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.

03.04: Up the Junction (BBC One, Wednesday 3 November 1965) 9:40 – 10:50pm
Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Nell Dunn & Tony Garnett (uncredited); Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Eileen Diss; Songs sung by Russ Parker, played by Winifred Helliwell and Marie Cleve; ‘Bad Girl’ by Stanley Myers and Nell Dunn

I used to be violently concerned about politics, when we lived in Battersea. There you are so much aware of everything that is going on. The walls of the houses are made of plywood and you hear everything. We had one tap and an outdoor lavatory. I was completely uninterested in comfort. I washed all the clothes in the public washhouse; now I have a washing machine. […] At Battersea all I thought about was Socialism and poverty and those things. I couldn’t have cared less what we ate. (The Scotsman, 3 April 1965, p. 6).

Location footage and hand-held shots and unsteady camera movements, undoubtedly imbued it with an ‘authentic’ aura previously unseen in television drama (Jamie Sexton, ‘Televérité Hits Britain: Documentary, Drama and the Growth of 16mm Filmmaking in British Television, Screen, 2003, p. 442).

Under [Sir Hugh Greene] television drama flowered at the BBC as it has never blossomed anywhere in the world. The Wednesday Play plays like Up the Junction, Kathy [sic] Come Home, Drums Along the Avon, The Lump, In Two Minds – plays that won a unique place in the history of TV drama in that they were discussed the next day by ordinary people as if they were important social happenings – were screened (Stanley Reynolds, Manchester Evening News, 21 October 1972, p. 4).

I first thought and felt deeply about Up the Junction when reading Tony Garnett’s memoir, The Day The Music Died (2016) on summer holiday in 2017. Garnett made a great case for its revolutionary nature in getting out of the studio and onto the streets, and, most significantly, in representing working-class life in an unvarnished way, to a TV audience with an immediacy impossible in cinema and of an infinitely large size compared to theatre. The direction the play took was partly influenced by Garnett’s own familial experience of abortion when growing up and his motivation to challenge societal silence and bigotry toward the subject. During my PhD study, I finally got around to watching the original 1965 Up the Junction, repeating the viewing to shot-log its entirety. Now, I watch it a third time for this sixtieth anniversary blog article, using the essential Ken Loach at the BBC DVD box-set.

Up the Junction was originally created by Nell Dunn, from a wealthy background, being daughter of industrialist Sir Philip Dunn. Nell wrote Up the Junction as a book based on her own observations of life in the Clapham Junction area of South London. Right-wing journalist Christopher Booker, within his tedious wider assault on 1960s culture, The Neophiliacs (1969) snidely emphasised Dunn as part of the ‘Chelsea Set’ and as being ‘a millionaire’s daughter’, a sexist denial of her own agency, and a typical attack on anyone well-to having a social conscience – while also being critical of Up the Junction and Edward Bond’s closely contemporaneous stage play, Saved (pp. 279-80).

Clearly, Up the Junction struck a nerve, annoying the right people. Des Freedman has argued programmes like it and Cathy Come Home ‘demonstrated how television could play an important progressive role in public life’ (2003: 69). Macmurraugh-Kavanagh elaborated, detailing how Up the Junction marked a key moment in The Wednesday Play’s drive to make drama a social intervention within and against the news and to shape public opinion: ‘focusing ‘fact’ through emotional and physical reality (as in the case of Up the Junction and abortion law reform)’ (Screen, 1997, p. 250). Dunn, born in 1936, is still alive, like Ken Loach nearing her tenth decade.

In November 1963, John Gross was highly complimentary about Nell Dunn’s romantic, yet also grounded view of London life, loving its comedy and melancholy, extolling ‘A highly accomplished book, truthful and likeable’ (Observer, 17 November 1963, p. 25). Andrew Leslie felt Dunn was covering ‘an odd social stratum […] They are the working-class who have been left behind, still visibly struggling for survival’ (Guardian, 29 November 1963, p. 17). These reviews mentioned the ‘dance hall’ and the ‘pawn shop’ and proximity to illegality. Leslie saw the characters as ‘like a species of moth, settling quickly on whatever point of life will hold them – and then away again’ (ibid.). The book went onto win the John Llewellyn Rees Prize for being the most memorable book of its year.

An interview by ‘Boswell’ in The Scotsman gave a picture of Nell Dunn’s home life in Putney with husband Jeremy Sandford and two children, enabling Dunn to reflect: ‘The world’s so mad, I can never make judgments. People are absolutely amazing!’ (op. cit.). MacGibbon & Kee are said to have commissioned Up the Junction following a few short pieces Dunn had penned for the New Statesman (ibid.). Dunn is said to be good friends with neighbour Edna O’Brien, who was when the interview was taking place, taking one of Nell and Jeremy’s kids to the cinema with hers (ibid.). Dunn recounts admiring Austen, Dickens, Hardy and Lawrence and was a great fan of Jeremy Sandford’s Third Programme radio plays before she met him (ibid.). As a writer, he is influenced by her environment as a writer, including a spell working in a sweet factory, and like other women writers she knows, Dunn was engaged in politics, helping to elect a Labour MP in Putney in the 1964 general election, while reflecting on living a much more middle-class life than she had in Battersea previously (ibid.).

Up the Junction centres on three young women, Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner), who go up to Clapham Junction where the events occur. The Daily Record identified the setting as Battersea, also adding, ‘Despite their poor surroundings these people have an aliveness which isn’t found in more affluent circles’ (3 November 1965, p. 16).

Television Today recorded that Ray Barron had dislocated a shoulder during rehearsals for the swimming scenes, and that the play would be recorded on 23 September (9 September 1965, p. 11). Ken Hankins felt the production, with ‘no plot and no story-line’, ‘deliberately unorthodox, attempting to capture some of the flavour of life in London’, sounded intriguing and noted the BBC was claiming it was a ‘show’, rather than a play, documentary or musical (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 30 October 1965, page unclear). ‘Monitor’ noted the large cast of 50, how only three characters are recurring, while, as other publications did more briefly, valuing Nell Dunn’s original book as ‘raw and witty’, with ‘remarkable warmth and insight’ in its 100 or so pages (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 3 November 1965, p. 2). Ralph Slater thought that its ‘sheer unpredictability’ made it ‘worth a try’ (Reading Evening Post, 3 November 1965, p. 2).

Rather dramatically, it was announced that senior BBC officials had called for a special screening of Up the Junction on 2 November and they ‘ordered several cuts – but left in a startling sequence about a back-street abortion’ (Daily Express, 3 November 1965, p. 13). Even before broadcast, the BBC was under fire about the play, accused by Mary Whitehouse’s Clean-Up TV Campaign of presenting ‘near pornographic material under the guise of culture and education’ (ibid.). This was, frankly, an absurd claim based on what was in the actual play, which they cannot have known, anyway. The CUTV are said to have gone to Kenneth Robinson, the Minister of Health with their pre-emptive complaint (Daily Record, op. cit.). Michael Bakewell was said to have been present at the BBC pre-broadcast screening, with cuts resulting being ‘minor’ (Lincolnshire Echo, 3 November 1965, p. 7). Picking up on the likely controversy, Clifford Davis claimed it was ‘certain to cause something of a sensation’ (Daily Mirror, 3 November 1965, p. 3).

Story editor Tony Garnett previewed Up the Junction in the Radio Times firstly by quoting several glowing reviews of the book; he followed this literary validation by tellingly rooting the play in Battersea experience, with the excursions to Clapham Junction, while also stating: ‘it could be lots of places’ (28 October 1965, p. 45). Garnett emphasised how it would show a troubling picture:

Go to any big city and the human waste will horrify you, because the people you will see tonight are exploited, given a raw deal, or just conveniently forgotten by the rest of us. You would expect them to be ‘down’ – and they have every right to be. But they are not. All of them – all ages – are irrepressibly alive. And the young people, like Rube, Sylvie, Eileen, and their friends in tonight’s play, have a personal style and sophistication which put to shame the self-promoting ‘in-groups’ with their tender clothes and their colour supplements. (ibid.)

Initiating a new epoch, Garnett writes of how to bring this to screen: The Wednesday Play has to ‘break some rules to tell the truth as we see it’, so ‘we told our director, Kenneth Loach, that none of the sacred cows of television drama need stand in his way. There were many risks involved in this freedom and he has embraced them with relish’ (ibid.). Garnett ended with a sharp focus on its unconventional style and truthfulness and uncannily predicted its lasting qualities:

This is a show which defies the categories. It is not a play, a documentary, or a musical. It is all of these at once. It is something new – but, more important, it is something true. If you watch it we can promise you something that will stay in your mind for a long time. (ibid.)

Significantly, for the long term of single drama, John Mackenzie was employed as Production Manager: Mackenzie became one of many vital talented directors on Play for Today and in British cinema (Unman, Wittering and Zigo, Made, Apaches and The Long Good Friday). Garnett, of course, would soon be elevated to the role of producer…

Linda McCarthy, who worked on the play as a trainee assisting the experienced AFM Jackie Willows, recalls shooting at municipal washrooms and a chocolate factory in Acton (interviewed by the author, 11 May 2021). Linda remembers arranging some of the motorbikes for the accident on Crystal Palace Parade, and also “driving round Clapham in a hearse. I mean, those days it was amazing because people still came out on the streets and if you went by in a hearse the men took their hats off. Incredible.’ (ibid.). She recalls they only probably got around two minutes of the final footage in the can per day (ibid.). McCarthy recalls that, when they did the sequence in the swimming pool, “one of the actors dislocated his arm and his shoulder so I had to take him off to King’s College Hospital to A&E. I think it was a Saturday night too, and you do not want to be in A&E on a Saturday night, certainly not.” (ibid.)

It was one of McCarthy’s first productions; she would have been familiar with South London, having been born there in 1943 and gone to Sydenham High School for Girls. She also recollects herself “and the three girls pushing all the washing across country in a supermarket trolley which we later used for the cameraman, Brian Tufano, [who went] in it for doing a tracking shot” (ibid.). Linda recalls all of the main cast being good fun to be with, many being of a similar age to herself, and how Nell Dunn was on set at least once, as she gave her a copy of the original book, which she still has to this day! (ibid.).

Anyway, Up the Junction is, of course, a play which I can watch, unlike the last two wiped ones. It starts a run until Christmas where I can watch pretty much all plays, barring The Bond, but even that has an extant clip.

Rating **** / ****

Up the Junction is a Pop Art collage, more sociological insight than well-made play, but it does still tell a story amid many fragments. It conveys the sociological imagination – to use C. Wright Mills’s 1959 phrase – through means of an artistic mode which feels immediate and lifelike. Its deeply immersive candid camera approach – Tony Imi (or was it Brian Tufano?) moving in among the people on the streets – gives it a fresh vividness. The vogue term at the time for this technique was televérité, developed from the documentary style of John Boorman and Denis Mitchell, alongside US Direct Cinema influences, as Jamie Sexton (2003) discerned. My PhD – available online – has further material on Up the Junction‘s canonical significance and details its Average Shot Lengths for its film and video sequences.

Loach, Garnett and Dunn’s drama, made by a fine crew and a vast cast similar to that in James O’Connor’s Three Clear Sundays from seven months earlier, puts us right into 1965. The opening with Myers and Dunn’s ‘Bad Girl’ being performed by a band as we then see new high rise blocks accompanied by yearning, creaking organ sounds in the song. We are given a breathless montage of overheard conversations, phrases, songs and images. A Genghis Khan film poster, David McCallum staring down at us from the wall of the room where Rube has the abortion. Discussions of the Hydrogen bomb, the pools, dieting and posters of wrestling bills, gossip about a “dirty old man”. Sex and death are the prime themes. There is a morbid or prurient obsession or a breezy casualness towards them.

This play feels rooted in the London equivalent of The Shangri-Las’ New York, the most brilliant trashy (p)arty pop which revelled in subjective melodramas of being young in the city. This Wednesday Play presents petty theft, violent scuffles, drinking in the boozer and drink driving on motorcycles. I do feel it stays close to the people so that the events do not seem overly glamourised, which is a trap the fascinating but queasily amoral Jeff Nuttall and Rodick Carmichael book (1977) does, fetishising violence. Bad things just happen here, and the key words spoken, late on, are “Poor Rube”. We do feel for her, even if the play deliberately avoids any Dickensian mode of popular sentimentality. While this is clearly Poor Rube’s story, she shakes off any sense of victimhood and remains very much vivacious, pleasure-loving Rube to the end.

The look is of course vital in mid 1960s British culture. I’m pretty sure Vickery Turner’s striking floral mod or pop art top is used or adapted by great London band Saint Etienne for the aesthetics of their debut album, Foxbase Alpha (1991).

In an uninterrupted take, the three girls sing The Beatles’ ‘I Should’ve Known Better’ (1964), from A Hard Day’s Night, a film that Geraldine Sherman appeared in, uncredited. I feel this play is informed by Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s warm involvement of working-class talent and by the blazing cultural example The Beatles were setting, exploring self, society and advancing Love over War. On the former, Garnett confirmed using many Theatre Workshop actors in Up the Junction, like George Sewell (2016, p. 140).

It contains so much interesting tangential language in the snippets of conversations and observations than you would get in a more obviously honed play. We get traditionalism and modernity constantly vying with each other – references to “trousseau” and “quinine”. This feels like O’Connor’s plays in its earthy proximity to street life, but without quite the same crime and punishment narrative moves. It’s great to just hear “guvnor”, “clobber”, “nicker”, “me nutter”, a “chinning”, “up the spout”, “toerag”, and a man branded “you dirty big slag!” without there being any question of punishment or evasion of the law. In a moment expressing the times, the elderly Mrs Hardy (Rita Webb) chortles wonderfully about there being little chance of her “getting in the family way now”!

Dunn and Garnett’s vision is also barbed and complex. There is a strong implicit anti-racism at times, but then also a racism which is not narratively challenged – perhaps in a deliberate that’s life-type way. I’d say the extended sequence with Barny the Tallyman is as clear and enraging depiction of the evils of unfettered capitalism as you’ll ever see in a film or TV drama. George Sewell brilliantly puts flesh on an utterly grasping predator.

Barny’s racism is clearly part of his pernicious worldview, and there is no chance of people getting the wrong idea – as happened with Alf Garnett – and nor is he made endearing or excessively central: he is there for five minutes or so, then he’s gone. Also, the early factory scenes crucially include three Black women workers – Myrtle Mackenzie, Cleo Sylvestre and Winifred Sabine – and they are an integral part, laughing, gossiping and illicitly dancing along with the rest of the workforce.

This all makes me instinctively more charitable towards the uncomfortable final scene, where Sylvie’s racist clichés are unchecked; Rube just laughs along with a “you didn’t…?” (say that) kind of response. Given how another girl casually admits dropping out of an evening class, Dunn and Garnett, implicitly, deliver a realist parting shot both against the ‘improving’ WEA type ethos, but also show it is needed, implying these young women are limiting their horizons by not trying to grasp more conceptual ways of seeing the world. Making this clear in too blunt or didactic a way would seem overly churlish and undercut the generally warm portrayal of the three young women.

Overall, this presents the archetypal depiction of vigorous, thrilling but dangerous working-class life at this moment in time, and the pervasive hedonistic spirit and Peggy Lee ‘Is That All There Is?’ fatalism of many ordinary people in the London Nell Dunn experienced, and in the working-class Birmingham that formed Tony Garnett. There is survival humour and no lectures, never any lectures. The magnificently flawed gallery of people here show us who they are through their survival humour.

Most significantly, it also presented a rare woman writer’s outlook, with, even rarer, a majority female cast – a necessary breath of fresh air, that was too seldom followed up over the next decade both in The Wednesday Play and its successor Play for Today.

Best performance: GERALDINE SHERMAN

George Sewell has to be highlighted, for his conveying of the counterfeit charm such a Tallyman would have, while conveying his utter, greed-driven tenacity. This is the face of the system that most people couldn’t easily identify. Also, the great Tony Selby, an utterly inimitable actor, sly and loveable, devious and forlorn.

But Geraldine Sherman, from a Jewish refugee background, and who grew up in an orphanage, is just stunning, sensual and ordinary, and carries us along in her intense experiences – an abortion, the death of her betrothed boyfriend in a motorcycle – while then brushing them off with a bizarre, compelling breeziness (I’m not going to say stoicism or that highly overused and ideologically utilised word in 2020s culture, ‘resilience’).

Sherman is a luminous 1960s figure to go alongside Rita Tushingham, Pauline Boty, Sandie Shaw, Julie Christie and Jane Arden. She projects a brash, vulnerable warmth as Rube, who is more than ‘feisty’: a real force of casual joie de vivre.

Best line: “Are you frightened o’ dying, Sylvie?” / “Nah, you can’t get owt when yer dead”.

There are so many other great ones… This is just a very cursory sample:

“I’m using me brains to the best of me ability. It’s what the Tories call free enterprise!” (Barny the Tallyman)

“Never mind, Sylvie. Keep never-minding, it’s only for life…” (Rube)

“Why should we think ahead? What’s there to think ahead to, except growing old…?!” (Dave)

“Borstal was all right… A sort o’ University for them that couldn’t afford Oxford…” (Dave)

“He’s promised to take me to Bromsgrove for a fortnight…” (Mrs Hardy) [A fine one as one of Whitehouse’s most vociferous MP backers represented that constituency!]

“She was a scrubber all ‘er life. Ever since she was 14, she worked in them baths… Boiling hot in summer, damp and draughty in winter…Surprised it didn’t finish ‘er orf sooner…”.

Oh, and, actually, this must be the best in terms of environmental print:

Audience size: 9.21 million

This success was part of a significant upturn in BBC ratings, with the BBC getting six shows in TV’s Top Twenty, according to ITV associated TAM figures: being seen by 4.35 million homes, equivalent to 9.57 million individual viewers according to my approximated calculations (Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1965, p. 9).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Vintage Years of Hollywood: Man’s Castle / Newsroom), ITV (Crime and the Bent Society: No. 02 – ‘The Big Tickle’ / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 58%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 69.2%

Reception: Funnily enough, this didn’t necessarily get many more next-day reviews than the average Wednesday Play. Yet, in time it was widely reviewed, while also provoking a vast reaction as a news item in itself, generating controversy and discussion of a volume that fulfilled Garnett’s aims. The reactions from critics and public were mixed, with a fair few loud attacks expressed, but these were out-argued by as many wiser heads. Overall, evidence points to the play annoying a certain type of person, but winning enthusiastic acceptance by a larger, increasingly socially liberal, public.

First off, an anonymous critic praised ‘a remarkable and technically stimulating hybrid, documentary in text and dialogue, impressionist in style and editing, embellished with raucous pop music’ (The Times, 4 November 1965, p. 17). They accepted its ‘honesty’, in reflecting Dunn’s experience of Battersea life, though pedantically noted it was only true of how ‘some people live’ and warned of the easy attractions the ‘well bred’ youth might find in ‘blank insignificant lives filling their vacuity with casually meaningless pleasures (mainly those of sex, booze, and dangerously driven motorbikes)’ (ibid.). They interpreted this TV show as suggesting that ‘life Up the Junction is drably and miserably unattractive ; her play is a vigorous persuader to virtue’ (ibid.). I would rather say that Dunn and Garnett are not judging the lives depicted in such a moralistic way as this reviewer does (ibid.).

Peter Black felt there was a provocateur element behind the play, with ‘the Wednesday Play boys’ seeing ‘just how far they could go in a television play with sex and cuss words’, but also that it was written and photographed ‘with remarkable technical brilliance’, immersing us in the street life (Daily Mail, 6 November 1965, p. 4). Black liked feeling so physically close to the characters, and legitimated its skill by analogising Dunn’s Battersea with W. Somerset Maugham’s Lambeth in his novel Liza of Lambeth (1900).

However, Black acknowledged that not all other viewers had taken to it: ‘A lot of people genuinely dislike seeing the unpleasant realities of life’, while others’ blood would have been frozen by ‘the anarchy of this play’ (ibid.). Black felt the terrified screams of the experience of the miscarriage effectively made a moralist point about the prior seduction (ibid.). Yet, despite all this, Black felt it applied too much of a ‘violent shove’, the amount of coarse language was unnecessary and that the final third added little (ibid.). He also bemoaned the camera turning him into a ‘voyeur’ during the seduction on the bomb-site, and claimed the BBC should have given more forewarning that many would be offended and shocked by the play (ibid.).

There might apparently have been other next-day reviews by Lockwood in the Daily Telegraph and one in the Daily Mirror, but these have not been traceable.

Maurice Richardson claimed that Dunn’s ‘objective study of mixed-up members of the Battersea lumpen proletariat had made a distinct impact on the subtopian hominids’ (Observer, 7 November 1965, p. 25). He noted tellingly that ‘Nobody objected that it wasn’t really a play at all’ and that the message that ‘this was very much what some girls really are like’ had got across, while reflecting he would have liked more ‘documentation’ and a sense of how typical these girls ‘and their sad sub way of life are of Battersea as compared with other parts of London’ (ibid.). Yet, Richardson felt its pull was in the script’s ‘verity’ and ‘exact observation’, compared with much other television (ibid.).

The same day, theatre critic J.W. Lambert critiqued Edward Bond’s Saved as a ‘springboard for squalid fantasy’, claiming it was ‘One in the eye for theatre that its first performance should take place simultaneously with Up the Junction‘s TV broadcast – with Dunn’s play ‘reaching out – too frenetically but with so much more warmth and truth – into this same grubby maelstrom of spiritual under-nourishment’ (Sunday Times, 7 November 1965, p. 55). Lambert reflected on now Tony Selby was excellent in both Saved and Up the Junction, which pointed up the contrast in the texts (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin, reliably the dimmest and crustiest critic in the pack, patronised Nell Dunn as ‘a lucky girl’ and ‘a girl who has done little more, as yet, than demonstrate that her heart is in the right place and that she has an ear for common speech’, also titling his weekly column ‘Little Nell’s curiosity shop’ (Sunday Times, 7 November 1965, p. 57). Wiggin is churlish about Dunn’s celebrity, and while he felt the play was ‘a highly moral affair’ which depicted ‘life being lived flat-out, fermenting like grog’, this was ‘all on one terribly monotonous level’ (ibid.). He found the constant din oppressive to his ‘despised bourgeois habits of privacy and modulation’, expressing a clichéd attack: ‘The so-called “musical” element was diabolical’ (ibid.). Wiggin disliked how the vérité shots of real people implicated them in the drama; while accepting the vividness of the play, he felt it was ‘the vividness of uninhibited extremism’ (ibid.). Wiggin makes a relatively perceptive going about progressive intellectuals finding life in the slums ‘rich’, while disdaining ‘thin and impoverished’ suburban life – which he nevertheless accepts they ‘quite rightly’ want slum dwellers to have access to. Yet his lack of attentiveness to the text is clear when claiming the central trip were ‘barely sketched in’ and he felt the elder women actors were far too familiar, though did feel the Tallyman was a ‘predator whom Dickens or Mayhew would have fastened on […] This vulturine monster was a stunning little cameo: a whole play, a whole series could grow out of him’ (ibid.).

However, despite these kernels of insight, and Wiggin’s claim to ‘respect radicalism’, he critiqued Dunn, Loach and MacTaggart’s ‘uneasy compound of self-righteousness and pugnacity’ and lapsed into his customary Tory philistinism:

Other people have tried to tell the truth and shame the devil, and even to improve this wicked world. Without losing sight of the prime aim of entertainment. (ibid.).

Wiggin’s slightly more eggheaded partner in Sunday prose T.C. Worsley emphasised James MacTaggart’s boldness and nerve in continuing got back ‘his fancies’, despite earning ‘more abuse than praise for his selections’, but also that he found the producer’s taste ‘almost wholly unsympathetic’, seeing his experimentation as ‘a false trail’ (Financial Times, 10 November 1965, p. 26). However, Worsley admired MacTaggart’s persistence in discovering ‘new forms in television writing and the provision of as free an opportunity as possible for his writers to experiment with the medium’, admitting his own critical tastes may be old-fashioned (ibid.). Experiment is ‘not just laudable, it is essential, if the whole thing is not to run down’: television needing such a slot equivalent to the Royal Court where ‘anything and everything can be tried’, though Worsley felt The Wednesday Play should be at a later hour and less exposed, as it were, to ‘harsh criticism’ (though, indeed, less impactful to a large public, I’d argue) (ibid.).

Worsley conceded that Up the Junction‘s ‘technical innovations’ as tele-verite and ‘liveliness and lyricism’ lent it an impact no conventional methods could have achieved, and commended White, Sherman and Turner’s brilliant acting (ibid.). He made familiar obtuse arguments questioning its overall truth about Clapham Junction life, while feeling it lost rhythm from the motorcycle accident on (ibid.). However, he ended his review more favourably by admiring its freshness of approach, compared to Rediffusion’s Blackmail, which would feature youthful amorality or backstreet abortions, but be ‘trivially told and indifferently acted’ (ibid.).

Patrick Skene Catling totally failed to review the play, instead impugning Nell Dunn’s deliberate social mobility, recalling meeting her once at Woodrow Wyatt’s ‘splendid house beside Regent’s Park, shortly after she had made her move from Chelsea to Battersea’:

I am not among those who believe that richest disqualify a man from socialist politics, not that they beat a young woman from living among the poor of South London. But she shouldn’t brag so about her way of life. Mr. Wyatt doesn’t about his (Punch, 10 November 1965, p. 700).

Frederick Laws reflected that reviewers of Dunn’s original short stories were excited by their portrayal of unfamiliar lives of women from ‘the lower orders’ in Battersea, but felt this TV version was (sigh) ‘no continuing central characters or progression of story’ (The Listener, 11 November 1965, p. 771). This is blatantly wrong in that there are three central women protagonists. Again, Laws felt it was propaganda ‘against the horror of furtive abortion’ and ‘could have been taken as a sermon against slums, poverty, and promiscuity’, echoing several other critics’ pearl-clutching interpretation from their own perspectives (ibid.). Laws felt ‘Miss’ Dunn ‘was plainly serious and on the side of the angels and the common people’, concluding with a wish that she might ‘one day give us a brutally realistic play about smart people’ (ibid.).

D.A.N. Jones also admitted to a ‘mingled pity and admiration’, though contrasting Dunn’s vision of charming spirit with Orwell’s colder approach to working-class life in the adaptation of his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying on BBC Two on Sundays (New Statesman, 12 November 1965, p. 760). Jones felt it was clearly true to life, ‘but it dealt almost entirely with extroverts in public situations’, interestingly also reflecting how local clergy wanted even more realism through drugs being depicted (ibid.). He noted a post-play Late Night Line-Up discussion where MacTaggart claimed that ‘we’ are afraid of people like this, while Ken Loach ‘held that the harsh abortion scene would act as a dire warning’, though Jones questioned against what, given how ‘The girl was up against and bouncing around so soon’ afterwards (ibid.). Apparently, ‘a tearful Nell Dunn answered telephone complaints from South London’ itself (ibid.).

While furthering the blind alley of questioning its deep social representativeness of all Battersea life, Jones developed this line of argument in the most interesting way:

We saw not Battersea but a set of mobile youngsters on a network that linked Tooting, Brixton and the deep-south motor-bike belt. We saw the equally feckless grannies and widows of the pubs and markets. But there was hardly a sign of the important 25-45 age group. They were represented by the evil tallyman, his business ethics interpreted with vicious brilliance by George Sewell. But who was he talking to? The author, evidently. Her absence from the play left a hold which could only be filled by an appearance of documentary objectivity, confusing the audience (ibid).

Philip Purser discerned that, at least, TV’s filmic yearnings had yielded a ‘movie’ in Up the Junction, claiming the proportions of film to video studio were 2:1 (it was in fact, by my exact calculations, 52.6%:47.4%). Purser felt this use of Denis Mitchell’s documentary style with actors was ‘a remarkable breakthrough’, while chiding the ‘over-praise and over-anxiety’ it had elicited, and expressing deep irritation that Dunn, MacTaggart and Loach had tried to ‘take up a total position’ on Line-Up (Sunday Telegraph, 7 November 1965, p. 13). Rather, Purser admired it as ‘a piece of art’, being ‘alive, tangy, exhilarating’, brilliantly shot and played, which ‘flew’, and had ‘dear old Rita Webb’ (ibid.).

Purser’s glowing – and notably anti-sociological – Sunday Telegraph review was also, tellingly, published as an advertisement in both The Listener (11 November 1965, p. 749) and The Economist (13 November 1965, p. 754). Significantly in view of November 1965’s position as a cultural turning point, Alan Brien’s review of Edward Bond’s play Saved at the Royal Court appeared on the same both times (ibid.). Notably, Kenneth Tynan uttered the word “fuck” on BBC3 just ten days after Up the Junction had aired.

A.B. complained of the noise, and its not being a play in the same way the previous week’s A Designing Woman was (Leicester Mercury, 4 November 1965, p. 8). They felt it was ‘essentially a Sunday supplement sort of programme, showing exactly the unfortunate sort of people that Lord Snowdon took such wonderful pictures of the other week for a certain newspaper’ (ibid.).

K.H.H. discovered ‘a kind of cockney “Guys and Dolls” in some ways’, offering ‘life in the raw’, with an emphasis on sexual adventure (Liverpool Echo, 4 November 1965, p. 2). They wanted more hope, feeling Dunn’s play was devoid of it, also noting how ‘surprised and embarrassed’ Dunn was in the phone-in section of Late Night Line-Up, talking to viewers telling her it doesn’t happen in their street and such (ibid.).

B.L. typically admired the play’s ‘vitality’ but expressed irritation at its ‘formlessness’, ‘strident background music’ and ‘sudden camera switches’ (Belfast Telegraph, 4 November 1965, p. 13). They found it ‘a haunting, horrifying picture’ of these people’s lives, who just carry on cheerfully (ibid.).

Peggie Phillips felt it was ‘almost totally destructive, sordid and alienating in its view of working-class English women’, with the only ‘benefit to be gained’ its ‘frightening propaganda against abortion’ (The Scotsman, 4 November 1965, p. 7). Phillips bemoaned Dunn’s ‘small and dingy view of life’, and questioned the BBC Director, Television, Kenneth Adam’s words against cosiness: ‘A few more consequences like this and the livingroom will need fumigation’ (ibid.). Four days later, Phillips returned to her attack, having the gall to call the BBC ‘anti-prudes’ ‘officious’ while also implying support for censorship: wanting youngsters not to be shown ‘such drab details on Sex’, which would lead them away from ‘the pleasures of matrimony and parenthood’ (The Scotsman, 8 November 1965, 5).

In stark contrast, far further south, Michael Unger was amazed by its realism: ‘Every word, every line and every action hung in the air and was engulfed in the powerful, raw and witty actions of the three anti-heroines, ending with ‘Magnificent’ in a single word sentence (Reading Evening Post, 4 November 1965, p. 2). In the Midlands, Sheila McGregor felt the play provided ‘magnificent television’, centring on characters who ‘refused to give in to their appalling surroundings’, while avoiding any ‘romanticised portrait of slum living’ (Birmingham Post, Midland Magazine, 6 November 1965, p. IV).

Jim Webber felt the documentary aesthetics made the programme open to criticism for not accurately representing all of Battersea life, and not just ‘three girls and their background’ (Bristol Evening Post, 6 November 1965, p. 5). The ‘authoress’ Dunn, on LNL-U is said to have explained she was concerned with ‘a specific section of the Battersea population, who did live in this way, talk in this manner, and act thus’ (ibid.). This article blethered somewhat boringly on – and on – with its concerns about the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction.

Alf McCreary noted that Dunn’s play was ‘a racy exposee of “life in the raw”’, which was frank but unlikely to shock a television generation weaned on the material they had been used to over the past five years (Belfast Telegraph, Ireland’s Saturday Night, 6 November 1965, p. 8). Rather typically, McCreary questioned the material, but acclaimed the production as ‘a television tour de force’, only questioning ‘the appearance of one fat, greasy actress who plays the same type of middle-aged Cockney matron in every film or television play I happen to watch’ (ibid.).

Uniquely – to the best of my knowledge – this was the first Wednesday Play to have been reviewed overseas. Otta. in US magazine Variety, sagely notes it had been ‘Much, and falsely, abused for concentrating on the seamy side of life at the expense of sugar-and-spice’, while praising ‘a forthright, pungent and fruitily phrased study’, which ‘had much of the immediacy of a documentary, but with the selectivity appropriate to drama’ (10 November 1965, p. 52). Otta. shrewdly noted the characters’ sense of ‘non-involvement’, and ‘zestful capacity for survival’, acclaiming a ‘fascinating, moving, and true montage of incidents, building up to a celebration of life as it is, rather than as pink spectacles would make it’ (ibid.).

The play elicited considerably more coverage outside of reviews than we’ve seen for any Wednesday Play so far, exceeding even John Hopkins’s two earlier 1965 dramas.

The Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian (4 November 1965, p. 1) carried a front page story thus:

Whitehouse claimed it made promiscuity normal, not facing the issue it already was normal for many people in British society, while arguing young people were being ‘exploited for the indulgence of dirty minds’ and linking it with a wider decadence she saw furthered in Monday’s Twenty-four Hours (ibid.). The Torbay Herald Express (4 November 1965, p. 3), Wolverhampton Express and Star (4 November 1965, p. 23) and Lincolnshire Echo (4 November 1965, p. 1) all carried highly similar copy:

The Daily Telegraph carried a short piece noting Ken Loach’s claim on Late Night Line-Up that they wanted to show ‘the terrible nature of abortion’, while also noting the BBC had revealed its duty officer had been ‘besieged’ with phone calls from viewers after the play’s broadcast (4 November 1965, p. 19). Brian Dean in the Daily Mail quantified this as ‘a record number of protest calls from viewers’: yet, merely, ‘hundreds’, which contained throughout the night after the play and all day yesterday (5 November 1965, p. 11). This article stressed how Whitehouse wanted Kenneth Robinson to meet a delegation, while BBC officials are said to ‘expect Mr. Michael Peacock, head of BBC 1’ to call an internal meeting (ibid.).

John Edwards and Richard Sear wrote a double page spread in the Daily Mirror; Edwards’s piece was somewhat Rod Liddle-esque doorstop journalism technique of visiting Winstanley Road and the Winstanley Arms boozer – ‘where [apparently] some of authoress Nell Dunn’s action took place’ (5 November 1965, pp. 16-17). Pub manager George Murphy reports a lot of anger against the play, while Daisy Lewis, 75, and Amy Martin ‘glowered behind their spectacles’ and use violent invective: ‘Abortions and whoring in Battersea? That Miss Dunn wants knocking on the head’ (ibid.). However, a more nuanced picture is at least clarified: at Garton Glucose factory in Clapham Junction, the men were said to be split 50:50 between those who liked and disliked it and none of the teenagers interviewed were bothered by the abortion scene or ‘free love’ depicted, with Rita Priest, 14, noting ‘There are girls like them knocking around the clubs, with others finding Clapham’s representation ‘pretty sexy’ (ibid.).

Interviewed by Sear, Nell Dunn insisted her writing ‘suggests things for people’s own interpretation’, which is unquestionably true of a play that was polysemic, as audience and critical reception attests (ibid.). The article claims Dunn herself was threatened by ‘phone calls’, sadly unsurprisingly given that Lewis and Martin weren’t alone in their vile attitudes, and she is said to have taken her phone off the hook on 3 November itself (ibid.). The piece recounts how Dunn and Sandford bought a house in Battersea in 1959 and installed a phone and bath, both of which they let many neighbours use due to their lack of such amenities in their own homes (ibid.). Dunn worked for several moments in a sweet factory for 2s. 5d. an hour, and her own humane attitude comes across:

To me the girls I wrote about were tremendous.

Some of them were called ‘slags’ – meaning that they were free and easy with their love. They had marvellous energy.

God knows, if most girls lived up to their standards, the world would be a gayer place. (ibid.)

Dunn also noted how she amalgamated characters from life, with some sections fictionalised, and the Tallyman chapter ‘came from life’, within a whole work aiming to ‘expose the hardships of working class life’ (ibid.).

‘Staffman’ stoutly defended Up the Junction in the Lincolnshire Echo for its sobering depiction of abortion and how the play was ‘anything but the product of a dirty mind’ (5 November 1965, p. 8). They felt the overall effect was ‘surely to scare the impressionable away from loose living’, which, ironically, is a main object of the Clean-Up TV campaigners…

Wolverhampton Express and Star reported a very real Parliamentary brouhaha gearing up, with Conservative MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, Harold Garden planning to table a question next week for minister Kenneth Robinson about how he had replied to Whitehouse’s aforementioned letter (5 November 1965, p. 25). Other groups, including the Catholic Teachers Federation and a group of Birmingham doctors were said to be lending the CUTV campaign their support, attacking the BBC for ‘highlighting moral laxity as normality’, with the latter group pressuring the BMA to put pressure on the BBC (ibid.). A group of women members of the North Hendon Conservative Association at Edgware passed a motion deploring ‘the moral standards now being set by the B.B.C. in TV programmes publicising sex, crime and lawlessness, of which ‘Up the Junction’ was the most recent and shocking example.’ (Belfast News Letter, 6 November 1965, p. 6). The Daily Mail clarified that the 20 Midlands doctors taking a lead in the protests were headed by Birmingham’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr Ernest Millar (6 November 1965, p. 9). Another signatory was Dr David Sturdy, while MP Sir Ian Orr-Ewing is said to have attended the Edgware meeting (Nottingham Guardian Journal, 6 November 1965, p. 5).

The Gossiper questioned their colleague Staffman on earlier praise for Up the Junction, saying: ‘television being fireside home entertainment, it should arrive for a higher level than this’, tiresomely adding that ‘lavatory pan’ would be an apter term than ‘kitchen sink’ to describe it, while damning the play’s characters as ‘illiterates’ (Lincolnshire Echo, 6 November 1965, p. 4). Alan Stewart of the Glasgow Sunday Post denied the play was ‘high drama’, describing ‘a sleazy sequence’ – in his own mind – ‘on a girl who had gone to a back-street abortionist’ (7 November 1965, p. 12). A highly-pro Whitehouse article in her relatively local tag, the Wolverhampton Express and Star conflated the play with a BBC programme on birth control clinics for “unmarrieds” at Birmingham and tried to give credence to a risible comment from an unnamed MP describing Whitehouse as ‘a modern Chartist, demanding from the communicators in 1965 what was demanded – and won – from politicians in the 1830s’ (6 November 1965, p. 16).

Taking a different tone, the Daily Mirror advertised on its front page the next Sunday Mirror‘s serialisation of Dunn’s original book, repeating three times: ‘IT WAS VULGAR. IT WAS RAW. IT WAS LIFE’ (6 November 1965, p. 1).

Columnist Peter Dundas railed against watching ‘silly wee lassies in Battersea […] who’re interested only in sex every other night of the week’, arguing it should have been cut altogether (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 7 November 1965, p. 10). Interestingly, Dundas interviewed producer James MacTaggart, who defended the play this:

I would hate to feel that I was responsible for adversely affecting a young viewer.

I don’t think that ‘Up the Junction’ was shocking or that it gave the impression that Britain is full of good time girls like the ones from Battersea.

We tried to show that a pity it is that there are girls involved in a way of life like this. We want people to understand them – and to have compassion for them.

Some Westerns shock me more than plausible like ‘Up the Junction’ (ibid.).

Dundas remained unconvinced, and the piece was flanked by Marjory Gaston, of Station Road, Neilston and Billy Cullen, 17, of Linnhe Crescent, Wishaw, who find it did not match the youngsters they knew or was ‘distorted and not true to life’ (ibid.).

The Reading Evening Post went so far as to contain a binary debate on the question: ‘Do we see too much of the seamy side?’ (11 November 1965, p. 10). John Fielding argued for, with Rodney Tyler, spectacled, against. Fielding opposed as he felt that, like John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill (1748), centuries earlier, those claiming it had a high, cautionary moral message were being duplicitous (ibid.). In one sense, Fielding may have been right: Dunn clearly wasn’t intending to morally indict the people or acts being depicted, as her 5 November Mirror interview made clear. But this was no bad thing: it is very much Fielding revealing his own snobbish prejudices when he feels he is watching something that is communicating that ‘people are immoral, fat, sweaty, perverted, ugly, foul-mouthed, lecherous, lying and avaricious’ (ibid.). So few press critics seemed to get that the Tallyman was the only individual being presented as bad by the play. Tyler more wisely commented that it was the technique of immersing us in the Clapham Junction life, not the play’s events themselves, that ‘shocked’ viewers, but then claimed watching is good so that we know ‘the seven deadly sins before’ preaching them (ibid.). However, Tyler shrewdly then reflected that Dunn was not forwarding a moral or immoral perspective, showing and not commenting, and rightly critiqued critics’ absurd attacks on being confronted with realistic language and behaviours, which had ignored the play’s actual communicative content (ibid.).

While Tyler had a concern that this play’s brilliant techniques could be used by a future Hitler, he extolled how ‘The BBC has not gone too far, for it is the purpose of drama to push back the barriers and to explore reality’:

I would rather have a thousand honest “Up the Junctions” to every Dixon of Dock Green or Lockhart, or night at the Stars and Garters on TV. They corrupt far more insidiously by distorting reality in a good cause.

They show a false fake world where human beings are like clockwork dummies and they help to keep the Mary Whitehouses of this world quiet, deluded and ignorant (ibid.).

Reading was a place awash with wise words on Up the Junction, as subsequent viewer letters will show!

Dunn’s plotless narrative was clearly commonly recognised: Shirley Lord in the London Evening News and Star noted how its ‘batch of candid camera shots’ approach applied also to Nik Cohn’s Market, a newly published book with ‘some frank close-ups’ (12 November 1965, p. 4).

Norman Phelps claimed that both the moderniser and traditionalist camps have a point about this type of play, yet somewhat sided with the latter, claiming the ‘small screen has taken as much as it can stand of this particular kind of utterly frank, utterly uninhibited programme’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 13 November 1965, p. 5). Phelps rightly highlights how TV should try and ‘discover new angles’ and do more than ‘comfortable happy little serials’, while also feeling it has to sensitive to how it is a presence in people’s home spaces (ibid.). Phelps accommodated much of Tyler’s wise view, while still claiming it went too far, acidly noting that MacTaggart and Loach’s claim it was ‘partly intended as a moral warning’ was a mere ‘eleventh hour rationalisation’ (ibid.). I would argue that it was a somewhat nervous sop to the media climate of 1965. Phelps noted how Dunn seemed almost in tears at the fact people hadn’t liked the play, and called for an Ombudsman to inform programme makers ‘on how certain programmes might be expected generally to be received’ (ibid.).

Captain Henry Kerby, Conservative MP for Arundel and Shoreham, West Sussex, wrote in, admitting he hadn’t seen the play and could not contribute to the controversy aroused by Lockwood’s review, though he had read and re-read the book and claimed it was of ‘very considerable sociological importance’ as an insight into ‘the lives of “the other half”.’ (Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1965, p. 8). Kerby notes prudes can switch off TV sets, but would certainly be unwise to ‘snap the book shut’ (ibid.).

In a clear sign of Up the Junction’s mainstream appeal and controversial lightning rod status, parts of Nell Dunn’s original text were serialised over three editions of the Sunday Mirror (7 November, pp. 20-1; 14 November 1965, pp. 8-9; 21 November 1965, pp. 8-9). The first of these articles included an image of Dunn riding a bark in a dark urban tunnel flanked by a fine looking canine:

This Sunday Mirror story was previewed in the Daily Mirror (13 November 1965, p. 2):

A prominent front page comment story mused on Tynan uttering the f-word on the BBC at 11:19 pm on Saturday 13 November, noting how as a paper they had first published the word ‘Bloody’ in a War related headline on 1 June 1940: ‘BLOODY MARVELLOUS !’ (Daily Mirror, 17 November 1965, p. 1-2). They detailed how ‘blue-stocking’ ‘Miss’ Marghanita Laski had used five instances of four-letter words in a New Statesman article over the same weekend, writing about the new Penguin Dictionary, without using asterisks as they really preciously do in their article (ibid.). They tried to indicate the Sunday Mirror‘s daring in publishing the excerpts from Dunn’s original Up the Junction text, asking rhetorically whether they are ‘going too far’? then implicitly answering no: ‘morals change, times change, words change, people change. Maybe we shouldn’t take it all too seriously’ (ibid.). The piece ended with an apt dismissal of the moralists’ calls to sack Hugh Greene as DG and Tynan as literary director of the National Theatre, but did question Tynan’s language being used without warning and branded him a ‘theatrical show-off’ (ibid.). Thus, the tortuously convoluted passage of change in the mainstream world of 1965 was writ… colossal!

The pseudonymous “Hotline” felt the worst thing about Up the Junction was how its makers took ‘relish’ in this ‘flood of sex and gutter language [being] poured into our homes in the name of freedom and liberty of expression’ (Port Talbot Guardian, 19 November 1965, p. 10). Stolid conservative reaction follows, with a deputation to local MP John Morris planned and extensive listing of people involved, and how ‘over 100 MPs’ had approved the presentation to Parliament of over 250,000 signatures supporting Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV Campaign (ibid.).

The same day, Katharine Whitehorn reviewed Nell Dunn’s book Talking to Women in The Observer, extolling Dunn’s portrait of nine woman of a similar age to herself – including Ann Quin and Paddy Kitchen – ‘tigerish priestesses of spontaneity [who] have enormous vitality, enormous appeal’ (21 November 1965, p. 26). Whitehorn wanted a bit of external social context, as well as Dunn’s own opinions, contributions and conclusions, but still found it an ‘absorbing, teasing book’ (ibid.).

In a Leeds parish magazine, the Rev. Eric Porteous of St Mary the Virgin, Quarry Hill, stood up for the play, noting he had been a curate in Wimbledon Park, London, and seen all the events of the play:

This is life as it is for many people. We must not believe that life is only what we experience in the four walls of our own home (Guardian, 1 January 1966, p. 3).

Nesta Roberts noted how volunteer social workers among the Sidcup and Chislehurst Grammar School claimed that old people now feared the young:

The popular press and TV has given them the idea that we are a sort of ‘Up the Junction!’ generation, used to attacking old ladies in the street. If you knock on the door, perhaps not having had a haircut recently and wearing an old pair of jeans, they think you are going to attack them. (Guardian, 3 February 1966, p. 6).

The audience research report reveals this was the archetypal Wednesday Play in the sense of attaining a large audience – nearly one in five of the UK public – while also polarising opinion. 25% gave it the highest A+ score, a further 26% an A, while 12% gave it a low C and 17% the lowest C- score (VR/65/619). 20% were right in the middle, ranking it B. Its RI of 58, while fractionally below Play for Today’s, was somewhat higher than the overall average for The Wednesday Play, which, IIRC, was 55-56 or so (ibid.).

The more granular detail included that there was a group broadly sharing the morally affronted perspectives of the more cloistered critics, terming Up the Junction ‘Disgusting, degrading, and unnecessarily sordid’, with the emphasis on ‘sex and squalor’ giving what they felt was the false impression that Battersea was peopled by ‘teenage sluts, young hooligans and vulgar old harridans’ (ibid.). Notably, the report claims that those who doubted the play’s veracity were a small minority among the sample of viewers, with rather more among the negative group just not finding this reality entertaining (ibid.). Conversely, over half found it ‘compulsive viewing’, strongly admiring Dunn’s capturing of ‘the brave, gay defiance of ordinary men and women’, loving how there was no ‘obvious ‘message” (ibid.). One viewer called it ‘the nearest thing to real life I have ever seen on television’, attesting to the success of Loach and Garnett’s approach, immersing us in the feelings of everyday South London life (ibid.). Two particular individuals spoke eloquently to how it was reflecting neglected working-class experiences:

Anyone who complains about this programme is complaining about life itself’, declared an Electrician, while a Housewife concluded: ‘How can I be offended by a way of life I remember as a child? (ibid.)

Performances were broadly felt to be ‘amazingly natural and realistic – ‘terrifyingly so’, in some cases, with many even refusing to believe they were by actors! (ibid.). The excellent outdoor scenes were felt to be integrated smoothly with the studio interiors, though some viewers felt there were excessive close-ups and ‘unnecessarily loud background noise’ drowned out the dialogue (ibid.). While some were ‘disconcerted’ by the play’s unconventional structure, this did not become a groundswell of opinion, with others noting shrewdly that this distanced it from typical drama, though they felt it should have been specifically framed as a ‘dramatised documentary’ beforehand (ibid.).

Public letters published in the press included Percy C. Brown of Birmingham 23, who admired its realistic staging, but felt it was ‘an offence against public decency’, out-Hogarthing Hogarth ‘and the anatomy episodes were over-protracted’ (Birmingham Post, 5 November 1965, p. 6). A definite snobbery resounded:

Typical, alas, of much that goes on today in the lower strata of society, the majority of the scenes and episodes constituted a flagrant abuse of dramatic art, and an unsavoury reminder of the steel decline that has taken place in speech, manners and morality int eh last three decades. (ibid.)

A Mrs. A.M. of West Heath, Birmingham wrote to claim she had ‘nearly smashed the television to bits’ in anger, feeling very personally affronted that the representation of young people did not match her own family: her sons own a motorcycle, but don’t ‘go drinking in pubs. They go fishing every weekend and there must be thousands like them’ (Birmingham Sunday Mercury, 7 November 1965, p. 27). I’m sad to have to be acerbic here, but why did so many people seem to struggle with the idea of fiction that had a licence to depict groups of people different to many viewers’ direct experience?!

The Glasgow Sunday Mail Magazine carried three letters on the play, a rare occasion a Wednesday Play headed this section of the paper (7 November 1965, p 16). James Duncan of Kirkintilloch Road assailed this ‘smut’, which was not ‘normal’, claiming dubiously some authority in being a teenager himself, while N. Lawson of 36 Castle Terrace, Edinburgh used the words ‘sordid’ and ‘drivel’, yes of course they did! (ibid.) Inevitably, our old mucker the Daily Mail signal boosted a similar Whitehouse acolyte from Wilberforce Road in Leicester, a Mrs B. Corby, decrying ‘filth’, yet above that carried a Mrs Joyce Thomson of Charlmont Road, Tooting, SW17, who praised its acting and righteously railed:

When are people going to wake up to the fact that sex is one of the basic enjoyments of life and always will be. I am not degenerate or weird. Just a happily married woman with a young daughter. (8 November 1965, p. 8)

Tooting celebrated freedom long before old Woolfie! At least if you just glanced at the press, you’d get the sense Mrs Johnson was outnumbered, but such is the persistent loud shouting of authoritarian conservative zealots.

In the first of several Daily Telegraph letters, Edna Stanway of Lymington, Hants, decried its depravity, then tellingly ended: ‘Is it too late to appeal for higher standards or must we leave it to the Communist countries who ban this type of decadence to carry forward the ideals of clean living and civilisation ?’ (8 November 1965, p. 12). Conversely, Tony Smythe of Reading found it ‘full-blooded, vivid, sympathetic and highly amusing’, slamming Lockwood’s partial review and claiming the characters were ‘a reasoned and fair proportion of the Clapham Junction scene (ibid.). Smythe, tired of a ‘surfeit of mournful seaside resorts and other kitchen sink dramas’ hoped that Lockwood’s comments wouldn’t discourage more dramas like Up the Junction (ibid.). An R.C. Grinham of London, SW11, backed up Smythe, claiming the dialogue was ‘studded with wit and shrewd observation – it was a giggle from beginning to end’ (ibid.).

Two letters in the Daily Mirror slammed the play. A Mrs H. Spalding chastised the Mirror’s TV critic for praising the play; while she was able to admit ‘some people do live in a disgusting manner’, the play made her ‘boil’, while a Mrs W. Delaney of London SW11 felt it unfairly depicted Battersea as ‘a cess-pool’; A. Humberstone of London EC1 was brief and tersely to the point: ‘Congratulations to the B.B.C. Let’s have more real-life plays for the people who live in reality’ (8 November 1965, p. 10). Unfortunately, then, many Northerners let the side down. W.L. Keighley of Ferndale, Blackley Road, Elland, backed up Whitehouse, feeling plays had been well worth watching in the mid-1950s, but decried how now the BBC persistently encouraged ‘the half-baked efforts of immature weirdies’ (Halifax Daily Courier & Guardian, 9 November 1965, p. 4).

Furthermore, ’57 Readers’ purporting to be ‘a group of responsible adult women of all ages, from all walks of life’ protested against a ‘vile and disgusting programme’ (Manchester Evening News & Chronicle, 10 November 1965, p. 3). They claimed to have considered sending a protest about other past plays, but this ‘all-time low standard’ spurred them to act: ‘we wish to censure any producer or head of department who passed this for public viewing’ (ibid.).

Conversely, two fine letters in the Reading Evening Post displayed level-headed Southern sense. G.G. Tate, of Birdhill Avenue, Reading, wryly noted how ‘This sort of life exists […] in most large towns and most intelligent people know this’, and that this sort of drama could actually do more good than ‘lectures’, while perceiving that the Whitehouse lot ‘do enjoy viewing disgustedly’ (9 November 1965, p. 8). A Mrs Frances Woollett of 22 Matthews Green Rd., Wokingham, turned some anger on Whitehouse herself: ‘I refuse to let her speak on my behalf. By whose authority does this woman appoint herself watchdog?’ (ibid.). Meanwhile, Rhoda Fraser, of 5 Scotland Street, Edinburgh, demolished Peggie Phillips’s review for missing the point of a ‘brilliant slice of life’, with ‘a great warmth of feeling’ towards its characters, and how ‘the warm seediness of the old borough’ was ‘giving way to the cold, high blocks of flats (The Scotsman, 9 November 1965, p. 8). This is a great letter, showing wisdom that Phillips was writing from a blinded ‘genteel’ perspective; Fraser fully got the play in a way few of the critics did:

The participants’ engagement in life, their “knocking” of out-of-touch officialdom, their search for love, their tolerance and their awareness of the threat of the H-bomb were surely all rich and positive qualities. (ibid.)

Meanwhile, an extensive discussion continued in the Wolverhampton Express and Star (10 November 1965, p. 12). P.R. Skidmore felt the BBC should encourage ‘that which is pure, and that which is right, and that which is holy’, but was outnumbered by ‘Tiger Wallace’, who claimed near pornographic books and some films would corrupt far more than Up the Junction, and by a certain Richard James Whitehouse, of Northwood Park, Wolverhampton, who followed up on his 6 November letter. This other Whitehouse discerned a cautionary message about careful driving, terming the play ‘a masterpiece created by brilliant teamwork’ (ibid.).

The Gossiper notes a housewife writing to tell them that highly educated white collar boys in Lincoln got up to similar behaviour – ‘All night parties, moonlight bathing (when the weather permits), week-end orgies etc.’ (Lincolnshire Echo, 11 November 1965, p. 3). She seems to feel they aren’t as open as the Battersea women, ending: ‘I am not condemning them – only wish I was young enough to join them…’ (ibid.).

A ‘Hans Christian Andersen Reader’ claimed not to have a TV, but found discussions of Dunn’s ‘sordid epic’ interesting, ending with a call to accept sex, but just as a small part of our lives, without ‘dirty sniggering’ (Leicester Mercury, 12 November 1965, p. 4). Barrington Roberts of Walberton, West Sussex rather snobbishly set themselves above the fray of those Telegraph correspondents who had viewed it, and passionately argued for or against the play’s merits, patronising them all as being alike as ‘a captive audience’ like that desired by advertisers (Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1965, p. 16).

Mrs V. Colebrook of Hastings, East Sussex reflected, obviously but necessarily, that ‘No doubt there are many people in Battersea who are not a bit like the people in the play […] But just because they are not is no reason to deny such lively characters exist’ (Daily Mirror, 12 November 1965, p. 10).

David Boulton of Elstead, Surrey wisely objected to the ‘Miss Stanways of this world telling me what will or will not corrupt me’, referring back to the previously outnumbered Edna Stanway letter of 8 November (Daily Telegraph, 16 November 1965, p. 21). This gradual backlash of good sense in the Daily Telegraph pages – despite apparent reactionary missives from “Peter Simple” [Michael Wharton] is significant: showing Tory England was far from uncomplicatedly aligned with Mary Whitehouse.

Furthermore, it is worth reflecting that a mere 0.005% of the estimated audience phoned into the BBC duty log about the play – and I don’t yet have evidence these were all necessarily negative calls – while fewer than this wrote into the press to complain. By and large, I estimate over 5 million people liked or really liked Up the Junction, with maybe 2.5 million disliking or hating it, to varying degrees, and 1.7 million being more mixed or neutral.

Academic Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh felt viewers had misread Garnett’s intent about abortion, those being positive towards the play feeling it was a chilling warning against abortion itself rather than a pro-abortion piece which indicted women being compelled to have backstreet abortions; she also noted how Loach and Garnett learned from this polysemic ambiguity, subsequently making Cathy Come Home crystal clear in all respects  (op. cit., pp. 253-4). While I’d argue that Macmurraugh-Kavanagh is overly emphasising the negative minority’s misreading of the text, it clearly did make Up the Junction a complex, divisive text, where Cathy would provide unifying through its Theatre Workshop style blend of Brechtian distancing and Dickensian sentimentality.

At a Conference to herald the January 1966 Wednesday Play run, starting with The Boneyard, BBC Head of Plays Michael Bakewell led from the front in noting that of the 9.5 million who had watched the controversial play, 400 had ‘registered their embarrassment’ (Guardian, 4 January 1966, p. 2). Notably, James Green had earlier noted how the postbag initially contained letters ‘all viciously in protest. But letters arriving two or three days later are less biased and often favourable to the programme’ (London Evening News and Star, 18 November 1965, p. 11). Mary Whitehouse was to have her very first TV appearance on 24 November, following a confrontation in the pages of the Daily Mirror with progressive campaigner Avril Fox and Harrow New Town Councillor, who along with seven like-minded women, is said to have kicked off an anti-Whitehouse ‘freedom for TV’ campaign with a letter to the New Statesman on 19 November.

Asa Briggs – who listed Up the Junction as one of his four landmark Wednesday Plays or Plays for Today from 1964-74 – records that there were 460 telephone calls to the BBC about the play, and that it sharply divided the audience (1995, pp. 522, 1013-75). Yet, as we have seen it had many strong public and media defenders, and the play quickly became canonised. In April 1966, Troy Kennedy Martin felt it had lifted drama ‘out of the rut and makes nonsense of the idea that television is only a poor relation of theatre or film’, claiming it was better than any British film of 1965 and more important than any play seen in the theatre (Contrast, p. 137). Martin noted how rare it was that directors in TV were given the time to develop like Loach had been, from Teletale onwards; he situated Loach alongside Peter Watkins (1935-2025 RIP), as directors whose works ‘explode out from the run of the mill material (ibid., p. 139). Martin also identified how Loach was getting viewers to feel rather than think, praising how he

uses sound to carry the momentum of a play. Girls chattering up stairs, noises, pop music, an overheard conversation about a gasworks, wild sound and crystal clear snatched phrases, statistics all provide the movement while the camera punches out the meaning. (ibid.)

In terms of journalistic urgency, historian Christopher Bray made the most significant claims of all, arguing that Up the Junction influenced the 1967 Abortion Act, which legalized abortion through the NHS (2014, p. 245). Within a month of the play’s broadcast, politician Lord Stonham cited it in a debate as exposing the grim reality faced by young women forced into illegal abortions. The discussion also highlighted class inequality – wealthy women could pay for safer procedures while the poor suffered most. The 1967 Act finally ended this injustice, passed by the Commons in July that year and coming into force on 27 April 1968. (Apparently, the BBC stopped a planned 1966 repeat due to the political sensitivities; a subject I will need to return to when I have more time, as the cuttings I have located primarily tackle the immediate aftermath of the original broadcast…)

Ken Loach won a Craft award for Drama for his work in directing Up the Junction at the Guild of Television Producers and Directors in 1966-7. A feature-film was subsequently made; this was directed by Peter Collinson – just before The Italian Job (1969) – and written by Roger Smith, of Wednesday Play fame. This BHE Films production was distributed by Paramount Pictures and ran just under two hours. It was passed for release by the BBFC with an X certificate on 15 September 1967. A 2008 Paramount DVD release attained a 12 for ‘moderate language, sex references and abortion theme’. The film was apparently a commercial success, but received mixed critical notices.

The play was cemented even more in the national consciousness when London band Squeeze recorded ‘Up the Junction’, inspired by and which alluded to the Wednesday Play, released as single on 18 May 1979, two weeks after Margaret Thatcher’s Tories won the general election. Thus, it quickly assumed a mood of nostalgia for Swinging mid-Sixties Britain, unquestionably a time of some optimism in comparison to 1979-84, when the Second Cold War, the Afghanistan War, theocracy in Iran, Thatcher’s cruel capitalist restoration and dread at nuclear war were all experienced.

I haven’t the time to do a full survey of the extensive academic coverage the play received. Julian Petley noted how Worsley’s critique of the play’s blending of fact and fiction directly echoed that old BBC force Grace Wyndham Goldie’s attacks on Peter Watkins’s The War Game in the Sunday Telegraph (in McKnight (ed.), Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach, 1997, p. 28). The most extensive coverage is in John Caughie (2000, pp. 114-20), Jacob Leigh 2002: 39-46 and John Hill (2011, pp. 36-50).

Idiotically, the BBC Four repeat on Wednesday 18 January 2025 was prefaced by the announcer claiming Dennis Waterman and Maureen Lipman were in it, getting haplessly confused with Peter Collinson’s 1968 film version.

Finally, we must return to what this play says about how times were changing. Christopher Bray put it very well, about 1965:

And so while over the succeeding half century our culture has fallen prey to sporadic outbursts of censoriousness, the people of Britain have shown no interest in undoing the good, liberating work of 1965. They know there is no going back to that mythical vision of a world before the fall. And they know that anyone who imagines he can take them back needs watching very carefully. (op. cit., p. 245)

— Many thanks to John Williams for supplying the 100 press cuttings (yes, 100 exactly!) that made the extent of this article possible. Thanks also go to Juliette Jones for professional transcription of my interview with Linda McCarthy, and to Linda McCarthy herself for spending time talking with me.

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.🙂