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.

03.01: Alice (BBC One, Wednesday 13 October 1965) 9:05 – 10:20pm
Directed by Gareth Davies; Written by Dennis Potter; Lewis Carroll (books); Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Michael Wield; Music by Peter Greenwell

The play, set in the Oxford of 100 years ago, started slowly with a long sequence of shots of college architecture which led me to expect that John Betjeman would walk in and tell us all about it. Unfortunately he did not. (Western Daily Press, 14 October 1965, p. 7).

I’m fascinated, with Dodgson, how considerable art can come from repression. (Dennis Potter in 1983, speaking of his film Dreamchild; cited in Humphrey Carpenter, 1998, p. 177).

Welcome back! Series 3 of The Wednesday Play was coming into being as The Wednesday Thriller – which I didn’t bother assessing – was airing over the summer ‘break’. As Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams’s excellent endnotes to their collection of Potter’s non-fiction clarify, location material was shot from 21-28 August 1965, while studio dates fell on 14-16 September 1965 (Dennis Potter: The Art of Invective – Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94, 2015, p. 338). According to Humphrey Carpenter (1998, p. 158), writer Dennis Potter, already highly prolific, was paid £750 for Alice, a play centring on Charles Dodgson and the Liddell family and their influence on his creation – as Lewis Carroll – of Alice in Wonderland a century ago.

The first mention in press cuttings I’ve located concerning Alice predates the shoot: noting that John Saunders would be appearing as the March Hare ‘in a play dealing with the life of Lewis Carroll’ (The Stage and Television Today, 5 August 1965, p. 11). The Radio Times billing was to indicate that Thornton was played by John Steiner, who ‘appears by permission of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company’ (7 October 1965, page unclear).

Dennis Potter’s play was to tell the story of how Charles Dodgson ‘came to write his classic’ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); this preview claims the Oxford don ‘came alive […] IN THE company of the little girl to whom he told stories’, but who ‘”died” a little in the shadows of his lonely room’ (Liverpool Echo, 9 October 1965, p. 2). Previewer Ken Hankins termed Dodgson ‘a strangely complex personality’, in a play which opens a season of 13, starting George Baker as Dodgson and Deborah Watling as Alice (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 9 October 1965, page unclear).

Glasgow’s Daily Record‘s basic preview claimed the scene ‘is set with a rowing boat sailing slowly down the river’, as stuttering clergyman Dodgson tells Alice his tales (13 October 1965, p. 15). The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail also featured a – different – photo of Rosalie Crutchley, playing Mrs. Liddell, looking imposing with her long, serious face (13 October 1965, p. 3). The Staffordshire Evening Sentinel was one of two West Midlands papers to note that the previous Wednesday Play series reached an average audience of 7.5 million, while previewing this new play, set in 1860s Oxford: ‘a gentle story’ dealing with ‘the anguish behind the magic’ (13 October 1965, p. 6). This preview also claims that director Gareth Davies ‘took his camera to Oxford to capture the lyrical authenticity of an England at peace with itself’ (ibid.).

Geoff Lane noted how The Wednesday Play’s previous series’ audiences were ‘well outside the normal catchment for straight drama’, though that despite this success, he found the season ‘a hotch-potch, lacking any overall theme or direction’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 13 October 1965, p. 11). Notably, Lane claims the 13 new plays are ‘designed to appeal to all tastes’, having ‘a common approach to life, that of the documentary’ – surely emphasising Tony Garnett’s fresh input (ibid.).

Garnett, the strand’s story editor, noted how excited he and others in the team were about the new series: ‘In office and pub, late into the night and through marathon weekends, I have enjoyed the company of a number of Britain’s most stimulating writers’, some new to TV, others previous Wednesday Play discoveries or established writers joining for the first time (Radio Times, 7 October 1965, p. 47). Garnett claimed ‘Each week will be a surprise’, given how ‘individual’ each writer is, and that, contrary to what Lane implies, ‘the series will not run to a set formula – pace, style, setting, and subject will vary from week to week’ (ibid.).

However, Garnett claims there are commonalities:

Whether we are in the year 1865 or 1970, in a mining village or an Oxford college, with an aristocrat or an astronaut, we shall try to face things as they really are. We are not in the wish-fulfilment business. We will try to show the real hopes and conflicts of some ordinary – and some extraordinary – people, honestly and directly (ibid.).

Garnett claims that they will need to break rules, and while not setting out to offend, ‘we may be provocative – but out of compassion that comes from a concern for human beings. We invite you to join us and hope you will be with us every Wednesday (ibid.). This is crucially hedged humanistic language, rather than confrontational Marxism: much likelier therefore to engage the average Radio Times reader.

Echoing Garnett, Geoff Lane’s preview (op. cit.) goes on:

The aim is to find the drama of real life, in the street and in the home; escapism and sentimentality will definitely be avoided by all the contributors. This does not mean a season of kitchen-sinks – the plays will be about extraordinary as well as ordinary people, and the settings may be historical.

Alice is one of these, delving ‘into the strange and contradictory circumstances’ in which Dodgson’s storytelling began (ibid.). Potter’s second Wednesday Play was promoted by a Radio Times front page photograph of Deborah Watling in the foreground with a blurry rustic landscape behind her (7 October 1965, p. 1). Watling, 17 when this was shot and broadcast, would later play another Victorian, Victoria Waterfield, as travelling companion of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor in Doctor Who in 1967-68.

Jack Bell in the Daily Mirror interviewed Potter, who was “a bit worried about how people will react. As a book, Alice seems to rank second only to the Bible. When we started recording some of the studio staff said that we shouldn’t do this to Dodgson, that we should leave him alone.” (13 October 1965, p. 18). Potter is said to show Dodgson as ‘a celibate – and repressed – clergyman with a bad stutter and a fear of women’; himself noting that Alice was the only ‘love’ of his life and that as she grew up; “his books deteriorated. And when she married an undergraduate, he gave up the one hobby he was good at, photography. He obviously suffered tremendous disappointment and rage.” (ibid.).

Potter based his play on Dodgson’s diaries, while Bell notes Mrs Liddell destroyed his letters to her daughter Alice; the playwright notes his subject “couldn’t stand talking to adult women” and was “a very prudish man who would storm out of the theatre if anything questionable was said on stage” (ibid.). Potter claims his aim was simply to “know more about the author” of “one of the best-written books ever.” (ibid.).

Tony Garnett noted how the play asked why Dodgson seems ‘so downcast in spirit, so anxious to cling to the moment?’ when he is with Alice, and that the answers are ‘moving and unexpected’ (op. cit.). He notes Potter’s ‘tenderness and understanding, bringing alive the public world of the Mad Hatter and the private world of its creator’, and how it will surprise those who have long loved the books, and ‘might move’ those who have dismissed them ‘as mere yarns designed to keep the children quiet’ (ibid.).

Before outlining my own responses to Alice, here is Dennis Potter expert John Cook’s interpretive commentary, inspired by watching the play again recently.

John Cook writes: On the surface, a period drama, set amongst the sleepy Oxford spires of one hundred years earlier, hardly seems to have been the most appropriate way to kick off the 1965 run of The Wednesday Play following its summer break.  This was about as far from ‘agitational contemporaneity’ – the words Head of BBC TV Drama Sydney Newman would later use in the press to characterise the overall tone of The Wednesday Play slot – as you could possibly get.  But look closer and one sees the challenge and the provocation underlying the comfortable period surroundings and the cut-glass accents – that ‘authentic lump of white gristle’ (The Sun, 15 February 1968) lurking within the evening’s bland TV viewing which Dennis Potter would come to prize about The Wednesday Play. 

For at the heart of Potter’s second transmitted TV play is a worry: was one of the greatest works of imagination in the history of English literature really the product of a closet paedophile ? Here, the play walks a careful knife-edge both in terms of scripting and performance.  Was the Reverend Charles L Dodgson, real-life Lewis Carroll, simply an odd eccentric of the Victorian age – a man who wished to arrest time ?  Perhaps this is the reason why, in the play, he loves to capture little girls through photography before they change and grow up and why he rails against any modernisation to his beloved Christ Church College, Oxford, where he has spent his life as a mathematics tutor.  Or is there something darker?  Why does Dodgson talk about ‘marriage’ at one point in the play with ten year old Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church college and real-life model for his ‘Alice’ in Alice in Wonderland?

And why does Alice’s mother worry so much about the relationship she burns Dodgson’s many letters to her daughter?  Is there a hidden darkness beneath Dodgson’s visions of the ‘wonderland’ of childhood?  Or is it the so-called ‘adult’ world which is the dark place, with its constant suspicions and instant judgments about the behaviours and motives of others who in the end are simply different?  The key line of the play is when Mrs Liddell stares out of her window at night, her image reflected back in the window pane, and says she has never liked to look from a lighted room into the dark because the reflection comes between you and the dark outside: ‘You have to be in the dark yourself to see into the black out there’.     

These were themes disturbing and uncomfortable for 1965 – even more so now.  This is why Alice (in spite of some dated aspects to direction and performance, especially the realisation of the fantasy scenes from Alice in Wonderland) remains an affecting play to watch here. It is best viewed alongside Potter’s feature film Dreamchild (dir.: Gavin Millar, 1985), which was released almost exactly twenty years later. Here, Potter revisited the events from Alice but this time from the perspective of Alice Liddell when, as an eighty year old, she sails to America in 1932 to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University in recognition of being the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland but who through this process finds herself troubled by the same dark adult suspicions about whether Dodgson’s intentions for her were really ‘pure’.  In the course of the film, the elderly Alice has to take a journey inside her own memories and Dodgson’s imagination (via scenes from Alice in Wonderland expertly recreated by Jim Henson’s Creatures Workshop) to try to find some answers and gain some form of emotional closure.  This she succeeds in doing, finally realising at the end that Dodgson’s work was indeed created out of a genuine innocent love for her as a gift to ensure her immortality.   

Written twenty years earlier, in a splurge of creativity as he seized his newly discovered ‘vocation’ as a television playwright (notebooks in the Potter Archive show contemporaneous drafting with Stand Up, Nigel Barton), Alice therefore looks forward to and foreshadows many of the major themes that would later come to define Dennis Potter as a writer: the worlds of fantasy and non-naturalism; the interrelations between life and fiction; childhood and innocence but also the spectre of adult sexual abuse out of that innocence. Already, Alice seethes with these themes in ways that might have made it seem odd and uncharacteristic to those at the time who had previously seen Potter as principally a writer of political and social critique but which seem wholly characteristic and in keeping now. 

Now, for my assessment of the play…

Rating: *** 1/2

This immerses you in Charles Dodgson’s distinctly unusual life and times, with a clear sense of a modernistic but nuanced 1965 lens on distant oddities and fundamental clashes – childhood/adulthood; tradition/change. Potter’s drama enables regular moments of excruciating awkwardness, making it clear how Dodgson’s stammer and his sexual repression (as according to the 1930s Freudian revisionist view of him, anyway) made him both apart from and a part of Victorian society.

The play goes a bit further than may seem wise in suggesting that he is repressing paedophilic urges towards Alice, given that evidence actually suggests he was attracted to adult women, but his socially conservative family subsequently excised these elements from his diaries, matching his own prudishness which Potter dramatised here. However, playwrights ought to have dramatic licence to portray long dead real people in whatever way they deem necessary, and Potter – himself a victim of sexual abuse in childhood – creates an unsettling, complexly ambiguous and fraught portrayal of a situation. Dodgson may be perceived to be doing good by sublimating his sexuality into his work; for once, Victorian hypocrisies and inhibitions helping. Or, he may simply be innocent in his intentions.

Overall, it remains a mystery exactly what his feelings were – and his sexuality – and it seems a total fool’s errand to use his photography as relevant ‘evidence’, given it was a standard Victorian aesthetic practice to – bizarrely to us today – feature nude children in Christmas cards and the like. A contested 2015 BBC documentary seems to have been blinded by Yewtree era hysteria in perceiving what was unlikely to be there, playing credence in one particular image which there’s no evidence is even linked with Dodgson.

Potter incisively portrays social frostiness and the Liddells’ well-to-do distant family life as being just as strange as Dodgson, himself termed “a rum sort” and “a loony” at different points. It’s made implicitly clear that Rosalie Crutchley’s mother is an influence on Dodgson for the Queen of Hearts – relating to his oddly possessive view of Alice – yet we also sympathise with her sensitivity to what might be really going on, and her loneliness, with her husband utterly mired in dulling habits. Her husband, the Dean Liddell, also brilliantly played by the excellent David Langton, is deeply attuned to the institutional politics of Oxford University, and advances a nominally “progressive” view, favouring changes to buildings and infrastructural improvements. This is admirable in context, compared with Dodgson’s utterly stubborn desire that nothing ever changes: wanting time pickled in aspic. But the Dean’s lack of attentiveness to his wife and daughters seems utterly arrogant and detached: symbolising the Victorian man of public affairs whose private sphere is simply an appendage.

The climactic picnic by the lake scene is devastatingly well written and played, revealing the diseased social imagination of practically all characters gathered. One of the young men, seemingly interested in the Liddell daughters, develops Alice’s scornful attitude to Irish labourers in an especially nasty vein. Alice herself finds this highly amusing and joins in with this gauche, venomous banter.

Lorina is markedly more sympathetic in criticising them, but even this is merely from the perspective that their ‘Oirish’ impressions are not technically good.

The mother here shows how she has influenced her daughters’ social prejudices, part of the adult world that indeed deserves critique and needs remedy. Dodgson then stumbles pitifully through ‘The Mock Turtle’s Dance’: Potter’s drama clarifying how adrift he is in his innocence, and making you feel for him more than if the family and male posho hangers-on had been expressing a more refined worldly outlook. For me, this scene’s portrayal of Dodgson’s abashed innocence overrides the ambiguous darker hints elsewhere to strongly imply he is not a paedophile.

Overall, the effect is to show how they are all adrift in different ways. It does not need directly communicating how these idle rich prattlers are clearly offering much less that is socially useful than, say, Irish navvy labourers who built the UK’s railways.

Dodgson, too, is clearly made to seem a distant out-of-touch Tory in bemoaning anything “mechanical”, including trains – where he unhappily resides at the play’s bookending scenes – and seems implacably opposed to any changes that may make lives easier for the majority, or even update existing Oxford architecture. The way he speaks to the labourer on the ladder is absurdly offhand, showing the ingrained entitlement of his class, however awkwardly expressed.

Potter therefore satirises the whole of Oxford society, especially these principals, as staid and apt influences for Carroll’s gallery of nonsense-spouting, hidebound animals in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He indicates that Carroll’s genius was in how Dodgson keenly observed patterns of behaviour and speech around him, and then converted them into entertaining, eccentric fantasy. He also shows how Carroll’s storytelling was, implicitly – perhaps unknown to Dodgson himself – self-critical: a queasy, yet necessary, outlet for a brilliant, but restless and addled mind marooned in childlike innocence and disturbed by changes in the material and intellectual worlds.

Gareth Davies, Potter’s customary director in the 1960s, handles the drama subtly. There are relatively long takes with necessary, occasional close-ups and camera movement, and the mise-en-scene displays Baker’s, Watling’s, Langton’s and Crutchley’s performances to best advantage.

The latter pair’s distant domestic scene – where she burns Dodgson’s letters – is textbook Ibsenite naturalist staging rendered carefully clear to TV viewers. Editing is occasionally used with stylistic force, as when Dodgson expresses a rare, odd joy when he has sorted out his present to Alice (which he never gives, it being superseded by his gift of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to her). The very abrupt cut from his glee has a harsh dissonance which mirrors, and further underscores, the play’s initial view of Dodgson’s suppressed urges.

I’d say, overall, this is a curiously overlooked play, absent from Wednesday Play canons, perhaps due to how it is extremely wince-making, comparably even to Abigail’s Party and The Office, but depicting a world far stranger and more temporally distant. This is one of Potter’s complex and intelligent dissections of the lines between an individual’s creative labour and their own lives. While it initially seems on the side of the 1930s revisionist view of Dodgson – which may have been Freudian projections of what was not there, or unlikely to be – it carefully does not preclude other interpretations, and indeed I am finally convinced of Dodgson’s innocence, even if he is an infuriating personage!

Fundamentally, Alice is also yet another Wednesday Play which undermines heroic myths. It also forwards a bleak view of Victorian life in Oxford at that time, exposing social coldness and distance, and how those favouring progress and those against it were both marred by their vast blind spots, domestically and publicly. It makes clear how the boat excursion where Dodgson first creates fantasy stories was a necessary historic moment, initiating one of the most powerfully surreal stories ever fashioned. Thus, while it is rather scathing about Dodgson as a man, Potter’s play pays tribute to his art – even if the extracts from it are a tad underpowered, and the play’s only main weakness.

Best performance: ROSALIE CRUTCHLEY

The playing is really well-judged throughout. As Dodgson, George Baker gives a performance of tremulous discomfort and headstrong priggishness. It must have been a tough ask to play, but he does an excellent job of evoking a strange, precious, precise and painfully upright middle-aged man, who is – rightly or wrongly in biographical terms – suffering from some form of arrested development.

Deborah Watling and Tessa Wyatt convey the performative Victorian ideal of young womanhood. David Langton is floridly confident and genial, anticipating his Upstairs, Downstairs character Richard Bellamy – his voice barely different – while also expertly enacting the Dean’s obliviousness and carelessness. Billy Russell has a grizzled charm early on as a working-class gardener.

Overall, I have to award it to Rosalie Crutchley, who ranges from blank Brechtian non-playing and Pinteresque elision to icy strength and brittle social callousness. Her performance is only mentioned by one of the many TV critics who assessed the play (none of them mention Langton!).

Best line: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland… [sighs] With inadequate drainage, no doubt…” (Dean Liddell).

Audience size: 5.69 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 37.7%

The opposition: BBC-2 (New Release / The Vintage Years of Hollywood: The Bank Dick [1940]), ITV (News / Cliff and the Shadows / The House on the Beach)

Audience Reaction Index: 62%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted:

Reception: Broadly very positive, by the press in and outside London: one of the best received Wednesday Plays so far. One or two took more of an aversion to the unsavoury representation of Dodgson’s infatuation with Alice, but more tended to see this as an emotional attachment overstepping the mark. Viewers were also largely positive, but with some reservations.

An anonymous critic noted an attempt to ‘penetrate the world of the awkward, starting, puritanical mathematics don who called himself Lewis Carroll’ and was shown as ‘aware of but unreconciled to time’ in his too deep attachment to Alice Liddell (Times, 14 October 1965, p. 16). They perceptively described ‘a sad, sometimes painfully embarrassing play’, of ‘desolate power’ with Baker’s ‘bravura’ performance insisting ‘that the viewer squirmed with him’ (ibid.). They also acclaimed how Potter used Lorina’s climactic reading from Alice in Wonderland as ‘a singularly courageous piece of writing’ in context: emphasising Dodgson becoming reconciled to Alice growing into adolescence (ibid.).

Peter Black described a seemingly new Wednesday Play title sequence, which he felt was totally ‘incongruous’ in its contemporaneity to Potter’s ‘dramatised feature’ which followed (Daily Mail, 14 October 1965, p. 3). Black loved ‘the authentic magic’ of the dramatised excerpts from Carroll’s Alice… books, but felt the play lacked ‘tenderness and understanding’, with Alice compared to Lolita and Dodgson not emerging as credibly human (ibid.). He also felt that Oxford as depicted didn’t feel like it had a wider life beyond the ‘persons of the drama’ (ibid.). However, Black liked the ‘unexpected touch of wit’ in Maurice Hedley’s performance as Mr. Macmillan, the publisher, ‘got up to bear a striking likeness to his grandson, Harold’ Macmillan (ibid.).

Mary Crozier saw how Potter’s tale underlined Dodgson’s ‘sadness’, noting she would have liked more of his stories’ ‘absolute logic and conviction’, to leave a ‘heavy’ narrative of ‘loneliness’ (Guardian, 14 October 1965, p. 9). In contrast to Black, Crozier found it ‘sensitive and imaginative’, aided by ‘excellent photography’, with George Baker making Carroll ‘touching’ (ibid.). Crozier found Watling overly ‘mature’, like many juvenile leads at this time, while it was ‘odd’ how a rowing boat remained stationary as Carroll told his tale in 1862, though, overall director Davies ‘secured a quiet, unhurried mood’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood would have liked more probing of Dodgson’s psychological ‘make-up’, feeling the dissolves into Alice in Wonderland extracts ‘intruded upon the mood that was being created’ (Daily Telegraph, 14 October 1965, p. 18). Yet, Lockwood felt the end sequence had ‘the spirit of melancholy, the atmosphere of time gone beyond recall’, being ‘beautifully and completely caught’ (ibid.). She felt Baker got much greater opportunity to act than usual, and regarded Watling’s performance as ‘charming’ (ibid.).

Sunday coverage included Maurice Richardson, who perceived that Dodgson’s ‘passion’ for Alice ‘appears to have been more or less sublimated’ (Observer, 17 October 1965, p. 25). Thus, he questioned Potter’s portrayal of Dodgson’s ‘barely repressed, volcanically smouldering paedophilia’, and Watling’s Alice being so ‘preposterously nubile and provocative that it was poor old Dodgson who stood in need of care and protection’ (ibid.). Richardson felt that Baker struggled manfully with his part, but that it wasn’t a ‘very happy exercise in documentary reconstruction’: ‘a desperate cloud of telly-vulgarity hung heavy’, and it was a misstep to include the scenes from the book (ibid.). However, he did like the interview scene between Carroll and Macmillan (ibid.).

While Maurice Wiggin didn’t see all the play, he felt able to express that “everyone” had found it beautiful and it was, with Baker’s Dodgson ‘one of those fully imaginative possessions, or re-possessions, which haunt the memory’ (Sunday Times, 17 October 1965, p. 49).

The play was quite widely reviewed outside London. Argus found it something ‘new, surprising and different’, fulfilling the strand’s promise via a ‘mature and moving drama’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 14 October 1965, p. 17). ‘It was juvenile yet sophisticated; profound yet fairy-like. A magnificent play which would have appealed equally to fans of “Watch With Mother” or followers of “BBC-3.” (ibid.). This most glowing review needed with a claim that, if this BBC quality was maintained, ‘ATV’s drama section will have something to worry about’ (ibid.).

Peggy Philips thought Alice a ‘beautifully written examination’ of Dodgson and the Liddells, with the script having ‘outstanding verbal precision’ and ‘poetry’ (The Scotsman, 14 October 1965, p. 7). The acting added to an ‘enthralling play, rich in sympathetic insight’:

going far beyond the dingy psychoanalytical into a personal tragedy which, contrary to the publisher’s estimate of “Alice in Wonderland,” was shown to be indeed “distilled out of some private agony.”

Philips saw Alice’s ‘brisk, unwitting cruelty that springs from a child’s innocent and careless view of adults’, with the play clarifying that ‘the tormented Mr Dodgson subconsciously avenged his wounds by making her so very disagreeable a little girl’ (ibid.). I would add that she is highly disagreeable already: in the climactic scene by the lake! In a highly positive end, Philips expects the Wednesday Play to ‘get a considerable audience’ if this standard is maintained (ibid.).

N.G.P. acclaimed its ‘strange, elusive sort of beauty’, noting Dodgson’s alternations between charm and ‘sudden moods of sulky silence or explosions of rage’ – and praised Baker and Watling as skilled and perfect interpreters. (Liverpool Echo, 14 October 1965, p. 3). In contrast to Richardson’s interpretation of clearly paedophilic urges, they felt it was ‘an “I wonder” rather than “I suspect”‘ scenario (ibid.).

K.H. found Baker’s performance the ‘highlight’, in a ‘revealing account of bitter-sweet moments’ in Dodgson’s life; a ‘skilful production, directed with a sensitive touch and played with sincerity by a talented cast’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 14 October 1965, p. 2).

Peter Forth felt Deborah Watling was too old and a deliberately ‘flirtatious young miss rather than the innocent but forthright child who crossed swords with the March Hare and Humpty Dumpty’ (Western Daily Press, 14 October 1965, p. 7). Forth found Dodgson unappealing, ‘swinging between outright rudeness and a sugary kindliness when talking to the little girls’, with his ‘Long stares at Alice’ imparting an unsavoury ‘infatuation’ (ibid.). Backing Richardson’s interpretation, Forth felt Rosalie Crutchley’s mother’s suspicions were well-founded, though overall, felt the play was ‘Too slow, too long and very much too clever’ (ibid.).

Omnes regarded Alice as a ‘most sympathetic’ telling of the story behind Carroll’s masterwork, with Baker giving a ‘finely tuned in portrayal’, though the clips from the book again came in for stick (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 16 October 1965, p. 5). Omnes felt there needed to more of these sequences to lighten the play’s heavy tone, or none at all, not the few we get (ibid.). In contrast to other readings of Watling’s Alice as a Lolita, she is ‘charmingly ingenuous’, and the play held out high hopes for the new Wednesday Play run (ibid.).

Geoffrey Lane found it a ‘moving, sometimes beautiful and often painful experience’ to watch (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 16 October 1965, p. 14). Again rather countering Richardson and Forth’s reading, he felt there was no ‘sexual innuendo and psychological booby-traps’, noting it was ‘too deep an emotional attachment to a child’ (ibid.). Lane acclaimed Baker’s ‘performance of brilliance and conviction’, highlighting his moments of ‘sudden eagerness’ as ‘striking’ and the great scene where he extemporised on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (ibid.). Lane found the dramatised extracts from the novel as unfunny, slow and lacking in wit, but like a fair few other critics, liked the Oxford settings in the play’s main sections (ibid.). Oddly, he noted Alice’s ‘charm and coltish grace’, comparing her to a horse (ibid.).

The play had an impact, even for those who missed it! Elgin’s The Northern Scot and Moray and Nairn Express included correspondence with Mrs Georgie Christie of Blackhills, Lhanbryd, grand-niece of Dodgson, who was disappointed to have missed the play when it was on (16 October 1965, p. 6). Christie notes her father once met Carroll and she has letters she wrote to him, also recalling the actress Nancy Price gifted to her and her sister when children ‘the baby pig’ used in a London stage production of Alice in Wonderland (ibid.).

Alice elicited a relatively strong RI of 62, above mean averages for any overall Wednesday Play series, perhaps reflecting the popularity both of Carroll’s classic writing and of TV period dramas in general – the phrase ‘period charm’ appears in the audience report, oddly considering my own interpretation of its Victorian gloom and human awkwardness (VR/65/570). A critical mass of viewers acclaimed its ‘great sensitivity’ and its portrayal of ‘the background to the famous story [was] most appealing’, with Potter painting ‘a perceptive and moving portrait of the central figure’ Charles Dodgson (ibid.).

A fairly sizeable minority departed from this broadly ‘cordial response’. Funnily enough, a few are said to have never even liked Carroll’s classic, while other purportedly serious adults sneeringly felt the subject was hardly ‘stimulating fare for adults’ (ibid.). Most interestingly, others criticised Potter’s play as it was overly disturbing given their ‘fond recollections’ of Carroll’s tales: they found Dodgson a ‘tragic clown’ and felt ‘his attachment to the young girl seemed over-emphasised [which made] it rather unpleasant, and although known to be odd, he appeared altogether too eccentric almost foolish’; one viewer is quoted: ‘I cannot believe “Lewis Carroll” was such an inane person’ (ibid.).

Most viewers admired the acting, though a few echoed pro-realist press critiques that Deborah Watling ‘appeared too mature, modern and sophisticated’ – odd, considering Potter’s skilled depiction of her stereotypical prejudices in the climactic scene! (ibid.) Impressively, a fair few viewers had ‘special praise’ for Rosalie Crutchley’s portrayal; while there was a divided response to the acted scenes from Alice in Wonderland, many found them enjoyable, also liking the make-up (ibid.). Overall, the play and its production was broadly enjoyed, with settings and scenery aptly enabling one viewer’s immersion:

one could imagine oneself back in that era (ibid.).

Jonathan Miller’s remarkable Alice in Wonderland (BBC One, 28 December 1966) received a more ‘bi-modal’ reception, gaining an RI of 57 on its original broadcast and then an even more divided response of 50 when repeated in the late afternoon on Sunday 2 April 1967 (BBC WAC, VR/66/727 & VR/67/220).

In the Sunday Mirror, a Mrs C.M. Carter of London, SW17, wrote in to assert that she had been a maid, 58 years back, in the house next door to where Rev. Dodgson lived with his two maiden sisters in Guildford, Surrey (17 October 1965, p. 22). Carter claimed he ‘always’ carried a bag of sweets to give to every child he met, and how she ‘never thought then that his book would live on all these years after he had gone’ (ibid.).

J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. advertised a new edition of both books to mark the centenary of Carroll’s classic, noting how Potter’s play had provided ‘some staggering publicity’ (Bookseller, 16 October 1965, p. 1868).

Subsequently, the play was repeated on BBC One on Wednesday 6 July 1966 at 9pm, up against a Bob Hope comedy feature-film, Nothing But the Truth (1941) on BBC Two and Dickie Valentine and Cilla Black on ITV. The Daily Mirror listings termed Carroll ‘an unhappy, lonely, eccentric figure’ (6 July 1966, p. 14). Well before the film Dreamchild, which John Cook highlighted, Alice was adapted for radio by Derek Hoddinott and transmitted on the BBC World Service on 17 June 1979, and later surfaced on BBC Radio 4 on 28 November 1979 under the Afternoon Theatre umbrella (Greaves, Rolinson & Williams eds. op. cit.).

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.🙂