played the game of life to his best ability’ (ibid.). They called it a ‘flop’ as entertainment, but acknowledged ‘the acting was first-rate’ (ibid.).

More positively, K.H. felt it was ‘a remarkable demonstration of the television director’s art’, appreciating the neat, skilful dovetailing of the historical flashbacks with the present (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 11 November 1965, p. 2). Anon in The Newry Telegraph regarded Seymour’s play as ‘Absorbing and interesting, because it was different’ – always a view I will tend to share (13 November 1965, p. 12). They noted McKellen’s ‘sneering, sarcastic inquisitor’ and how the play ‘had the quality of a night-mare’, exacerbating the more we saw of Rampayne’s past (ibid.). Hawkins was said to be ‘grand’, McKellen ‘irritatingly scathing’, while they felt Rampayne’s ruthlessness had been exposed, along with the ‘real personalities of those other three involved, especially the Communist’ (ibid.).

The audience, collectively, was far from impressed: 18% giving it the higher A+/A scores and a significant 49% scoring it C/C- (BBC WAC, VR/65/636). A Company Director felt it utterly ‘boring – nauseating theme and characters’, while a Housewife claimed, ‘I am sick to death of protest plans. For heavens sake let us have an end to them’ (ibid.). This is an odd comment to make, given it is closer to N.F. Simpson than to agitprop in style and, as already mentioned, really isn’t didactic, though I suppose criticism of the British establishment and South African regime may have touched some nerves.

A Bank Manager was greatly disappointed, especially due to the ‘front page (Radio Times) treatment’ it had been given, claiming it was ‘a blatant advertisement for extreme Left-wing cum Communist thinking, or lack of it’. This became an interestingly contradictory response, while seeming to perpetuate the fallacy – common today – that representation equals endorsement:

Many old scores were re-opened and we were again treated to colour and race hatred and class distinctions served up ad nauseam. It was a dreary play enlivened only by invective and spleen. (ibid.)

Others assailed ‘sick entertainment’ or ”a pretentious dressing of the theme’, unlikely to the point of being ridiculous’ (ibid.). I am afraid I am going to have to consider it evidence of a lack of intelligence on one viewer’s part that they claimed to have spent 45 minutes ‘trying to fathom what it was all about, and finally gave up’: as it is straightforwardly about putting an old Establishment man on trial for what he has done in his life!

A third moderately liked it, though many of these also felt a good idea hadn’t been developed successfully, and some claimed it ‘lacked fire’ and included several ‘longeurs’ (ibid.). A small group is said to have really enjoyed its cleverness and freshness, being ‘definitely different from the ordinary run of plays, imaginative, exciting, original’ and ‘very viewable’ (ibid.). While acting was felt to be slightly below par by some, most were impressed, with ‘many praising’ Hawkins and McKellen (ibid.). The production was felt to be satisfactory by the cast majority, though the easily confused disliked the ‘jumping about between years’ (ibid.).

I’ve only located one letter to the press about it. Mrs B. Kane of Lincoln Road, Werrington, Northamptonshire regarded the play as a major ‘waste’ of Jack Hawkins’s ‘talent’ (Sunday Mirror, 14 November 1965, p. 22). Kane eye-rolled that ‘sound effects and scenic departments were obviously enthralled by their tasks’ in ‘that stupid BBC play’, while, in a parallel way to critics of Up the Junction, taking against the characters they saw:

The monstrous know-all young man wearing the animal head was such an objectionable character mouthing phoney dialogue that the play lost any impact it could have had. (ibid.)

Ultimately, Alan Seymour’s play was a good watch, and while not quite imaginatively enough developed from its brilliant absurd premise, it stands up as yet another fascinating time capsule of 1965 and its TV drama, and was playful enough that its 72 minutes flew by.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.18: ‘Cemented with Love’ (BBC1, 5 May 1965)

02.18: Cemented with Love (BBC One, Wednesday 5 May 1965) 9:40 – 11:05pm

Directed by Michael Leeston-Smith; Written by Sam Thompson; Produced by Peter Luke; Story Editor: Harry Moore Designed by Douglas Smith

Sam Thompson (left) and Denys Hawthorne as Bob Beggs (right)

Finally, Ireland and Northern Ireland enter our Wednesday Play story, with a play by Sam Thompson brought to the world by producer Peter Luke, who had featured much more in autumn-winter 1964, but was to remain a significant figure.

John B. Kerr (Harold Goldblatt), married to Ethel Kerr (Elizabeth Begley) is a ‘wealthy butcher and due-hard politician’: a corrupt Orangeman MP for the fictional Ulster constituency of Drumtory, a seat he has held for 20 years, but is now about to retire (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 5 May 1965, p. 2). He expects his son to take over his seat while maintaining his prejudices. But the boy William Kerr (Anton Rodgers) returning from a time in England, is an idealist, and bases his campaign on ‘religious reconciliation – unaware, apparently, of the bribery, blackmail, rumour-mongering and personation-plotting going on around him’ (Guardian, 8 October 1966, p. 6). His election agent is Alan Price (J. G. Devlin) Crucially, William’s campaign is hampered when he reveals he is married to a Catholic. William’s rival in the race Swindle (Sam Thompson) had already understandably begun attacking the notion of Drumtory being a ‘family seat’ for the Kerrs (Coventry Evening Telegraph op. cit.).

The Radio Times preview indicates the play’s source of satirical humour in anachronistic beliefs and language: ‘the electioneering speeches with which the play opens seem to have more relevance to the seventeenth than the twentieth century’ (1 May 1965, p. 43). Minds are shut and there is no ‘real discussion’ (ibid.). Writer Sam Thompson (1916-65)

sees the political speeches of his Loyalists and Republicans as little more than repetitive history-mongering [while] he sees their political methods as a ludicrous travesty of parliamentary democracy (ibid.).

The article affirms how Thompson’s representation of an election campaign is not a wild exaggeration given ‘last year’s pre-election riots’ in Belfast, and that his own experience as a candidate in County Down clearly informed the play, ‘just as his time as a docker must have provided material for his first major work’, Over the Bridge (ibid.). Thompson’s electoral experience notably echoes that of Dennis Potter, who also stood as a Labour candidate in the 1964 general election – both men lost comfortably.

The South Down constituency has had a fascinating, historical trajectory. While Irish Nationalists tended to win the seat from 1885-1918, the Ulster Unionist Party comfortably won all 1950s contests, Lawrence Orr amassing a majority of 30,577 in 1959. In 1964, Sam Thompson as a NI Labour candidate, gained 6,260 votes (11.2%), finishing third behind an Independent Republican, helping cut Orr’s majority to a still-mighty 21,891.

Subsequently, the former Tory purveyor of racist discourse Enoch Powell held the seat for the UUP from October 1974, if not as solidly as before, generally. In 1987, Powell lost the seat to Eddie McGrady of the centre-left SDLP, who were pro-Irish unification but anti-violence. McGrady and his successor Margaret Ritchie comfortably held the seat for thirty years, until Sinn Fein gained it on a 9.3% swing in the 2017 general election, extending their majority significantly in 2024.

Thompson, from a Protestant working-class background, worked as a painter in the Belfast shipyards. His politics were socialist and he was a trade unionist who became a shop steward at Belfast Corporation, but his opposition to sectarian discrimination cost him his job. Thompson wrote extensively for BBC radio in the late 1950s, with plays and documentaries about his experiences of working life and sectarianism. His writing and political outlook were crucially formative for fellow Northern Irish Protestant writers born in the 1940s like Stewart Parker, Derek Mahon and Graham Reid. Thompson was an especially strong influence on Parker’s lively comedic style and anti-sectarian socialist humanism (see my PhD, Volume One, pp. 193-4).

An interesting cast includes Margaret D’Arcy, Paddy Joyce, Ronnie Masterson, Denys Hawthorne, Basildon Henson, Kate Storey, Doreen Hepburn and Sam Thompson himself as John Swindle, William’s rival for the seat. The play was commissioned and recorded in London, but its original planned December 1964 screening was cancelled by BBC Northern Ireland Controller Robert McCall, which showed the Unionist establishment’s sway with the BBC (John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 156). There is much extensive coverage of this controversy both in John Hill’s excellent book and cuttings I don’t have the time to dissect just now.

Sadly, Thompson collapsed and died at the Northern Ireland Labour Party’s offices in Waring Street, Belfast, on 15 February 1965, aged 48; he had suffered from a heart condition and had suffered two heart attacks in 1961, but kept highly active, such as touring Ulster with Joseph Tomelty’s play, One Year in Marlfield (Belfast Telegraph, 15 February 1965, pp. 1, 4) This same article noted Thompson lived at 55 Craigmore Street, off the Dublin Road, Belfast, and extolls his persistence: ‘until his death he continued to criticise and challenge authority in all its aspects’ (ibid.).

On 30 March 1965, a ‘local BBC production’ of Derryman Brian Friel’s play, The Enemy Within, about the 6th century monk Saint Columba of Iona, had been screened and was seen by Alf McCreary as ‘simple, beautifully written and profound’ (Belfast Telegraph – Ireland’s Saturday Night, 3 April 1965, p. 8). BBC Genome does not turn up any hits for this, but a radio version was on BBC Home Service Northern Ireland in June 1963. The Enemy Within had been first staged at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1962, and its televising made McCready look forward helpfully to Cemented With Love (ibid.). It was incredibly sad that Thompson himself could not sit back and watch his play when it eventually emerged on 5 May 1965, and the sense of loss is compounded by Harold Goldblatt’s report that Thompson’s last words to him were that he had been commissioned to write two more TV plays (Belfast Telegraph, 15 February 1965, p. 2).

This is another play we cannot, sadly, watch today, as the recording was not retained in the archives.

Audience size: 5.94 million.

The play gained an especially high TAM rating in Ulster, the highest BBC One programme of the week: 44, just outside the Ulster top ten (Television Today, 20 May 1965, p. 10).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 50.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Many Happy Returns – Diamond / Enquiry: Austria – The Great Survivor / Jazz 625: Dixieland Revisited), ITV (Thinking About People: Liberal Party Political Broadcast / A Slight White Paper on Love: 1 – Can This Be Love? / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 14.3% (needs a more thorough check to be totally certain!)

Reception: There was a tellingly scant response from London critics, somewhat more in Glasgow, Bristol, Leicester and Liverpool, and far more response in Belfast! Critics were positive, with slightly more resistance in Belfast, though viewers were well behind this play, especially those from Ulster.

Lyn Lockwood noted the play dealt with the most ‘provocative subjects’ of religion and politics, and admired how Thompson delivered ‘hard blows’ at both Protestant and Catholic camps, feeling that ‘Reactions across the Irish Sea to this political satire will no doubt be fast and furious’ (Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1965, p. 21). As a ‘neutral’, she found it all ‘highly diverting’ and praised ‘admirable’ performances from J. G. Devlin, Harold Goldblatt ‘and other familiar interpreters of the Northern Irish character’ (ibid.).

Left to right: Elizabeth Begley, Harold Goldblatt, J. G. Devlin, Anton Rodgers and Sam Thompson

The best Irish play I have seen for years. Remarkably well written, funny yet didactic, unbiassed yet vigorous and strong (ibid.)

Frederick Laws’ response was mixed, calling it ‘a rough-and-ready comedy about political and religious ill will in Northern Ireland’, which ‘worked well when patently fantastic and grew weak whenever we were asked to take it seriously’ (The Listener, 27 May 1965, p. 803).

There was somewhat more response across other British cities. In Bristol’s Western Daily Press, Peter Forth liked the acting of ‘an enthusiastic and talented cast’, including Devlin, Rodgers and Begley, while describing the political meeting scenes as ‘lively and amusing’ (6 May 1965, p. 7). Interestingly, A.B. felt the prospect of a comedy – a ‘goodwill-straining vein’ – was usually incredibly ‘daunting’, but Thompson’s comedy was ‘great fun’, with a ‘vast – and presumably expensive – array of characters ranging from the downright vicious to the genially innocent’ (Leicester Daily Mercury, 6 May 1965, p. 10). A.B. reflected that Thompson must have ‘known well what he was about in showing that the opposite of apathy is not bound to be social awareness and political idealism’ – a very up to date sentiment for British local election results in 2025 (ibid.). This is perhaps slightly condescending and complacently trivialising, though:

Bigotry and blind hatred keep the electoral fires burning and it is almost tempting to wish that we could look forward to as much fun and games in the municipal congrats now building up to their annual anti-climax in Leicester (ibid.).

N.G.P. felt the play was a posthumous tribute to Thompson’s ‘talent for witty, sometimes savage, observation of life as he had known it’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 6 May 1965, p. 3). They liked a ‘riotous comedy’ with an underlying ‘thread of biting satire’, with the themes ‘pushed home with dickensian gusto by the extravagantly Irish characters’ (ibid.). Gnomically, Alan Stewart commented: ‘For my money there were quite a few cracks showing’ (Glasgow Sunday Post, 9 May 1965, p. 12).

As you might expect, the vast majority of responses were from the Belfast press. An anonymous front page review felt it wasn’t serious enough and was not in the class of Thompson’s Over the Bridge ‘as a cauterizer of bigotry’ (Belfast Telegraph, 6 May 1965, p. 1). You can tell Cemented With Love had struck a nerve in this passage; it was clearly too unpalatable in its truthfulness:

But we must look now for less of the rawness and crudity which Thompson’s lurid and rebellious mind tended to make melodrama of what Ulster people know to be real and earnest. (ibid.)

They also desired a more St. John Greer Ervine-style Ulster playwright to write ‘of a more rational people tested by a changing environment – and comprehensible to all the world’ (ibid.). Unfortunately, this viewpoint was wide of the mark, while Thompson was spot on, concerning where Northern Ireland was headed, given the subsequent history of the Troubles.

Similarly, William Millar found it was not enlightening, feeling it partially succeeded in providing ‘a laugh or two’, being a ‘light-hearted romp in which all the good old stage Irish parts were utilised to the full’ (Belfast News Letter, 6 May 1965, p. 12). Millar was entertained by the first 20 minutes but found the underhand doings ‘boring’:

Even the personation scenes towards the end showing women feverishly changing costumes to vote a second time, did not come off (ibid.).

While Millar loved Patrick McAlinney as the Irish United Party representative and Harold Goldblatt’s ‘tub-thumping’ performance, he felt Thompson’s last play was ‘far from being his best’ (ibid.).

In stark contrast, Christopher Cairns loved ‘a vigorous, rumbustious, provocative and at the same time human and, I think, deeply felt extravaganza’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 3). Cairns saw it as sadly ‘predictable’ that many Ulster people would feel the play would do them harm, when actually ‘this kind of self-critical picture of the conflicts and prejudices of a community, done with sincerity and skill, increases interest in us and respect for the colour and vitality of Ulster’ (ibid.). He suspected politicians like those represented in Thompson’s play would hate it, and that demonstrated its success (ibid.).

A clear-sighted Ralph Bossence was also impressed by a play which left him feeling ashamed of what it revealed, especially given how he’d encountered local people afterwards who had regarded William’s bigoted parents as rational and justifiable. William’s own expressions of ‘incredulity, indignation and despair […] were the emotions that should have been stimulated’ (Belfast News Letter, 10 May 1965, p. 4).

Similarly, Olive Kay noted this ‘funny, heartwarming’ play was ‘too realistic for some’, and how it had been defended by Jimmy Greene on Ulster TV Channel nine’s Flashback against press comments attacking the play; Greene ending in ‘a homily deploring our lack of ability to laugh at ourselves’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 3). An anonymous Correspondent reflected how the play’s muted, less extreme reactions reflected well on the people of Northern Ireland, now more able to ‘smile, no doubt a little acidly, at what passes at times for public piety’; they are hopeful that civilised decencies expressed in private will eventually be observed universally in public (Belfast Telegraph, 8 May 1965, p. 6).

Olive Kay also soon revealed there would be a Folk Song concert at the Ulster Hall, organised by the committee for Thompson’s memorial fund (Belfast News Letter, 11 May 1965, p. 3). This was to feature Dominic Behan, the Irish Rovers, Irene and Dave Scott, The Ramblers, alongside Cemented actors Begley, Goldblatt and Devlin as the compere (ibid.).

The BBC audience sample was largely very positive, with several Ulster viewers attesting to its truth, with a Clerk tellingly claiming, ‘everybody watching enjoyed laughing at themselves’, when watching with six others (BBC WAC, VR/65/240). Thompson’s humorous light touch and the fairness with which he treated both Catholics and Protestants was commended; a Schoolmaster apparently summarised many views, feeling it was

The best Irish play for years. Remarkably well written, funny yet didactic, unbiased yet vigorous and strong (ibid.).

Some were bored, and certain naive English viewers failed to grasp or believe this was what Belfast was like, which confirmed the suspicions certain Northern Irish viewers themselves had (ibid.). Others complained the play was ‘rowdy’, with too many ’emotional gasbags’ shouting at each other to little purpose (ibid.). There was some criticism of artificial studio settings, but also admiration for natural acting and the use of filmed inserts of the Orangemen’s procession (ibid.).

A Belfast News Letter reader, the Rev. M.W. Dewar, who’d admitted not seeing the play, nevertheless attacked critics from the ‘new intelligentsia’, like Ralph Bossence as ‘humourless’, and unable to see that people can respect each other across religious divides, and ended up quoting lines from Lynn Doyle’s Ballygullion which expressed how individual character transcends collective identity (14 May 1965, p. 10).

The Belfast Telegraph reported relatively few comments received by readers about the play, but they were ‘mostly complimentary’ (6 May 1965, p. 2). They quoted viewers praising how accurate it was and how much ‘courage’ it had taken to show it; others comments included:

very good, if it had been for local viewing

Congratulations; you have shown everybody up

I think it was very fair from both points of view.

Very funny. A riot. Congratulations.

(ibid.)

Fascinatingly, the paper reported how a late sitting at Stormont meant that few local MPs could see it, but that Unionist MP Bessie Maconachie and Nationalist MP Eddie McAteer had managed to and both had liked it, especially McAteer (ibid.). Denis Tuohy had chaired a discussion of the play on BBC Two’s Late Night Line-Up, with fellow Ulstermen the actor James Ellis and Guardian journalist John Cole. While the latter felt it was outdated and not suited to English audiences, he hoped it would help Northern Irish people ‘look at their own attitudes’ (ibid.). Belfast-born Ellis paid a tribute to Thompson, calling him ‘an outspoken but very lovable man’, and an interesting writer usefully helping Irish people ‘to take a look at themselves’ (ibid.).

The play was soon central to discourse in Stormont debates: UUP’s Brian Faulkner hoping that the contract for a new plant for Cookstown would be ‘cemented with love’, while Gerry Fitt, then of the Republican Labour Party, ‘got in a dig about the exposure of religious intolerance in Drumtory when the Racial Discrimination Bill was being discussed’ (Belfast Telegraph, 7 May 1965, p. 12).

Robert Thompson, of Pinner, Middlesex, wrote a highly eloquent letter noting the intense pleasure Cemented With Love had given him and that, had Thompson lived, he ‘would surely have become the O’Casey of Northern Ireland’, and delineated the play’s deep significance:

The appalling tragedies to which all these vicious philosophies [from various European imperial regimes] were indelibly imprinted on our minds by the recent TV series on the First World War.

In Northern Ireland a far more sinister method has been in vogue for 150 years, and this consists in brainwashing the tender youth of the country. When thoroughly done, ever afterwards the individual will never be completely rational, but will in effect always be a neurotic emotional cripple. Sam Thompson’s play brought home to us the unutterably tragic consequences of all this, but what heed will we give to his message? (Belfast News Letter, 12 May 1965, p. 4)

Two letters from Kilmarnock and Glasgow respectively expressed the feeling it might do some good, with J.B. in the former arguing:

it seemed all set to cause trouble. But by showing the truth, they made the whole religious question in Ulster look so ludicrous that even our minister told me he had to laugh. It made the right point (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 9 May 1965, p. 16).

A wry piece soon reported that the ‘first fruits’ of the play’s screening in England have ‘blossomed’ in how Parliamentary pairing arrangements between the main two parties were being broken, while the Oxford University Conservative Association treasurer had confessed that some of its members voted twice in the ‘Queen and Country’ – Oxford making ‘a good start’ in catching up with Drumtory! (Belfast News Letter, 28 May 1965, p. 4).

In October 1966, Thompson’s play was staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival at the Gaiety, with Eric Shorter terming it ‘amusing and sometimes instructive entertainment’, enlightening him about ‘personation’, i.e. hiring bogus voters (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1966, p. 19). He felt it wouldn’t go down so well outside Ireland, given the treatment being slow and the development obvious, noting how Tomas MacAnna’s stage adaptation of the TV original had extensive ‘parochial detail’ (ibid.). Shorter liked Ray McAnally as the Kerr, boss of the Ulster town, and commented:

The play is very repetitive and the moral is thumped home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But it has an easy, effective and amusing way of dealing with highly relevant issues; and its heart is very much in the right place (ibid.).

Shorter ended by praising Barry Cassin’s production for marshalling crowds confidently and even bringing ‘a motorcar purring on to the stage.’ (ibid.) Benedict Nightingale felt that Thompson failed in writing personal relationships, but his treatment of the political campaign was ‘direct and forceful in a vivid, semi-documentary style’ (Guardian, 8 October 1966, p. 6). He appreciated Thompson’s message about parallel historical dogmas and how Feinians would also seek vengeance were there a united Ireland. Nightingale detailed its strengths alongside its significance being more geographically particular, and the problem of ‘preaching to the uninvolved’:

This combination of verve, didactism, and fair mindedness is rare in a pop play, and it had the audience clapping agreement in places. It was energetically performed too, especially in crowd scenes ; yet nothing could hide the fact that the play, lifting its sights no farther than a very particular problem, could only achieve a full meaning within the six counties themselves. There is always something a little comfortable about the applause and approval of a non-participant, even a Dubliner (ibid.).

The anonymous Times critic felt it a simple play, but appealing in liberal Thompson’s ‘sincerity’ in showing the ‘clash of sectarian hostilities, and the ugly methods of the politicians who exploit them’ (8 October 1966, p. 6). Furthermore, they extolled Thompson’s ‘peculiar strength’ in entering ‘into the cynicism and passion of the forces he was attacking’, and McAnally’s dominant performance and ‘excellent caricatures’ by Maurie Taylor and Dominic Roche (ibid.).

Ultimately, it is a real shame we cannot see this: perhaps the biggest loss so far, alongside Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and The Confidence Course. I can only end with Christopher Cairns’s eulogy to its writer:

What a loss Sam Thompson is to us! Who will take his place to scourge our extremists and intolerant fools with such humour and delightful energy? (Belfast Telegraph, op. cit.)

Happily, Stewart Parker (1943-90) was this very writer, though, less happily, he lived a similarly truncated life. Play for Today’s subsequent rich and varied representations of Northern Ireland were formidable: all plays written by Parker, Dominic Behan, Joyce Neary, John Wilson Haire, Colin Welland, Jennifer Johnston, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Ron Hutchinson, Graham Reid and Maurice Leitch ought to be released on Blu-ray and repeated on BBC Four.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.10: ‘Horror of Darkness’ (BBC1, 10 March 1965)

02.10: Horror of Darkness (BBC One, Wednesday 10 March 1965) 9:25 – 10:35pm

Directed by Anthony Page; Written by John Hopkins; Produced by James MacTaggart; Script Editor: Vincent Tilsley; Designed by Tony Abbott.

Now, we arrive at a major Wednesday Play, whose context is vital to outline before we begin: it was only in 1967 when gay sex in private between men over 21 was decriminalised in the UK. The Glasgow Daily Record provides a good summary of the narrative and tone of John Hopkins’s second Wednesday Play of 1965:

Peter is a free-lance commercial artist and Cathy holds an undemanding job that enables her to cope with the constant demands involved in living with him.

On their doorstep one morning arrives Robin, a friend the couple are delighted to put up. But after a few days the relationship of the three people in the house takes on a new and disturbing meaning. (10 March 1965, p. 16)

Peter Young (Alfred Lynch) used to know Robin Fletcher (Nicol Williamson) in their art school days and is now settled in an unmarried relationship with Cathy (Glenda Jackson) in a luxurious London flat. Robin has given up his day job as a teacher due to success he claims in having a short story published in a magazine under the pseudonym Philip Moss; he subsequently has a play staged in London too and brings a party crowd to Peter and Cathy’s house where we hear distant bustle and upbeat jazz music playing.

James Green notes that the Morden-raised Londoner and Cambridge-educated Hopkins’s extremely prolific TV scriptwriting output, while noting Horror of Darkness had cost £10,000 to make and been shot back in March 1964 (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, 3 February 1965, p. 2). Green reveals this play – described by Hopkins as “A rather grim play about human relationships” – was held back from broadcast due to the BBC being ‘under critical fire for presenting too many grim and kitchen-sink dramas’ (ibid.).

Eight days later, Fred Billany’s article reveals, in dated language, ‘PERVERSION PLAY WILL BE SHOWN’, indicating that a year on it would finally be screened on BBC One (Aberdeen Press And Journal, 11 February 1965, p. 2). The Observer revealed it had been shot on 3 March 1964 and due for transmission on 14 March as ‘BBC brows were raised’ over the play (7 March 1965, p. 23). Jean Woodhams indicates that the BBC now felt ‘something a little stronger’ was now permissible, given how the present Wednesday Play was ‘concentrating on lighter drama’, thus they could not be ‘accused of having a pre-occupation with the seamier side of life’ (Derby Evening Telegraph, 8 March 1965, p. 13).

The Liverpool Daily Post previewed more circumspectly, branding it ‘a new slant to the eternal triangle theme’ (6 March 1965, p.8). The Observer noted it uses Hopkins’s ‘favourite technique : close examination of character, little plot’, while also quoting him on the benefits of the TV medium:

you can use more words than in the cinema and yet be more intimate than in the theatre. You’re communicating personally with your audiences of one or two. They are reticent of reaction, but when you do get them it’s marvellous. I remember watching a Bobby Wilson match at Wimbledon on TV. I got so excited that even though I was alone I found myself applauding shots. (op. cit.)

Rarely among the press previews, the Scotsman highlight the salient fact that Lynch and Williamson had recently appeared as Estragon and Vladimir, respectively, in the first UK revival of Waiting for Godot on stage at the Royal Court, directed by none other than Anthony Page (10 March 1965, p. 16).

A later article, around the time George Melly hailed Talking to a Stranger as ‘television’s first authentic masterpiece’ reveals something of Hopkins’s tastes and methods and his ear-to-the-ground cultural antennae, noting his research for Z Cars sitting in police cars and looking through logbooks in Liverpool, and how he listens to Radio Caroline, reads Peanuts and ‘is wild about Dusty Springfield’; he is quoted: ‘When it’s going, everything is relevant. I’m not in the market for polished sentences.’ (Observer, 30 October 1966, p. 23).

Rating **** / ****

This is a deeply affecting, contained domestic drama of tortured interpersonal relationships. This drama overtly engages with gay experience, comparably to Simon Gray’s oblique 1970s TV plays. While it does emphasise gay lives’ bleakness and tragic outcomes and therefore was part of a narrative paradigm that needed escaping historically, its sheer transgressive power and incisive honesty emphasise its truth for its times: so it ought to be celebrated.

As well as the (gradually) openly gay Robin and the repressed Peter, there is a portrait of Peter and Cathy’s ‘free’ open relationship which isn’t all that open really, and isn’t bringing any happiness to either of them. Peter has allowed his life to be dominated completely by work and its deadlines. His commercial drawings for a magazine bring no joy to his life, but have enabled their home to be filled with all the mod cons befitting an affluent London flat, as Cathy shows Robin in a significant early scene. Therefore, this play’s elliptical style is also well grounded in sociological and journalistic observed detail.

A workaholic pattern is bound up with emotional repression, while Peter’s clear communication difficulties could, tentatively, indicate his potential neurodivergence. In contrast to Peter, invariably sedentary at his work desk which dominates the sitting room, Robin by contrast is garrulous and physically mobile, and has a love of 1930s jazz dance band music and showtunes, which he plays in the same space which he occupies. Cathy expresses her dislikes of his music tastes, in a pungent line!

Cathy has a zesty modern spirit and a sardonic humour, which makes it all the more significant that she is generally so tolerant of Peter’s customary inattention to her. Yet, the finale where she finally leaves, symbolically for “Florence, Paris, Rome”, is an Ibsen-like moment: rejecting Peter and the loveless environment, entirely necessary for the play and logical for her subtly formidable character.

While it doesn’t deviate too from naturalism, director Anthony Page deploys artistic visual framings and sequences, as when there is a zoom out from Peter and Cathy on the staircase, one of many vividly stylised images of human distance and discord in a shattering play.

In a five minute sequence (c.37-42 mins) dialogue recedes and we have several pieces of music of a frenzied classical nature used alongside fast cuts between scenes of the trio apart, often joylessly doing household chores, or, in Robin’s case, occupying the fancy leather armchair, stretching out in frustration, or is that desolation? :

We see him from a high angle, emphasising his ultimate disempowerment and odd dependency within this unconventional domestic setup. This sequence is at the absolute core of the play, as is the unbearably tragic flashback at the end that Peter sees of himself and Robin running happily with a dog in the woods when he is having sex with Micaela. While Peter’s forcing himself on Micaela is undoubtedly problematic, well, Peter is a problematic human being; in addition, ultimately she does provide some consent, agreeing provided the act is not in the bed where Robin killed himself.

This was my second viewing – after 19 August 2023 when I called it ‘magnificent’ – and I’d forgotten the details, but what a superb range of performances and economical writing this is. It felt productively in the vortex of Pinter’s territorial dramas, where individuals vie for power over space. It also reminded me specifically of James Kelman’s haunting novel A Disaffection (1989), about a Glasgow teacher’s rejection of the nine-to-five, and subsequent ambiguous dissolution – terrain also navigated in the superb Inside No. 9 tale Tom and Gerri (2014).

I have recently watched Blue Jean (2022), a recent British film which is undoubtedly a more careful and responsible prospect, and provides a necessary socio-political reminder of the ghastly history and dire human consequences of Thatcher’s Clause 28 legislation. Acting, writing and vision are all impeccably sound in that film; however, I must say that this play contains deeper artistry in its ambiguity, subtlety and – actually – its mise-en-scene and use of music. I’d say both that film and this film, 57 years apart, are vital LGBTQ stories which deserve to be experienced.

Best Performance: NICOL WILLIAMSON

This is an utter fool’s errand as all three are magnificent, and the two smaller parts provide very able support*, but I had to go for the great mercurial stage and screen actor Nicol Williamson here as Robin Fletcher.

Williamson is an extraordinary actor, whose brilliance was acclaimed by Samuel Beckett. He is tremendous in similarly idiosyncratic, volatile roles in the Jack Gold-directed and John McGrath-written films** The Bofors Gun (1968) and The Reckoning (1969); but in each of these he feels utterly different to Robin, varying the acting idiolect he deploys.

As Robin, he conveys a fantasist whose sociability and need for companionship is real, but clearly often thwarted in the world. He clearly establishes how his love for Peter is for the old Peter of their art school days – that young man is now long submerged. Williamson has a nervous energy and sly dexterity, in verbal and bodily terms that makes Robin a compelling character: a dreamer lost in even the world of mid-1960s London which seems to be opening up.

*Heck, it’s also worth mentioning Wallas Eaton, utterly defines how to act in a small part: both subtle and deeply memorable.

**These two feature-films feel spectacularly close to the Wednesday Play/Play for Today tradition in a way few others manage. Kes (1969), of course, is another…

Best Line: “Now, if you want to do something badly enough, you’ve got to do it. You have got to.” (Robin)

Cathy’s response to Peter’s refusal to go out is also sardonic truth telling: “Oh, I know you’ve got work to do. Oh well, c’est la vie… It certainly is…”

Audience size: 7.92 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / One Good Turn / Tamara Karsavina: Portrait of a Ballerina), ITV (Night Spot / A Face in the Crowd / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 40%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: The play was very strongly admired by London critics, somewhat more meagre if still quite positive reaction outside London. However, the audience largely disliked it, showing a notable divergence from critical taste, though there was intelligent appreciation from a minority.

Gerald Larner noted how its shocks made it involving, but that such a ‘subtle and complex’ work deserved feature film length, as its narrative became jumpy and elliptical at 65 minutes (Guardian, 11 March 1965, p. 9). Larner admitted however that ‘the obscurities here gave an impression of truth and of depth that formula script editing frequently rejects’ and the excellent script was ‘a splendid vehicle’ for the distinguished cast, whose performances provided ‘considerable if occasionally harrowing pleasure’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood implied that the Pinter or Potter visitation-type narrative is a universal experience: ‘Most of us have experienced the uninvited, temporary guest who threatens to become a permanency’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p 19). Lockwood found its progression to a tragic ending effective, due ‘to what was left unsaid’ (ibid.). The anonymous Times reviewer was similarly effusive, in praising a play which exposed Peter’s ‘way of life which accepts responsibilities but rejects depths of feeling ; it is a tragedy of a man who has made himself an island’ (11 March 1965, p. 15). They gave fulsome praise of a ‘disturbing and at times painful, but […] totally unsentimental’ play which ‘treats youthful, casual ways of speech with mastery’, granting Williamson, Lynch and Jackson great scope for ‘nervously strained acting’ (ibid.).

Initially, Maurice Richardson seemed much as positive, claiming Horror of Darkness was ‘far and away’ Hopkins’s strongest TV play so far (Observer, 14 March 1965, p. 24). However, Richardson felt the ‘elaborate personal tangle was not really properly planted’, finding ‘the sardonic Scots psychopath”s suicide ‘artificially welded on’ and the events of the final act ‘even more contrived’ (ibid.). Notably, the same paper revealed Hopkins had yet another play on ITV the next week for Armchair Theatre, I Took My Little World Away, dealing with the aftermath of suicide (14 March 1965, p. 22).

Philip Purser reveals the prolific Hopkins had also worked on a televised ballet the same week, perceptively likening the five-minute dialogue-free sequence in the play to this (Sunday Telegraph, 14 March 1965, p. 13). He praises Hopkins not as a televisual innovator, but putting others’ showy devices to useful work: especially, the ‘stunning’ flashback near the end – which explained the underlying situation (ibid.). Purser notes all three Hopkins TV works of March 1965 centred on suicide, ‘the pit underlying civilized human society’, while feeling that the ‘very well observed undercurrents of envy’ contained deeper interest than ‘the homosexual undertow’ (ibid.). He noted how the two men both envy and despise each other’s contrasting lifestyles, providing the play’s main ‘tension’ (ibid.). While Purser felt Hopkins had ‘piled on’ the agony, he nevertheless acclaimed ‘very persuasive performances’ and ‘a superbly controlled late appearance by Wallas Eaton’, ending with a command to watch Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play tonight (ibid.).

The New Statesman‘s critic felt the play ‘as impressive’ as Fable and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play were ‘tiresome’, praising ‘powerful, jittery’ acting (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660). Bill Edmund was another to praise Wallas Eaton, knowing him previously from Take It From Here and other comedy shows, saying ‘his few minutes of screen time stole the play’ here (Television Today, 18 March 1965, p. 12).

Frederick Laws was also rather favourably disposed; while he emphasises Robin as ‘a homosexual, a layabout and dangerous’, he found excellent the ‘intolerable tension of the presence of the intruder and the almost benevolent rejection of him by the girl’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws signs off with praise of its matter of fact worldliness:

Remarkable and creditable that the play appeared to have no thesis about homosexuality but took it for granted that we would know there is a lot of it about. (ibid.).

Of non-metropolitan critics, one K.H. termed it ‘a first-class example of the television director’s art’, but the play itself ‘a morbid affair that must have driven many viewers over to the other channel or out to the ‘local’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 11 March 1965, p. 2). Possibly the same (?) reviewer ‘K.H.’ in a different newspaper said on its later repeat that Hopkins’s play remained ‘depressing […] black, uncomfortable’, and communicated very little, though admitted its saving grace was performances which were ‘deeply considered’ (Northants Evening Telegraph, 28 July 1966, p. 2).

An anonymous – and somewhat eccentric – review in the Scotsman revealed something of the play’s ambiguity, thoroughly taking against ‘the wretched Scot’ Robin:

[who] was so reminiscent facially of his lamentable countrymen of an earlier period, Darnley and his son James I and VI that his peculiarities almost seemed to have an historical justification, and came as no surprise.

With the spite and hysteria which makes such young gentlemen so embarrassing […] (11 March 1965, p. 15).

This review is highly positive, but seems to misread – or at least simplify – the play as deliberately showing ‘the trail of spiritual destruction resulting from such imbroglios’ (ibid.). Furthermore, they are delighted ‘There was no liberal-minded chatter about consenting adults in this piece; a positively Jacobean welter of gloom and catastrophe befell the hapless victims of fate’ (ibid.).

Peter Quince in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was so riveted and ensnared by the play that his precious pipe went cold (13 March 1965, p. 5)! Quince admired its ‘dramatic tension’ and ‘wholly serious study of a human predicament’, enacted through ‘performances of rare quality’:

Off hand, I cannot remember any television play which maintained such concentrated pulling power from its opening lines to its final curtain. (ibid.).

In contrast, B.L. failed to give any clear value judgement, simply claiming that this and Hopkins’s Armchair Theatre play showed he is ‘concerned, almost obsessed, with the idea of suicide and what drives people to end their lives’ (Belfast Telegraph, 15 March 1965, p. 7).

The only wholly negative response was a thin, tiresomely abhorrent expression of homophobia compounded by lazy anti-licence fee views, from Glasgow’s Sunday Post:

The B.B.C. has done it again. Their Wednesday play, “The Horror of Darkness,” had a homosexual in our living-rooms at a peak viewing time.

This is taking realism too far.

The B.B.C. want a bigger licence fee. It seems to us they’re taking too much licence already. (14 March 1965, p. 3)

Before dwelling on the specific reactions of viewers, it’s worth noting the very large audience, as L. Marsland Gander did: especially impressive and significant in the light of its ‘”extreme”‘ content (Daily Telegraph, 26 July 1965, p. 15). It did a public service to inform and educate people about gay love and desire in the context of its legal prohibition.

However, this clearly went over the heads of rather a large section of the audience (BBC WAC, VR/65/130). 21% gave it A or A+ scores with 52% giving it C or C-, thus leading to the lowest Reaction Index so far in our Wednesday Play story (ibid.). Some comments specifically echoed Mary Whitehouse’s aim to Clean Up TV. A draughtsman stated:

Maybe the play was for intellectuals and queers, but I know one thing – no-one in my office either enjoyed it or understood it (ibid.).

This rather nasty strain of majoritarian conformism was compounded by claims the setting was so huge that it ‘bore no relation to anywhere normal people would live’ (ibid.). This view seems naive, and tellingly resentful, in disputing the reality of large London abodes for well-off couples. It certainly indicated there was an Us and Them attitude among members of the BBC viewing panel.

However, a significant minority loved this play, more in line with London critical opinion, admiring the original framings and arrangings of scenes within ‘a profound study of loneliness in the younger generation’ (ibid.). Its intelligent avoidance of a moral attitude or indeed any simplistic focus on an ‘issue’ was perceptively commended:

the whole play was so much about people and so little about homosexuality as a thing in itself, and people are the ones that matter. (ibid.)

Ultimately, however, the jerkiness and dissonance of the whole play meant many in the public who were expecting Ashes to Ashes or Campaign for One simply weren’t going to enjoy this, hoodwinked by publicity using the hackneyed ‘eternal triangle’ type rhetoric. A compositor recognised that ‘The whole thing was like a nightmare, which is probably what the author intended’ (ibid.). This individual presumably didn’t like the play, as many viewers find empathising with very different people, situations and social settings in drama difficult, especially if any formal experimentation or narrative ellipses are employed…

There were several letters to the press. A June Grundy of 47 Meredith Road, Leicester attacked Lord Ted Willis for defending depictions of sex and aggression on TV, not wanting ‘immorality’ to be ‘presented to us for our light entertainment’ (Leicester Mercury, 16 March 1965, p. 4). As a P.S., Grundy said she’d written the letter just after watching Horror of Darkness, claiming it has put her in Mary Whitehouse’s camp: ‘The fact that the acting was brilliant merely heightened the impact of the loathsomeness of abnormal and degraded human sexual behaviour’ (ibid.).

Similarly, Mary Lisle of London SW3 was affronted, speaking from a silent majority type position, implicating David Frost and John Hopkins as self-obsessed people focusing on what is amusing or interesting and not ‘higher and better’ (Sunday Telegraph, 21 March 1965, p. 27). Lisle asked: ‘Must we watch a man throwing himself on a woman and gnawing amateurishly at her for three or four minutes? Never have any of us been so manhandled. Then why should we be treated to a specimen of their craft?’ (ibid.). Comparably, Mrs. E. Cooper felt a play with a ‘negative and hopeless outlook’ made ‘most undesirable viewing’ and called for ‘more wholesome material’ (Radio Times, 25 March 1965, page unidentified).

On the same page, reducing the margin to 3:1 against, came a positive response from the fine city of Leeds: a Mrs. K. Ewart simply pronounced it ‘perfectly written, perfectly acted, perfectly produced!’ (ibid.).

Claverley’s most famous self-promoting moralist Mary Whitehouse continued her Clean Up TV campaign with a comparatively subtler response to Horror of Darkness than to some other plays – if also one which implicitly attacks permissiveness and homosexuality being represented on screen (Television Today, 1 July 1965, p. 11). She admitted it was technically ‘brilliant’, but felt its material ‘old hat’ and wanted playwrights to ‘accept their share of responsibility for the problems with which the country is wrestling, and show concern for the state of mind in which they leave audiences.’ (ibid.) Whitehouse’s letter had been prompted by script editor Vincent Tilley’s attack on the CUTV campaign for its desire to censor TV drama and stop experimentation. She also evaluates another play repeated in the Wednesday Play slot – that we will come to before too long – as an example of what she feels is more socially responsible (ibid.).

In his column, Philip Purser revealed Whitehouse’s less guarded response to Hopkins’s play: ‘a deliberate attempt to preach suicide and despair to the impressionable and the lonely’ (Sunday Telegraph, 31 July 1966, p. 11). Purser explains how fictional plays work, as if to a child:

But it no more advocates these things than “Othello” recommends husbands to strangle their wives. It shows the plight in which people can trap themselves and shows it with great compassion and skill. Watching it through a second time I admired it even more than the first. (ibid.).

Purser also noted Whitehouse’s ignorance of who Hopkins was, or that he had ‘established some claim to respect’ (ibid.). Purser, at this stage a real drama afficianado, later retreating into crusty conservatism in attacking certain Plays for Today, occasionally in parallel to Whitehouse, though in more intellectual terms. However, in 1965 at least, Purser was on the side of progressive art. Also setting himself against the ‘British puritan Philistine’ tendency, Peter Black felt the idea of a Viewers’ Council to placate Whitehouse was probably unwise, as it might give her kind too much power. Black noted how it was ‘quite easy to justify’ repeating Up the Junction and Horror of Darkness ‘by reference to their objectives’, which were clearly sensitive and serious (ibid.).

By contrast, tabloid journalist Ken Irwin subsequently bracketed Hopkins’s play as an example of ‘weird, off-beat’ plays, alongside ITV’s The Avengers, a Public Eye episode with a gay character and It’s Dark Outside, as being part of ‘a “kinky” trend’ affecting British TV, or afflicting it, in his partial view (Daily Mirror, 24 April 1965, p. 15). Derek Bennett, producer of It’s Dark Outside – which starred Veronica Strong as Claire Martin, a promiscuous ‘gay girl-about-town’ – records that the postbag was 9:1 against his show, abusively calling it ‘filthy, disgusting and too sexy’, but argues, vitally:

I still think there is an audience for dramatic emotions and situations. But viewers must grow up and be more adult. [my emphasis] (ibid.).

The BBC, in one of its bolder historical phases under DG Hugh Carleton Greene, held its nerve this time. From July 1966, Horror of Darkness was one of twelve 1965 Wednesday Plays to be repeated on BBC One in the usual Wednesday Play time slot. A BBC spokesman claimed this repeat season demonstrated how the strand ‘provided intelligent discussion on important moral issues’ (Television Today, 9 June 1966, p. 11).

It is worth emphasising: an implied 1.66 million people liked or loved this play. How many of those did it inspire to become regular vanguard viewers of The Wednesday Play/Play for Today over the next two decades? A fair few, I’d surmise… One who definitely did was TV critic and historian of gay representation Keith Howes, whose words are apt to close this article. Howes told me he deliberately watched the play on TV in a separate room to his parents:

This is your life, really, you’re watching your life, and you think oh, I just don’t want to be
this, you know, I don’t want that at all. (interviewed by the author, 21 August 2020)

Howes also noted how Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) in The Theory Of Everything (2014) watched the play on TV, which brought it full circle and was apt given Hawking’s status as an LGBTQ ally.

— Many thanks again to John Williams for locating most of the cuttings

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.06: ‘Malatesta’ (BBC1, 2 December 1964)

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

01.06: Malatesta (BBC One, Wednesday 2 December 1964) 9:25 – 11:00pm

Directed by Christopher Morahan; Written by Henry de Montherlant (stage play – 1950), translated by Jonathan Griffin, adapted by Rosemary Hill; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Roger Andrews; Music by Richard Rodney Bennett

This is another historical play for the Wednesday slot, set in Italian Renaissance in the 15th or 16th century, according to different press articles. A freelance general Malatesta plans to murder Pope Paul. I gather this play has, more broadly, been seen as a Nietzschean tale of how the ‘superior’ man has a greater vulnerability than the ‘herd’ man: as represented in the fall of the immoral hero Malatesta.

Patrick Wymark as Malatesta (L), Cyril Shaps as his biographer Porcellio (R)

This play was written in 1943-44 and published in 1946, before being staged in 1950, opening on 19 December at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. This first production was directed by none other than Jean-Louis Barrault – of Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) and La Ronde (1950) fame – who also played Malatesta.

While artistic works can be detached to a degree from the lives of their creators, it’s safe to say that this play’s dramatist had a checkered character, to say the least. Henry de Montherlant (1895-1972) came from an aristocratic Parisian family and wrote some notably misogynistic works, and was a sometime bullfighter and pederast who sexually abused street boys and openly endorsed the Nazi German invasion of France in 1940, urged the French to adapt to it and opposed the Resistance.

The postwar world was so forgiving that this Nazi collaborator was… elected to lifetime membership in the Académie Française in 1960.

Where Mr. Douglas had featured character actors old and new, Malatesta returned to the general policy of enlisting current star name performers to bolster the public profile of discrete plays. Here, Patrick Wymark plays the ruthless titular general, and was primarily known for playing the tycoon John Wilder in Wilfred Greatorex’s The Plane Makers (ATV for ITV, 1963-65), which became the equally vastly successful The Power Game (1965-69). Newspapers took the bait, with most previews emphasising the Wymark Factor; the Rugeley Times notes he is playing ‘a man of power and evil’ (28 November 1964, p. 13). That fine screen actor Cyril Shaps plays ‘a man of learning’ (Daily Mirror, 2 December 1964, p. 18).

Philip Purser stood apart from this, emphasising instead ‘Henry de Montherlant (b. 1896)’ as ‘the Charles de Gaulle of contemporary drama’ with his dialogue having a ‘Gaullist sonority’, which he discerns in The Bachelors (Rediffusion), adapted from a de Montherlant novel (Sunday Telegraph, 29 November 1964, p. 13) and which appeared on ITV the same week as this.

In opposition to Malatesta, ITV had a Norman Swallow documentary about slum clearance in Oldham, The End of a Street centring on the varied human reactions to being removed from the place they were used to.

As this play was junked, we can’t see for ourselves whether the play has a winning ‘Gaullist sonority’ and Frenchness, is a solid, more concise advance on The Borgias or is merely a ripe individualist Nietzschean débâcle…

Audience size: 4.90 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 35.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (Inside the Movie Kingdom/Curtain of Fear – part 6), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/The End of a Street/Professional Wrestling from Beckenham, Kent)

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 62.5%

Reception: Mixed towards good, with the style of play not being to all critics’ tastes, but finding favour with a slight majority and the acting, as usual, was largely praised.

The Times‘s anonymous reviewer was largely very positive, praising ‘a theatrically extravagant instalment of de Montherlant’s continuous, coldly admiring analysis of pride’ and ‘Mr. Wymark’s huge, colourful performance’, well balanced by John Glyn-Jones, ‘coolly impressive’ as the Pope (3 December 1964, p. 7). Lyn Lockwood said it was the best to date of three de Montherlant TV transfers in 1964, liking an ‘exciting play’, which gave Wymark ‘a splendid part’ and Glyn-Jones also stood out (Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1964, p. 19).

Maurice Richardson was less positive, finding it an odd pick as a TV play: ‘as difficult to get into as an apple-pie bed’; with Wymark ‘ill-at-ease’ and too ‘chubby’ as Malatesta and a total lack of action and incident in the play’s main body (Observer, 6 December 1964, p. 25). Similarly, John Russell Taylor found it ‘woefully lacking in drama’, with the ‘roaring’ Wymark and director Morahan having little ‘idea of building up some interior tension in the play to compensate for its lack of external action’ (Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In contrast, Philip Purser loved a play which confirmed de Montherlant’s ‘towering stature’ and which enhanced ‘the already considerable standing of the B.B.C.’s Wednesday series’ (Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 1964, p. 13). He praises all in the cast, especially Shaps and Edward Burnham as like ‘a pair of ageing critics under the heel of a dynamic new editor’, and he feels Wymark could assume the mantle of ‘special hero status’: i.e. heavyweight Olivier stakes (ibid.).

Outside London, A.B. in the Leicester Mercury was mixed, feeling Glyn-Jones was in keeping with the time but Wymark wasn’t enough of a ‘loathsome monster’ (3 December 1964, p. 13). Peggie Phillips expressed almost exactly the same perspective on the performances, adding that Patrick Troughton should have played Rimini, being ‘dark, spleenful and subtle’ (Scotsman, 7 December 1964, p. 8).

While some viewers found their encounter here with the Renaissance Italy era repellent and others were simply bored, generally the play received a very positive reaction from viewers, with great praise for Wymark and the ‘lavish’ settings and costumes (VR/64/642). A Textile Spinner ‘declared’ there was ‘no sense of this being a studio production at all”, which the BBC Audience Research Department saw as setting ‘the final seal of approval on a production of unusual quality’ (ibid.). This is an atypically opinionated anti-studio opinion to hear in this particular time period.

It’s notable how this and the previous two plays all scored in the 67-68 range, showing that the range of historical periods was working, even if the audience sizes for Mr. Douglas and Malatesta were notably smaller than for the contemporary The Big Breaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire Nielson, interview with author, 10 March 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Rating ** 3/4 / ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expressive finger-pointing gesture from Goodliffe!

Best Performance: JEAN ANDERSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 4.90 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 34.5%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 67%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 75%

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Observer, 29 November 1964, p. 25)

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

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

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

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

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

— With many thanks to Claire Nielson

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

Book Review: Molly Haskell (2016) FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE: THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN THE MOVIES (rev. edn.)

This is an excellent book. Molly Haskell’s deep viewing knowledge of a vast array of films provides the key to making this an expansive historical analysis of women’s representation in cinema. It is especially focused on Hollywood, but there are some insightful comparisons with European films, and different national cinemas’ distinctive ways of presenting women.

This book, originally published in 1974, does what any academic book should do, and make you want to watch the films being analysed. Helpfully, Haskell shows command of a wide field and avoids focusing too much in depth on specific case studies. She prefers to dissect the narratives of the full range of film output. Being film criticism first and feminist argument second aids the book, and Haskell makes the most eloquent critique of Laura Mulvey and John Berger’s English structuralist critique of the ‘male gaze’ that I have ever read.

Haskell argues that 1920s-40s films had a varied and evolving repertoire where women more than held their own, shifting more into the workplace with the onset of the Second World War and adapting to the reduction in sexual material due to the Hays Production Code from 1934. The Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy film, Adam’s Rib (1949) is highlighted as the apotheosis of genuinely adult Hollywood cinema, a rare instance whereby the complex negotiations of marriage, love and work are explored in an entertaining and pleasurable way.

Haskell goes onto detail a sad decline through the 1950s-70s, tracing women’s gradual erasure in films of this time – or at least their simplistic reduction. There are tantalising reflections on the impact of East Coast theatre and television’s sociological realism which could have been drawn out more, especially as she praises Cagney and Lacey and Katie and Allie late on. However, it is a convincing argument that women and cinema itself were diminished in the masculine rush to escape Classical Hollywood’s studios and make films with violence first, sex second and love relegated.

The final chapter documents an impressive 1980s resurgence of women creators behind the camera, and most especially performers in front, with 1970s Second Wave feminism belatedly influencing a staggering variety of performances which formed a counter-attack to Reaganite social conservatism.

Such an impressive book, this; Haskell’s style is laconic and sophisticated and unafraid to depart from conventional wisdoms of the past and indeed it will give people today much pause for thought and feeling.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.02: ‘In Camera’ (BBC1, 4 November 1964)

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

Due to personal circumstances, this post is incomplete, but it contains the core of my thoughts and some on the play’s reception.

01.02: In Camera (BBC One, Wednesday 4 November 1964)

Directed by Philip Saville; Written by Jean Paul Sartre (play – Huis clos, aka. No Exit, 1944), translated by Stuart Gilbert & adapted for TV by Philip Saville; Produced by ; Designed by Clifford Hatts

Now, this one is actually available to watch on YouTube, so no excuse, watch now, before reading on! :

Off-air video via the play’s screening on BBC Four in the early hours of Monday 28 June 2004

Inez (Jane Arden) is a lesbian postal clerk.

Estelle Rigault (Katherine Woodville) is from Paris, shallow, entitled.

Garcin (Harold Pinter) is a pacifist from Algiers, who stood up for his beliefs amid the Algerian War, and was executed as a result.

This is a primarily video-studio play, but with a few filmed inserts which have a cinema vérité look. At one moment, we hear a familiar track from Miles Davis’s A Kind of Blue (1959), engaging with popular modernist jazz from the Black Atlantic. Estelle and Inez dance to a tango by (I think) Emile Prud’homme Et Son Orchestre.

The play reflects on choice, willpower and acting in order to be. After a massive dramatic zoom-in, Garcin proclaims, “I was a man of action once… I’m dead and done with, a back number.” This associates with him with agonising protagonists Patrick McGoohan performed on TV, whether in Arden and Ibsen adaptations or The Prisoner (1967-68). He later reflects, “I chose the hardest way. A man is what he wills himself to be.” The play piercingly hones in here on our masculine culture’s dominant binary concepts of heroism and cowardice.

There are haunting, double-edged lines like Garcin’s “Men at least can keep their mouths shut.”

I enjoyed what I saw of BBC Four’s recent repeat of The Roads to Freedom (BBC2, 1970), David Turner’s expansive TV drama serial adaptation of Sartre’s trilogy of novels. It had a serious toughness and worldly humour, representing a fine encounter of French and British ideas, aesthetics and tones.

Sartre’s leftwards shift from “apolitical” individualism to non-party socialism, to revolutionary socialism to belief in anarchism and non-statist social movements fits the shifting trends from the 1930s-70s. His experience of German Nazi occupation and French colonialism influenced his emotional and intellectual progression towards a greater political Commitment, as encapsulated in his key late 1940s What Is Literature? Despite denunciations of bourgeois society he largely kept clear of Communism and seems in line with the New Left’s anti-Stalinist socialism with a human face.

There are also 1954 and 1962 film versions, and a 1985 TV version called Vicious Circle, directed by Kenneth Ives and featuring Omar Sharif as Garcin and Jeanne Moreau as Inez.

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

In Camera is a largely but not totally talky piece, enlivened by Saville’s direction and the performances which enact Sartre’s ideas about action and talk and being. Saville mixes long claustrophobic takes, which are invariably close-ups, two-shots or intricate three-shots – centring on the actors’ faces.

We also see elliptical images from outside, which I’m assuming are memories. Harold Pinter can be a fine actor and he fits in well here, as a man who was called up to fight in the war, but executed for deserting, in a scene we see near the play’s opening.

As I take existentialism to concern making authentic individual decisions and actions, against group conformism, this play faces the fraught complications that inevitably come with other people. Here, this is exacerbated by the three’s enforced confinement with each other. There’s no rationalist optimism or fellow feeling but individual worlds clashing, with sexual attraction and repulsion featuring significantly.

There is a pessimistic coldness in the refusal to entertain the possibility that people might find accommodation with each others’ worlds. It’s colder than Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot wherein for now Vladimir and Estragon do have each other. Here, the mention of torture and demonstration of psychological torture bring to mind Pinter’s later play One for the Road (theatre – Lyric Studio Hammersmith, 1984; TV for BBC2’s Summer Season, 1985), a chilling dissection of the language and acts of a totalitarian police state.

It seems well ahead of the general run of British TV, historically, in depicting an open lesbian character. The dead Inez expresses a relatable ennui and alienation amid modernity. While she would likely come across as incredibly haughty to many viewers today, she’s actually a more grounded and often wistful**, emotive presence than Estelle, who’s a spoiled, arrogant posho of the sort presumably familiar in many anti-super rich films today. Estelle’s utterly oblivious sense of her own superiority comes across in her voice and gestures and most pointedly in a line when she is insulting about lowly workers.

I enjoyed and was absorbed by this: its tight human close-ups being highly suited to the TV box in the corner of people’s living rooms. This viewing context enhances moments of jarring discordance, cuts to others outside who are in these people’s heads. Saville marshals them into several evocative framings and, periodically, we see their separate heads confined as the screen draws in with an effect resembling black curtains.

Clifford Hatts’s minimalist white sets also include abstract sculpture and art works, which convey this as more of an ambivalent critique of modernity than Sartre’s stage original, Huis clos.

Just as notably, the original – which I’m unfamiliar with, so please correct me if necessary – featured Garcin as a journalist whose avoidance of military service presumably in the Second World War is perceived more as an act of cowardice. Here, Saville’s TV version makes his stand a more heroic refusal: to be part of France’s colonialist war in Algeria, 1954-62. Sartre’s book of essays, Colonialism and Neocolonialism was published in France in February 1964, so there is some chance Saville and Arden read it…

Despite this, it still does not feel big-P political but rather an abstracted variant on what Raymond Williams termed ‘enclosed room’ TV dramas which explored interpersonal conflicts behind closed doors in domestic settings – with public affairs offstage. Thus, I’m sure this garnered some of the many viewers familiar with Armchair Theatre, which of course had included not just the crucial Alun Owen, but also Harold Pinter himself, a superb dramatist of everyday menace and absurdity.

There’s no surprise that director Philip Saville and his then-wife Jane Arden went to work on The Logic Game for BBC2’s experimental film slot, Six (9 January 1965). This is also an impressive and more eccentric work, which, I dare say, some viewers may find even tougher going than In Camera, but I’d urge people to give it a go!

**Unsurprising to see the luminous Jeanne Moreau cast in the role in 1985, who is utterly superb in Louis Malle’s existentialist crime thriller Lift to the Scaffold (1958), which has a specially composed Miles Davis underscore.

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

While all three actors are good in the roles, it’s unquestionably got to be Jane Arden, a magnetic force. Her deep intelligence and seriousness comes across in her role of the transgressive lesbian “coward” Inez.

Her voice is powerful, modulated and a stiller, subtle centre against Katherine Woodville’s faster, more shrill delivery and greater movement as Estelle. A self-professed ‘bitch’ who calls Estelle likewise, Arden portrays a complex, intellectual lesbian, who states some of the more tangible messages of the play.

Arden’s voice is grandiloquent (listen to her sardonic pronunciation of “hero!” while languishing back on the bench). Her fringe itself is stark and transfixing and her tired eyes carry a depressive, compelling power. We fully believe we are with her in this eternal Hell of the enclosed room, in camera, with no exit.

Jane Arden, born in Pontypool, Monmouthshire in Wales in 1927 was a major figure in underground British theatre and filmmaking in her collaborations with Jack Bond, which IIRC began with the extraordinary documentary Dali in New York, where she brings a burning intelligence and to reveal Dali’s autocratic and misogynistic tendencies. Arden had studied at RADA in the 1940s, moving into film and TV acting and writing. Clearly, her ultra enunciated RP tones in this play come from her RADA training. I’m assuming she had at least something more of a Welsh accent growing up…I

I’m glad to say that this isn’t the last time we’ll encounter Jane Arden in this story, though it’s a matter of historical regret that she never wrote a Wednesday Play or Play for Today herself. That would have been something remarkable…

Best line: One line for this play…? Nah!

“Forget about the others…? How utterly absurd. I feel you in every pore… Silence clamours in my ears..You can nail up your mouth, you can cut your tongue out, but it doesn’t prevent you being there… Can you stop your thoughts? I can hear them ticking away like a clock: tick, tick, tick… And I’m sure that you can hear mine. It’s no good sulking on your seat. Every sound comes to me soiled because you’ve intercepted it on the way. You’ve even stolen my face. You know it and I don’t. And you’ve stolen her from me. Do you think she’d dare treat me as she does if we were alone?! I’ll never leave you in peace… That would suit your book too well. You’d go on sitting there, like a Yogi in a trance. Even if I didn’t see her, I’d feel her in my bones. Knowing that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress for your benefit. Throwing you smiles that you didn’t even see. Well, I won’t stand for that. I prefer to choose my Hell.” (Inez)

Of course, Garcin’s “Hell is other people” is crucial to the play, but you know that already, so I have opted for a great monologue that Jane Arden delivers with focused intensity, seen behind Harold Pinter, both faces in frame.

Also, “You can’t throttle thoughts with hands!” (Inez)

Audience size: 5.88 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (N/A), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Billy Fury Show/Wrestling)

BBC2 figures clearly weren’t being calculated or at least published, even internally, at this point.

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 100%

This figure excludes the Daily Telegraph and New Statesman which did not have TV columns directly following this broadcast. John Williams, who has helped with cuttings, did not uncover any regional press reviews, interestingly.

Reception: The London press reaction was largely positive about most aspects of the play, especially the acting, with most but not all critiquing aspects of the visual style.

The Times‘ anonymous reviewer felt that Arden and Pinter’s characters ‘ground each other savagely away’, seeing Estelle as more an instrument to torture them, but finding Jonathan Harris ‘extremely menacing’ as the Valet (5 November 1964, p. 16). While they found the shots of outside the room/hell less effective, ‘the close groupings and limited movement in front of the camera reinforced the play’s thesis’ (ibid.)

Mary Crozier in the Guardian went even further in admiring a TV ‘event’ which had an appropriate intensity in conveying imprisonment and suffering (5 November 1964, p. 9). Crozier disliked the ‘dark shadows closing in on each side of the face of one of the speakers whenever he of she went into monologue’, and like the Times reviewer she (presumably) wrongly ascribed this to producer Peter Luke rather than director Saville (ibid). She was even more favourable towards the cast, finding Arden ‘very affecting’ (ibid.).

Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail stuck up for the play against the ‘droves’ who telephoned the BBC to grumble’ about In Camera, far preferring its moral seriousness to Frederick Knott’s play Write Me A Murder (BBC2), ‘which toys endlessly and boringly with murder, and not a soul complains’ (6 November 1964, p. 3). I’m impressed by Furlong’s disappointment at BBC2 failing to cater for ‘intelligent minorities’ here (ibid.). She was well ahead of, say, Chris Dunkley in 1982 with his reactionary broadsides against Channel 4.

Maurice Richardson in the Observer noted how the play had been recorded earlier in the year for Festival but held back, and was glad of this ‘glossily superior, genuinely compulsive viewing’ (8 November 1964, p. 25). He admired Pinter’s sensitivity and control and Catherine Woodville’s ‘correct suggestion of fathomless greed’, and the play having the ‘peculiar quality of a tragedy in which the purge is forever withheld’ (ibid.). Like most other reviewers, Richardson disapproved of the ‘totally egregious pseudo-cinematic capers’ which interrupted the actions, but felt that a great play survived these, and quite liked the set design being akin to a modern art gallery (ibid.). He felt this cliffhanger play made Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide 1964 election victory – an actual landslide, not like Biden in 2020 or Trump in 2024 – over Barry Goldwater seem an anticlimax (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times dissented from the general consensus, finding Sartre’s philosophical insights ‘squalid’ and banal (8 November 1964, p. 44). There is a clear anti-intellectualism underlying Wiggin’s rhetoric:

I don’t know why they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to this bore: there isn’t a market gardener who has not done more for peace – simply by living his fruitful life, in decent silence. I don’t wonder that the gap between our ever-growing population of sensitive squealing intellectuals, and the multitude who do the world’s work – and live its abundant life.

Wiggin far preferred Knott’s BBC2 ‘entertainment’ Write Me a Murder. As we shall see, the audience, in their collective diversity, rejected Wiggin’s simple-minded binary perspective. The Sunday Times subsequently printed one bluff letter in support of Wiggin from Sussex and two correcting his misinterpretation of Sartre’s play and ‘message’: David Cooper in Oxford and the imperious Mrs Angela M. Aspinwall of WC1, London (15 November 1964, p. 10).

Marjorie Norris in Television Today was, largely, an outlier the opposite way to Wiggin, loving Saville’s three-dimensional visual direction and claiming it seemed Sartre’s play had been written for television, though even she found some fault with the fragmentary glimpses outside the room (12 November 1964, p. 12). Norris liked Hatts’s set design and found it ‘impossible to distinguish’ between the actors in their excellence, admiring Jane Arden’s ‘tortured eyes’ and Pinter as ‘a sensitive (and good looking) actor’ (ibid.). Norris faults a 30-second segment around 10:30pm where she heard a backstage ‘racket’ which shouldn’t have been there, but the quality of the acting forced her to ignore it (ibid.).

John Russell Taylor saw it as the ‘event of the month in drama’, acclaiming Saville as the ‘nearest thing we have – or are probably likely to get – to an Orson Welles of the small screen’, being fascinated to see whether he would succeed or fail (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915). While Taylor doesn’t especially like Sartre’s play – ‘intellectual grand guignol, ingeniously put together but terribly thin and mechanical once one sees how it works’ – he felt Saville did a ‘brilliant job’, even admiring most of the flashbacks, as they are so subliminal (ibid.). Taylor’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:

And it was, surely, a piece of self-discipline akin to genius on Philip Saville’s part to refrain until just before the end from doing the obvious, inevitable thing, shooting the three on their separate couches from immediately above, so that when at last the shot appeared it came with full dramatic force instead of looking like just another piece of applied technical bravura. (ibid.)

In line with all other critics bar the leaden Wiggin, Taylor extols the acting, highlighting both Arden and Pinter’s status as playwrights.

The BBC audience research report (VR/64/589) is a fascinating document which speaks to the emotional intelligence of a majority of viewers at the time, and their varied personal responses.

‘I am quite sure I shall never forget it, but I certainly didn’t like it.’ (Housewife)

‘Really way out. I just had to watch it. One could feel the torment of mind portrayed.’ (Caretaker [in the year of the Pinter film!])

‘Just like a cross-section of clients in my waiting-room. Quite brilliantly written to make the point that “hell is other people”.’ (Social Worker)

None of the comments reported suggest neutrality or indifference. These are strong reactions: 47% either A+/A in the ratings and 30% the lower C/C- ratings with just 23% in the middle with a B.

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. 🙂

Book review: Liz Smith (2006) OUR BETTY: SCENES FROM MY LIFE

As with many memoirs of famous people, this has greatest power in its reflections on childhood, growing up and life before fame. Smith’s fame has been as a skilled character actor, not any sort of star, but nevertheless the latter half of the book is rendered blander by the very human diplomacy and tact she adopts in discussing people she had worked with, and still might work with.

That said, this book is a resounding corrective to any idea of Liz Smith as a cuddly, mild eccentric. While ‘I love playing nutty creatures in eccentric outfits’ (p. 145), Our Betty establishes the reality of her as a perceptive observer and unconventional performer, able to move from sitcoms to social realism to Samuel Beckett absurdism, with these experiences blending into and informing each other.

Smith reflects on her love of cinema growing up in 1920s Scunthorpe, noting films like The Singing Fool, Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway alongside The Variety Theatre and strolling players doing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a boxing ring below the railway lines. Her mother died when she was two, and her father deserted her when she was seven, after several prefiguring instances of his irresponsibility. Adopted by her Grandma, she got fascinated by performance when at school: ‘That was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. Make people laugh, have lots of lights, no gloom and no oil lamps.’ (p. 50)

One of her most vivid childhood memories of playing in the street constitutes one of the most magnificently bleak ripostes imaginable to any ‘good old days’ nostalgic romanticising (pp. 21-2). There are also fascinating tales of her Grandad and the 1926 General Strike and how life working in the steel furnace was ‘pure theatre’ (p. 27). The segment about the Plough Jags reads like a condensed, five-paragraph J.G. Ballard short story rooted in Scunthorpe strangeness (pp. 27-9).

It’s fascinating to read about her time in Portobello from the late 1940s, at art and then drama school, moving in a milieu including Rita Webb, Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and even Diana Dors. She seems to have far preferred this life in a London ‘village’ than in the suburbs near Epping Forest that she subsequently moved to in the 1950s. Smith, who had worked at the impressively open and democratic sounding Gateway Theatre (pp. 82-3), joined the Unity Theatre and then Charles Marowitz’s experimental group which rehearsed at Fitzroy Square. They all needed day jobs to manage this, as Marowitz paid them no money for their evening work. She had some great creative experiences with Marowitz, but the economic side of it seems exploitative and he dropped them abruptly to go to the RSC with Peter Brook.

The creative heart of the book is Smith’s association with Mike Leigh, who cast her in his feature film, Bleak Moments (1971) and then Smith’s first of seven Play for Today roles: in Leigh’s Hard Labour (1973). The section on the latter (pp. 131-7) is riveting. It provides insight concerning Smith’s creative input into her role as Mrs Thornley, ‘a woman who worked for others. Like a slave’ (p. 133). At a time when Chantal Akerman has now supplanted male auteurs in Sight and Sound’s greatest films ever poll, Hard Labour stands as Play for Today’s most prescient and subtle feminist drama of 1973, alongside Nemone Lethbridge’s more baroque Baby Blues. Smith’s enactment of Mrs Thornley’s painful life was meticulously researched but clearly also has some roots in her own experience of dull and exploitative labour (p. 54, 120-1). Smith relished Leigh’s rigorous and challenging ethos; working with Leigh continued her learning process with Marowitz, but was more fairly rewarded and lasting. Hard Labour enjoyed the vast luxury of eight weeks of improvisations followed by a month of shooting, all enabled by a BBC steered in a radical direction by producer Tony Garnett.

Call me a doyen of Play for Today’s ‘deep cuts’ if you will, but I do just wish she had reflected on playing Miss Pritchett in Elaine Feinstein’s Breath (1975); she is unnerving in that, channelling elements of Whitehouse and Thatcher, and showing her vast acting range.

The latter section has some fine vignettes on the more unusual side of British TV and film. We hear about Smith working on the likes of Peter Tinniswood’s offbeat I Didn’t Know You Cared (pp. 147-9), with its variety of settings, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), by Viv Stanshall whom she rightly calls ‘wonderful’, Peter Greenaway’s tremendously original The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and a series for children called Pirates. We learn how Smith features in a student film production involving Timothy Spall, Sanscape. While she absolutely adored the experience of being in LA for various projects, film productions often fell through or parts got cut.

Apt given her lifelong love of the cinema medium, Smith also provides a welcome roster of now neglected films of the 1980s-90s: A Private Function (1984), Apartment Zero (1988), High Spirits (1988), We Think the World of You (1988), The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) and La Nona (1991) for BBC2’s erformance play strand, alongside drag artiste extraordinaire Les Dawson.

Smith makes the crucial point that The Royle Family, which she calls a career ‘highlight’, felt deeply naturalistic due to the lack of an audience, which naturally leads to larger, communicative performances, but it was also performed as scripted and totally without improvisation (p. 209-10).

Smith comes across as a perceptive and caring person: a long time vegetarian who loves animals, commits to charitable activities, including Water Aid, and reflects on childhood memories of encountering one Black man locally (pp. 30-1) and her cosmopolitan experiences as a WREN in the Second World War (pp. 58-67). On the final page, she recounts sitting in a favourite armchair and how she listens to Al Bowlly every day and takes joy in her family life, which was clearly far more stable for the younger generations than hers was.

Book review: Colin Chambers (ed.) (2018) PEGGY TO HER PLAYWRIGHTS: THE LETTERS OF MARGARET RAMSAY, PLAY AGENT

This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.

I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.

While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.

Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.

This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’

Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.

As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.