Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.22: ‘The Man Without Papers’ (BBC1, 9 June 1965)

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

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

02.22: The Man Without Papers (BBC One, Wednesday 9 June 1965) 9:25 – 10:40pm

Directed by Peter Duguid; Written by Troy Kennedy Martin; ??; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by William McCrow; Music by The Seeds; special lyrics by Bob Dylan

Who is Roscoe, what is he ?

(Daily Mail, 9 June 1965, p. 14)

This play is another of the brazenly contemporary, mainstream occupying Wednesday Plays, deliberately escaping middle-class dinner parties or upper-class drawing rooms. It ‘investigates the complicated personality of a tough, brash, modern hero-villain’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 5 June 1965, p. 14), or was ‘all about a stateless man’s desperate attempt to establish an identity for himself’ (Liverpool Echo and Evening Express, 5 June 1965, p. 2). The Glasgow Sunday Mail noted that ‘Hit-parading folk singer Bob Dylan wrote the songs Ben Carruthers will sing’ (6 June 1965, p. 17).

The play taps into a universal and rather temporally expansive theme of documentation and papers personally representing identity. Not just their importance to Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker, but the Cold War per se, and Stephen S. Thompson’s excoriating drama based on real events, Sitting in Limbo (BBC One, 2020), which documented Theresa May’s Home Office’s racist ‘hostile environment’ policy towards Windrush migrants like Anthony Bryan, whose inhuman, Kafkaesque nightmare experiences were set in motion by Cameron’s government.

It was noted as Troy Kennedy Martin’s first TV play since 1961, creating another ‘contemporary hero, Roscoe, a fast-talking idealist on the run’, while noting TKM’s credentials, based on Z Cars, Diary of a Young Man and the ‘prize-winning’ Interrogator (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 9 June 1965, p. 3). Scottish paper the Sunday Post rated it ****, same as Z Cars, noting the stateless man is ‘hunted by gangsters and police alike’ (6 June 1965, p. 12).

Lead American actor Benito Carruthers and singer Bob Dylan are termed ‘products of the so-called “beat generation”, a highly idealistic group who are deeply committed to propagating their beliefs through their art’: all key background to a ‘thriller’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 9 June 1965, p. 2). The same article notes how Roscoe (Carruthers) was seven years ago in a North Korean PoW camp, who preserved the morale of his comrade David Castle (James Maxwell), who is now an important Home Office official (ibid.). Roscoe is now stateless and in trouble with the authorities and poses a danger to Castle’s own career (ibid.). Castle’s wife Marcella is played by Geraldine McEwan.

There is further information:

Bob Dylan, who is just finishing a successful tour in this country, has specially written the lyrics for songs that Carruthers sings in the play. The music was written and is played by the Seeds. (ibid.)

Geoffrey Lane reflects how Roscoe is also wanting to establish his ‘political rights’ alongside his identity, and how TKM’s dramas ‘have always gone beyond convention in force of their comment on modern life’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 9 June 1965, p. 11). Lane reflects somewhat ambivalently on Roscoe:

the modern equivalent of a romantic hero, a beatnik, a fast-talking and highly questionable idealist, combining the irreconcilable elements of saint and parasite. He is played by an actor born into the beat world. (ibid.)

Lane questions whether Roscoe is overly relying on his noble past deeds to now ‘demands such sacrifices as he does’ from Castle and Marcella, while also saying a shame that it clashes with the NET and Michael Sklar’s documentary about immigration, which included London and Bradford filming (ibid.).

Clifford Davis centred on Carruthers, ‘the 25-year-old Chicago actor’, making a British TV debut, in a play by a ‘no-punches-pulled’ writer TKM who ‘invariably’ produces ‘unusual situations and off-beat dialogue’ (Daily Mirror, 9 June 1965, p. 14). Davis finds Carruthers embarked on a similar mission to Roscoe in his own life: wanting to settle here and ‘become English’, while hearing of his work in various labouring and dish washing jobs in New York and starring in John Cassavetes’ improvised film Shadows (1959) (ibid.). He also claims that Carruthers provided the melodies to Dylan’s words for the play’s songs (ibid.).

The Radio Times had noted how TKM has the ‘uncanny knack of coming up with the right stories and characters at the right time’ (3 June 1965, p. 35). This reminds me, of course, of Edge of Darkness (BBC Two, then BBC One, 1985), which I saw in the late Nineties and is a complex political thriller which emotively features environmentalism and contains a vivid gallery of characters. This preview indicates Roscoe’s politics in having ‘burnt his passport during the days of McCarthy’, and being on the run ever since: a character either loved or hated by the men and women who encounter him (ibid.). Carruthers’s proximity to Roscoe is again emphasised, and involvement in ‘a hip scene which stretches from San Francisco to Paris’, epitomising ‘the best in the young footloose 1960s artists who care more for life than for money’, with Carruthers being Dylan’s ‘old friend’ (ibid.).

No rating: while it does not exist in full in the archives, the first two-thirds does, which I have watched, though it is unfair to make any overall assessment of the play based on such an incomplete source.

From what I’ve seen, I’d broadly say the critical comments noted below are fair, in the positives and negatives discerned. It’s definitely a lively performance from Carruthers which must have felt like a charged injection of new life at the time. He certainly had something of the kinetic energy and oddball charisma of 1970s Tim Curry about him. David Dixon plays the ultimate twisted version of this archetype in the Play for Today Jumping Bean Bag (1976), who’s nastier and public-schooled, whereas Roscoe is indulgently amoral.

Unlike And Did Those Feet? with its pair’s innocent freedoms, this felt rather more depicting the familiar Dionysian freedom of 1960s myths. There’s the wearying familiarity of sexual freedoms being entirely on men’s terms. Roscoe tells Anne, David’s secretary, about the attempted brainwashing by a ‘slit-eyed Commie from Peking’ when in a Korea PoW camp, before discussing how McCarthyism destroyed freedom in the US. There’s a sense of escaping competing Communist and Capitalist tyrannies into hedonistic freedom which means jumping on various buses without paying a fare, or a milk float and stealing a bottle of milk. And just womanising all the time.

For me, the opening with Roscoe calling David from Glasgow is pacey, hooks you in and is intriguing, but it gets less interesting as it goes on, with, seemingly, Martin’s point being the attractiveness of this Bohemian freedom, viewed entirely from masculine perspective. The underworld elements seem grafted on and barely figure, just being a backdrop. It felt a very deictic play: telling of its context, and also in how enjoying it is hard to fully fathom given how far away we are from that context.

Audience size: 8.42 million

Interestingly, in TAM ratings, it was the top BBC One programme of the week for the large Wales and the West region, with a Tamrating of 35% – i.e. the percentage of sets capable of receiving both BBC and ITV transmissions actually tuned in a point in time to any particular programme’ (Television Today, 24 June 1965, p. 14).

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Scarlet and the Black – Part 5 / Horizon, including Men and Sharks / Jazz 625: The Zodiac Variations by Johnny Dankworth), ITV (Carroll Calling / This Question of Colour: An American television team takes a hard look at the British and immigration)

Audience Reaction Index: 54%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: c.35.7%

Reception: The London critics were mixed, with quite a varied spread of views. I’d say the regional press were slightly more favourable, though again there was a range of opinion. The audience response was fairly mixed, with many both for and against.

The anonymous reviewer found it a very exciting play, concerning Roscoe having lived in Britain without papers ‘and therefore as an outlaw for seven years’, and then abusing his connections with Castle to gain his papers when threatened by the criminal underworld (Times, 10 June 1965, p. 7). However, they felt Martin depicted Roscoe vaguely, not really exploring the question of his ‘sanctity or corruption’ in sufficient depth, though Carruthers ‘found a great deal that was sinisterly attractive in Roscoe’ and James Maxwell was ‘firm and effective’ as his bullied friend (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood mused on the familiar ‘fugitive on the run’ narrative, but with Roscoe ‘a decidedly off-beat hero’: one she found profoundly ‘alienating’ in being ‘Anarchic, loose-mouthed, beatnik-haired, owning the manners of an ape’ (Daily Telegraph, 10 June 1965, p. 21). Thus, she totally lacked sympathy with his plight, though admitted Carruthers played Roscoe ‘devastatingly well’ in the Method style, and the script had ‘all the pace and the punch that one has come to expect from its writer’ (ibid.). Lockwood’s review also indicates that Anne (Ingrid Hafner) is very attracted to Roscoe, giving him ‘much more than tea and sympathy’ (ibid.). Interestingly, the same page has a photo of Alexander Trocchi and Allen Ginsberg pronouncing a ‘PLANET-CHANT CARNIVAL’ in London, the day before their beat poetry performance at the Royal Albert Hall, with Bruce Lacey and Alan Sillitoe to appear too (ibid.).

Peter Black immediately noted The Wednesday Play’s title sequence as the ‘best’ of any present drama series’, with its jolting, contemporary vigour and unpredictability: ‘After this, you know you are not likely to get a play which will begin with a butler answering the telephone’ (Daily Mail, 10 June 1965, p. 3). Yet, he criticised producer James MacTaggart’s lack of sure planning of a direction, claiming its most ‘consistent’ feature is its ‘fatuous indulgence of authors and directors, born of a desperate need to believe that the current crop is better than it seems’ (ibid.). To cap off this rare overall assault on the strand, Black targeted TKM’s play as ‘another confusing and pretentious bore’, centring on a ‘kind of anarchist-Saint’, Roscoe, who he didn’t find interesting, and, in an oppositional reading, did not feel like siding with (ibid.). Black even feels this sort of hero – with ‘mesmeric power over every woman in sight’ – is ‘becoming as lifeless as the drawing-room heroes they displaced’, decrying Martin’s failure to interest him in this character: admitting he may be carving out a place for himself as a Clement Scott-like ‘fuddy-duddy’ (ibid.). Theatre critic Scott had opposed Ibsen and Shaw back in the 1880s-90s (ibid.).

Patrick Skene Catling saw Z Cars creator Martin as using ‘maudlin self-pity of a rather old-fashioned hipster on the run’ to take revenge on the police’, with Home Office and Scotland Yard ‘worse than square’ (Punch, 16 June 1965, p. 899). Catling admitted liking the opening in a Glasgow telephone booth, but felt that, despite some ‘strong lines, passionately uttered’, it was a ‘muddled’ play which asked, but didn’t answer, questions, being characteristically 1965 in hoping ‘that obscurity might be mistaken for deep significance’ (ibid.).

Kari Anderson found it an entertaining, compelling mix of the social protest play and thriller: a ‘lively sprawl’ which put you off caring about certain inconsistencies, while watching at least (Television Today, 17 June 1965, p. 12). Anderson noted that for true beats, Roscoe would be ‘too involved, too voluble’, insufficiently gentle and withdrawing, claiming he was actually more of an ‘anarchist, 1960 style’ (ibid.). Anderson loved the thriller framework, yet felt actions and motives here weren’t clear, especially as regards the underworld element, while accepting unlike Black and Lockwood why Roscoe would appeal, due to his irresistible ‘inner conviction and vitality’ (ibid.). Capping off the most positive London press review, Anderson liked its plentiful comments on ‘the social scene’, which had wit and gaiety and weren’t ‘heavy and deliberate’ – suggesting crucial skills TKM possessed – and acclaimed Carruthers for transcending early mugging, becoming ‘completely charged with the daemon of vitality’ (ibid.). While he felt an overly cat-like Geraldine McEwan was ‘too mannered’, James Maxwell ‘is in the front rank’ of actors, Ingrid Hafner conveyed Anne’s compassion, and Charles Victor, John Woodnutt and Anne Manahan also registered strongly (ibid.).

Outside London, M.G. felt The Wednesday Play series ‘suddenly sparked into life’ with a ‘first-rate thriller in a carefully observed contemporary setting’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 10 June 1965, p. 5). They loved the visuals, a claiming Eddie Best’s ‘superb camera work’ and Carruthers’s ‘gem’ of a performance of a ‘Bohemian’, ‘a true character of the sixties, one of those off-beat, easy-going, somewhat slovenly persons’ (ibid.). Furthermore, contradicting certain London reviews, they thought all narratives threads were skillfully handled, and liked how Roscoe’s ‘duality of bitterness and tenderness’, and its effects on others, was portrayed (ibid.). Michael Beale, contrarily, was put off by how it was ‘inclined to shoot off at all sorts of angles, which seemed to have little bearing’ on Roscoe Mortimer’s plight, switching over to ITV’s documentary and feeling he had learned that West Indians assimilated better into British life than Asians (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 10 June 1965, p. 2).

Also from Tyneside, Eric Forster noted the sensational elements meant it would have to be ‘exceptionally good not to be an unexceptional tarradiddle’ (Newcastle Journal, 10 June 1965, p. 5). Forster agreed more with some London reviewers that the gangland plot added little, and found the inspector a ‘dreary’ stereotype, ‘who uttered endless police-style cliches’ (ibid.). He felt Roscoe was a good, complex character but perhaps fitted ‘for a different type of television exercise’ (ibid.). However, Geoffrey Lane felt it was ‘not to be turned off’, being a ‘thoughtful’ take on the thriller genre, with Roscoe a ‘Byronic hero’, seen in these Romantic terms as waving ‘the banner of freedom’, and ‘as accurate a portrait as I have seen on television of the post-war rebel’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 12 June 1965, p. 11). Again, Carruthers’s performance was seen as brilliant, alongside McEwan and Maxwell’s ‘great intensity’, within a ‘strong and original play’, that transcended ‘some rather doubtful, hardboard scenery’ (ibid.).

Unusually, in the Scotsman, it got mentioned not in Peggie Phillips’s Television column, but in Allen Wright’s film one. Phillips, tellingly in view of The Wednesday Play’s undoubtedly androcentric output so far, comments how Channel 10’s Play of the Week, Bridget Boland’s Beautiful for Ever, ‘was one of the few good television plays written by a woman’s, a true-life crime tale which gave Ellen Pollock and Dulcie Gray splendid acting opportunities (14 June 1965, p. 4). Wright noted how cinema was declining, with big spectacular musicals like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, Beatles and Bond films and Topkapi being rare outliers, with television now performing the ‘functions of film societies on a huge scale, raising standards of appreciation and creating the climate for experiment’, with some TV plays being ‘virtually films’ themselves (ibid.). Wright claimed The Man Without Papers was like Bond films and A Hard Day’s Night, but ‘in its form and editing, it was far more sophisticated’, and part of how television now ‘offers a wider range of intelligent entertainment than the cinema can now provide’ (ibid.).

Alongside a photo where he resembles Lou Reed somewhat, an interview with Ben Carruthers reveals that he wrote ‘Jack o’ Diamonds’ with Dylan, which appeared in the play, and alongside ‘Right Behind You’, Parlophone had released it as a single (Belfast Telegraph – week-end magazine, 19 June 1965, p. 7). F.B.’s interview notes Carruthers is descended on his mother’s side from Benito Juarez, the first President of Mexico, and has just completed his own film script, Count Downe, a horror story where he was to play the lead: “I will get the film made no matter how long it takes or how much it costs”, and predicts he will make ‘a big impact in British show business’ (ibid.).

Among a very large audience, there was division, but a larger groundswell of enjoyment than for Mercer’s play last week, with 41% giving it A+/A compared with 27% C/C- and 32% in the middle (B), giving it a fairly typical Wednesday Play Reaction Index of 54, which indicating it was agitating and delighting people in the right sort of numbers (BBC WAC, VR/65/312). It did not score as highly as The Interrogator in 1961 (68), though. The reaction here is summed up as ‘baffling and compelling at one and the same time’, though much of the emphasis is on its ‘hotchpotch’ quality and being ‘Sick, sick, sick and obscure’ (ibid.). Others, however, loved a ‘gripping’ tale with a complex protagonist very different from the norm in thrillers, and a student observed

a kind of anarchist-cum-saint, in whose conduct lay the clue that leads to the way our of dark and into the light (ibid.).

Many felt Carruthers was so good as Roscoe that he himself must be a rebel, with Maxwell and Victor also praised, but Geraldine McEwan seen as doing little more than ‘creeping about and looking torrid for reasons which we never understood’ (ibid.). Settings were seen as very authentic and continuity moved at a brisk pace, though occasional criticisms were made of overly ‘abrupt’ switches in scene and ‘too gimmicky photography’ (ibid.).

One viewer letter from a Mrs. M. Boylan of West Horsley, Surrey, slammed ‘SUCH a stupid play’, questioning why two attractive women would fall for ‘the fuzzy-haired, uncouth Roscoe’, and seeing the police inspector as ‘the most unlikely one I’ve yet seen on television’, while having – surprise, surprise (ed.) – no ‘notion what it was all about’ (Sunday Mirror, 13 June 1965, p. 22). Boylan specifically echoed comments in the BBC audience research viewing sample, seeing him as a ‘scruffy […] tramp’ (op. cit.).

It’s an odd one, as we have missed so many plays due to their archival absence, but I really just don’t feel like we have had a gallery of heroes of the kind Peter Black refers to: none of these – Willoughby Goddard, David Markham, Jane Arden, Barry Foster, Glenda Jackson, Alfred Lynch, Nicol Williamson – fit the mould he identified in the slightest. David Hemmings was verging on Bohemian in Auto-Stop, say, but in a very circumscribed way. While we have missed a fair few others, so who knows, I do sense that this kind of overtly countercultural protagonist is very rare in 1965 Wednesday Plays. Of course, Carruthers’s link with John Cassavetes points strongly forward to how in 1973, Tony Garnett enabled Plays for Today devised by Mike Leigh and Les Blair to be broadcast…

Ben Carruthers (1936-1983) never did get to make his screenplay as a film, though did feature in The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Jamaican director Esther Anderson’s intriguing sounding short film Short Ends (1976), alongside varied forces Jim Capaldi, Martine Beswick and Judy Geeson. Both Peter Duguid and TKM were to largely move over to working for ITV after this, with the exception of Martin’s 1980s BBC return. Martin went on to work on some exceedingly macho-signifying films in Hollywood and for BBC Films: Red Heat (1988) and Bravo Two Zero (1999), with a posthumous credit on Michael Mann’s Ferrari as recently as 2023!

Dylanologists will no doubt be able to confirm, but it seems there is considerable doubt that he specially wrote the lyrics for the play, and also that ‘Jack O’ Diamonds’ was a traditional Texan gambling song popularized by Blind Lemon Jefferson many decades earlier.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.21: ‘And Did Those Feet?’ (BBC1, 2 June 1965)

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 existing plays up to Cathy, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis.

02.21: And Did Those Feet? (BBC One, Wednesday 2 June 1965) 9:25 – 11:10pm

Directed by Don Taylor; Written by David Mercer; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by William McCrow; Music by Herbert Chappell

An aristocrat in search of an heir. But six marriages produce no children – except for two illegitimate sons, always pursued by their father’s hatred (Observer, 30 May 1965, p. 22).

I quote a BBC spokesman: “Lord Fountain’s bastard sons – fat Bernard and thin Timothy – live in a swimming pool with inflatable rubber animals which they prefer to humans.

“When their father wrecks the pool, they join the London Zoo staff, and release all the animals.” (Ken Irwin, Daily Mirror, 2 June 1965, p. 20).

a way-out comedy, so off-beat in fact that it sounds unbelievable (Bill Smith, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 2 June 1965, p. 15).

Reputedly wild comedy by David Mercer (Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 30 May 1965, p. 11).

David Mercer (1928-1980) was established by this point, as a ‘name’ writer, at least among the press. And Did Those Feet? is a notable one-off in its sprawling length, while being in another in Mercer’s line of collaborations with director Don Taylor. Taylor was a theatrical, studio-loving hold-out against Sydney Newman’s shift to kitchen sink naturalism; I have read parts of his Days of Hope memoir (1990) and a memorable March 1998 New Statesman broadside in favour of imaginative studio plays, against filmed realism. His Dead of Night play The Exorcism (1972), which I saw at Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema many years ago and also on DVD, is an excellent Marxist ghost story. I’ve still yet to see his The Roses of Eyam (1973), about the plague in Derbyshire village, which Ben Lamb has written about here.

he Daily Mail trail it as a ‘sad, funny, mysterious tale’ (2 June 1965, page unclear). The Rochdale Observer describes it as a ‘zany comedy’ with ‘crazy adventures’ (2 June 1965, p. 11). Mercer himself is acclaimed as ‘one of TV’s best writers’, delivering ‘the half-sad, half-comic adventures of a Peer’s illegitimate twins’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 29 May 1965, p. 14) and even ‘considered by many to be the best playwright that television has produced’ (Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 2 June 1965, p. 3). Contrarily, Ken Hawkins felt averse to ‘plays that are so absurd they make the Goons appear normal in comparison’, noting this will likely provide ‘plenty of cause for invective […] it will run for 106 minutes’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 29 May 1965, p. 3).

After the play’s broadcast, Mercer was interviewed by Llew Gardner in his Hampstead home, expressing the feeling his plays would be better understood in two or three years’ time, while slagging off both the South and North of England, respectively, as ‘like a toy garden; it’s soft and boring’ and ‘provincial towns anger and bore me’, expressing that London suits his rootlessness, even if his ‘West Riding puritanism’ still influences his caution (The Sun, 11 June 1965, p. 5). Looking oddly like a young, bearded Barrie Rutter in the photo, Mercer reveals his own interest in the sea, and some surprisingly individualistic, Tory views:

he does not like paying income tax. He says: “As I pay them an awful lot of money, I think the least the Government can do is to consult me about how they intend to spend it (ibid.).

Bill Smith jokes about how the twins ‘find it difficult to come to terms with life’, after describing Timothy as a ‘beanpole’ (op. cit.). The Radio Times preview eloquently previews a ‘very sad, very funny, very mysterious tale’, wherein somehow the twins ‘just cannot get on with people and they find the world a harsh puzzling place […] always they are pursued’ (29 May 1965, page unclear).

David Gourlay’s Guardian profile of James MacTaggart made a significant point that MacTaggart had now established The Wednesday Play, some of which had achieved an ‘impact’ on TV comparable to Look Back in Anger on stage in 1956 (3 June 1965, p. 6). This lends Kenneth Haigh’s voice-over narration of the play extra piquancy. MacTaggart’s aims were for Wednesday Play writers to be aiming for ‘the freedom of the novel’, rather than ‘the fixed architectural cadences of the three-act Shaftesbury Avenue piece’, focusing on ideas over entertainment (ibid.). Gourlay describes the images we see:

BATHING BEAUTY – block of flats – ship on the rocks – demonstrators – police – guided missile and then, as unexpected and compelling as the biblical still small voice after earthquake, mighty wind and fire, the figure of a boy standing quietly isolated in some unknown street. Perhaps by now the nine million viewers of the Wednesday Night Play on BBC-1 take these opening titles for granted. (ibid.).

MacTaggart does not, Gourlay states, noting he devised The Wednesday Play’s title sequence as a prologue which was ‘intellectual but pop’, in his evocative phrase (ibid.). MacTaggart is also quoted feeling A Tap on the Shoulder, Dan, Dan, the Charity Man and Horror of Darkness were the most ‘remarkable’ Wednesday Plays so far, with And Did Those Feet? set to ‘push things – almost to the limit’ (ibid.).

Now, this is one we can actually watch! It’s available here in pretty poor visual quality:

I was lucky enough to watch a considerably clearer version via charity Learning on Screen’s educational resource, Box of Broadcasts.

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

Difference and variety were absolutely crucial to the single play firmament in the 1950s-80s, and this is truly laudable in expanding the medium’s possibilities. Anyone writing it off or dismissing it because of it not fitting their expectations of realism, a “well made play” or a straightforward narrative, is truly missing the point about what made that whole time compelling, unpredictable and artistically “fecund” – to quote Lord Fountain.

On first viewing, this just felt to me like Vivian Stanshall’s Rawlinson End, but without the laughs, the eccentricity just a tad forced. Long-winded, verbose dialogue from human mannequins that didn’t get to the gist of things, or have sufficient grist, compared with that of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter…

That said, there’s something admirable about the BBC giving over 105 minutes of its prime time schedule to a fundamentally weird piece, that would be bound to alienate the majority watching. It showed guts to avoid crowd pleasing when mostly that is what TV did: this ought to be vital in any anti-utilitarian conception of TV as portal, not Huxleyean balm.

Then there is Eric Deeming’s dexterous film camerawork and Sam Barclay’s superlative lighting work in the 16mm sequence in the swimming pool, where Timothy and Bernard go to live. Visually, for me this is play’s one really memorable setting, and it captures the twins’ bizarre, and increasingly admirable, eccentricity, perfectly. These scenes include Sylvia Kay and Jo Rowbottom as Poppy and Laura, who both do well as petit bourgeois and tough working class women, respectively, roles somewhat in line with others we have seen, and given a reasonable amount to say, if not do… They are a vital contrast to the boys, worldly and going with the consumerist herd in just as genuine a way as the boys utterly deviate from it.

Sylvia Kay and Jo Rowbottom as the materialist *normals*

Herbert Chappell’s music is much more present than is usual for a Wednesday Play/Play for Today, which emphasises this was one of the most prestigious and ambitious productions. It grated on me the first time, but I was more won over by its strings and harp the second time; it was not strange enough, yet it does embed a kind of mottled wistfulness fitting for a play which
Patrick Troughton is a suitably hawkish mad dog of a hapless, delusional and arrogant aristocrat, whose world is clearly fading. The whole scenario just seems like it needed taking even further, Bunuel is mentioned in the script by some posh Oxford student lass, and I mentioned Stanshall already. It seemed a pertinent enough dig at Lord Fountain, without fully drawing out his sons’ ‘proto-hippy’ rebellion in ‘opting out’ – which Oliver Wake shrewdly perceives in his BFI Screenoline article. More scenes like in the indoor swimming pool and the moment where they burst into song, and fewer addled verbose speeches, would have helped…

While there is clearly some radical energy in what David Mercer was trying to do here, it felt it got dissipated through excessive reverential focus on the word. Don Taylor needed to be seeing it more in visual terms, as a surrealist would.

Yet, on second viewing, its curiously aimless – yet not – philosophical ruminations came across much more clearly. It came into view how this was a nuanced celebration of gentle non-conformism – easily extrapolated to CND campaigners or hippies. And, what’s more, a rare deep exploration of entropic lethargy and vigorousness. Decaying chaos vs. busy order. Mercer touches on an odd truth that the old school conservativism of landed wealth is dying, dissipating – indeed, Lord Fountain dies – and then the benign innocence of the twins is taking over, but that Laura and Poppy’s more conventional materialistic path will win out in evolutionary terms. However, you get the sense the twins will in their way, enjoy life more, especially if they’re able to entirely escape the prison of conventional expectations – which, however, aberrant they are, keep niggling at them.

Viewing #2 also made me appreciate the errant silliness of Mercer’s preoccupation with animals, which really anticipated that of Chris Morris thirty years later. We get the daftness of the inflatable animals in the swimming pool, after the strangely lovely Flanders and Swann like duet they’ve recorded on film and watch again as a comfort to Bernard.

Such scenes are utterly unique, and make you forgive the extensive long takes close in on actors’ faces – a stifling aesthetic, even if nobody can deny it gives you a brilliant view of some vividly performed lines, from Goddard, Markham and Troughton in his dream talking with God (Jack May). The second half is significantly stronger, because you’ve got used to the play’s world, register and the performances gel far better. Initially, it just felt risibly broad at times with madcap mugging from certain players very reminiscent of certain 1960s film comedies. Yet, an odd serene gravitas developed, building to a fine, very Edward Lear-like ending.

So, And Did Those Feet? felt a remarkable mix of the preposterously indulgent, in its length and verbosity, and something that was sociologically, psychologically and anthropologically – and scientifically – deeply planned and thought out. For such an apparently whimsical fantasy to taps into some of the 1960s’ major concerns shows the unique scope of the Wednesday Play. Competition, desire, conventional ‘fun’ and herding instincts against morality, fratenity, unconventional fun and apartness. It shows us the different human rituals, juxtaposing busy acquisitive capitalism alongside what seems a sedate spontaneous animism, almost…

Best Performance: DAVID MARKHAM

This was a tough one! Troughton gives it his all, even down to ingratiating dream talk: “oh, bully to God!” At other times, he channels Matt Berry into being long before he was even born!

Sylvia Kay is as grating and crass as she is meant to be; Jo Rowbottom is brassier and strikingly formidable: a bold, modish-talking, leather-jacketed no-nonsense lass. But then I feel anyone would struggle with the absurdly ‘self-revealing’ blubbing scene that Mercer gives her during the meal, late on.

Willoughby Goddard has a gently nimble presence, and wonderfully conveys Bernard’s deep special interest in all things aquatic, including dolphins. Yet, I must just give it to David Markham, for a performance of intellect, kindness and poetry: some of his line readings are wonderful. He was also the father of Jehane Markham, a Play for Today dramatist who I interviewed who sadly passed away recently. RIP, she was wonderful. David Markham, then, was one of the PfT firmament’s great nurturers.

Best line: “My family’s put its idiots into the Foreign Office for generations…”

There are zingers aplenty: “He can only paint pictures of women in cages!” Laura gets these: “I used to think because you was strange, it made you interesting. It doesn’t…”; “My mind’s buzzing!”

As well as philosophical musings on remembering what things are called, Timothy gets this absurd profundity/profound absurdity:

If there’s a God, I know what he is… He’s a chuckling idiot with a tape recorder. And what does he do? Plays his tapes through my head. Is that fair? Is that any way to treat a baby. I’ve never had a minute’s peace.

Audience size: 4.95 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Scarlet and the Black – Part 4 / Enquiry – David Dimbleby looks at the Ku Klux Klan / Jazz 625 – Victor Feldman / Newsroom and Weather / Late Night Line-up), ITV (Carroll Calling / Any Old Thing / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 25%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 71.4%

Reception: Viewers by and large hated it, with a minority of adherents. Critics were far more favourable, both in London and outside, though an aesthetic conservative bloc did manifest. Overall, few were indifferent! Though indeed the amount of attention it received was significant, and how several critics almost exactly mirrored my response – which admittedly took an extra viewing compared with them!

Alan Blyth was notably large-minded for the Daily Express, perceiving ‘a poetic, visionary mind, not afraid to think big’, despite a ‘shapelessness, length, and indigestible profusion of ideas’ (3 June 1965, p. 4). Blythe’s nuanced response is like a synthesis of all the critics’ views, liking how Mercer defied logic and saluting the BBC’s courage in enabling it to range ‘with a piercing, occasionally jaundiced eye over the whole human condition’ (ibid.). Blyth noted the twins ‘impotent’ in several senses and likened them to the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘outcasts in the world as it is today’ (ibid.). He also praised Don Taylor’s ‘artist’s eye for grouping and atmosphere’, and Willoughby Goddard for ‘his tender, soulful performance’ (ibid.).

Peter Black, however, felt it was ‘indulging a private chat between its writer and producer’; only seeing it as interesting in its deployment of silent film, narration (from Kenneth Haigh), stop-motion photography, animation, statements to camera and music (Daily Mail, 3 June 1965, p. 3). Unlike myself, Black loved the first thirty minutes, finding all devices worked and the Burmese jungle scenes with the Japanese soldier Ishaki (Kristopher Kum) being ‘funny and touching’ (ibid.). However, he felt Mercer’s message was just ‘how sad that simplicity and goodness are isolated’, and this was iterated repetitively in a ‘dramatically inert’ play (ibid.).

Mercer ‘writes as though he is not in tune with the minds of his audience’, and Don Taylor’s direction is overly ‘reverent’ (ibid.). While he did admit the splendid ‘dramatic fantasy’ of the candle-lit swimming pool sequence, Black attacked Taylor’s ‘wearisome and unpleasant insistence on the big close-up regardless of the value of what was being said’ (ibid.). Still, Black seems to have preferred if somewhat to the ‘ineffable feebleness’ of Granada’s Pardon the Expression, which ‘incarcerates the endearing Arthur Lowe’ (ibid.). Black added later that Mercer’s talent ‘needs the limitation of a frame’, and needs to be separated from Taylor (Daily Mail, 24 June 1965, p. 3).

Lyn Lockwood noted a play ‘very unusual indeed though not, I imagine, popular with the bulk of its audience’, anticipating angry letters (Daily Telegraph, 3 June 1965, p. 19). Lockwood noted the twins ‘were spared the pains of growing up, having begun life in middle age’, musing that this was not ‘the sort of drama for the practically minded person’ (ibid.). A mixed review admitted ‘excellent’ performances from Markham, Goddard and Troughton, and Mercer’s ‘very fertile imagination and a fascinating use of television technique’, but ‘At 105 minutes he was too generous with his time (ibid.).

Anon in the Times felt it was only intermittently funny, ‘often sour and childish’, Mercer working ‘cleverly imagined’ scenes to ‘exhaustion’ in his symbolist determination (4 June 1965, p. 15). However, they admired an ‘abundance of lively if not watertight ideas’ and a ‘central relationship of great beauty between the two outcasts […] beautifully conveyed’ by Markham and Goddard; plus, Troughton ‘triumphantly indulged in malicious senile acting’ (ibid.). They also rightly noted the ‘delightful pictures’ in the swimming bath sequence, but ended by questioning the pace of a directionless and stagnant piece (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson was annoyed at a ‘wilfully ragged and undisciplined […] jerky dream interrupted by didactic messages with symbols obvious as telegrams’ (Observer, 6 June 1965, p. 25). He found the fantasy ‘thin and forced’, disagreeing with Blyth in hating the ‘silliness’ of the opening half hour’s ‘tricks’, finding a ‘marked improvement’ after the halfway mark as the twins’ characters began to establish themselves (ibid.). Richardson identifies the dolphins as signifying the ‘happy womb-life’ to Bernard, ‘an endearing non-monster’ (ibid.). Again, the swimming pool scene is rightly noted as the play’s ‘best’, while Lord Fountain hitherto ‘a stock senile zombie’, was ‘vivified by his dream dialogue’, while still remaining impotent, leaving him feeling it was worthwhile viewing after all (ibid.). This review almost exactly mirrors my own views!

Philip Purser devoted the vast majority of his weekly column to it: ‘I can’t think of a more magical, more complete bit of invention than the scene towards the end in the swimming pool’, which he then devotes a four-sentence paean to (Sunday Telegraph, 6 June 1965, p. 11). He didn’t see it as confusing as all, but a ‘straightforward allegory’ about innocents who aren’t fitted for the big real world, likening it to Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear, touching the same ‘chord’ as ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ (ibid.). Purser loved a joke in the Russian Roulette bit, and reflected how this pool sequence had physical scale, making him forget ‘the awful making-do of so much TV. drama’ (ibid.). Purser extolled Mercer’s ‘exciting, ambitious approach’, while admitting like Richardson he had ‘almost deserted it’ – after ‘dim jokes’ like the mother in the cage and Hitler appearing in the boys’ Oxford University digs (ibid.). He shrewdly noted how an actor’s TV work is ‘cumulative’, with David Markham’s characterisation ‘a hangover’ from his innocent misfit role in de Montherlant’s The Bachelors (1964) (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin again disliked the opening half-hour, but felt there were ‘some merry moments and some tender insights’, though made in ‘a deterrent manner’ (Sunday Times, 6 June 1965, p. 40). He discerned the symbolism of the Establishment’s ‘sterility’, and how the twins are incapable of making love to their ‘gorblimey girl friends’ (ibid.). Wiggin felt Mercer’s message about ‘the plight of innocence in a greedy and cynical world was sometimes eloquent, sometimes funny’, but done in too ‘inflated’ and ‘pretentious’ a way; like a smug patriarchal mansplainer, Wiggin claims to speak for all:

We are mostly at home with the naturalistic idiom. If Mr Mercer had developed his argument in conversation between credible characters it would have had more weight (ibid.).

Don’t know about you, but I’m not up for his idea, which would have weighed down this drama and made it too like so many others.

Wiggin predictably says Mercer needed ‘disciplines which cannot be rejected by the writer who wants to convert the multitude’, which he feels Mercer at heart wants to (ibid.). T. C. Worsley went even further in the aesthetically conservative assault than Wiggin, being bored at ‘such a pretentious farrago’ (Financial Times, 9 June 1965, page unclear). Even Worsley couldn’t deny Markham and Goddard’s ‘remarkably authoritative’ performances, though he misreads – I feel at least – the twins’ position as ‘negativism’ (ibid.). He claims, more interestingly, that these fine performances of depth clashed with the initial Bob Hope style of Troughton’s acting and the tricks, though I’d seriously question his assertion that Markham and Goddard went against Mercer’s intentions in how they played their parts (ibid.).

My attitude to these Wiggins and Worsleys

Bizarrely, Worsley does not even enjoy the swimming pool sequence, feeling it was giving Taylor more pleasure than it was serving the play’s progress, comparing it negatively with Charles Jarrott’s ‘disciplined’ camera work in the version of Pinter’s Tea Party (BBC One, 25 March 1965) (ibid.). He claimed Taylor failed the viewers in not making Mercer’s intent clear, and disliked the way ‘it kept changing’, questioning how the girlfriends were played in ‘yet a third style of muzzy realism’, while ending in a tiresome violent metaphor of his own:

So shoot the director first, but on this occasion you might use a spray gun, and not mind too much if the author gets peppered too (ibid.).

John Holmstrom liked how Mercer ‘dares to think in large bizarre terms without a trace of affectation […] one senses a wealth of submerged complexities’, though he also felt the story suffered by ‘having no point of normality to relate the grotesqueries to’ (New Statesman, 11 June 1965, p. 930). Wasn’t this actually meant to be Poppy and Laura, and also to get us questioning “normality” itself, as a value judgement? While Holmstrom found the swimming pool sequence a ‘longueur’, he found it ‘rich and absorbing’ (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris could be relied on for wise words, noting that those who had had ‘too hard a day at the office’ would struggle with it, but herself feeling ‘glad’ to have seen it, as ‘something of value had been said’ (Television Today, 10 June 1965, page unclear). Again, the opening was seen as ‘too rich an hors d’oeuvres. Surfeited, it was easy to feel too somnolent to appreciate the finer flavour of the later scenes’ (ibid.). Norris noted Markham’s ‘kindliness’, ‘the sort of man whose shoulder you could weep on’, and Goddard’s role of a lifetime: ‘All the beauty and pathos of the character shone out’ – and how these innocents’ sweetness had engendered ‘hatred’ in others (ibid.). Norris aptly felt most of the others ‘would have fitted equally well into a Carry On film, though Diana Coupland ‘was freer to rise above this mean to give a nicely-judged unreality’ (ibid.). Jack May as the voice of God ‘hit the right note of discreet social compromise’, and Norris’s last words are rather an excellent summary:

Not an ‘easy’ play, but undoubtedly worth doing and worth seeing. Rather too long, occasionally tedious, frequently infuriating, always stimulating. (ibid.)

Outside London, Michael Beale – not the hapless former Sunderland AFC head coach – called it ‘television theatre of the absurd’, which mixed the ‘hilariously funny’, ‘indigestible’ and ‘boring’, though overall ‘an interesting experiment in fantasy’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 3 June 1965, p. 2). T. McG. took a broader view of the whole Wednesday Play offering, feeling it had, as promised, delivered ‘original and imaginative ideas’ and ‘bright new talent’ so far (3 June 1965, p. 2). They mused that no previous plays had ‘presented such an odd assortment of characters’ as And Did Those Feet?, accurately noting it defied categories: ‘It was hilariously funny in an offbeat sense at one moment, and then the mood would change to one of deep melancholy’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 June 1965, p. 2). They finished with an apt summary of likely public feeling, but freely deviated from it:

I can well imagine many people dismissing it as a lot of nonsense because of eccentricities, but I found it refreshingly enjoyable (ibid.).

Peter Forth found it ‘indeed a strange play, verging on the abstract’, while brusquely branding the twins ‘Strange individuals, these […] who liked animals better than people’, clearly empathising with the girlfriends! (Bristol Western Daily Press, 3 June 1965, 9). Forth backed the Worsley-Wiggin philistine groupthink, feeling it ‘was very clever, too clever’, failing to identify any ‘lesson’, or ‘parable’, while grudgingly admitting there ‘may be a place in television drama for this way-out type of play’ (ibid.).

Alf McCreary gave a more thoughtful response, acknowledging sociologists and psychologists would find much of interest in the play, while also enjoying it ‘at face value as a modern fantasy in the grand Lewis Carroll manner’, with ‘gorgeous sets’ and actors largely matching the dialogue’s ‘intricacies’ (Belfast Telegraph – week-end magazine, June 1965, p. 8). McCreary was delighted to get some fantasy, when ‘Most evenings our television is flat beer – and most of it canned anyway’ (ibid.). This was a hand-pulled pint of foaming nut brown ale that the likes of Wiggin, Worsley and Forth just could not appreciate!

Audiences tended to side with those conservative voices. A Mrs G. McMurrough of Kirkintilloch slammed it as ‘utter rubbish’, ‘Alice in Wonderland stuff’ which constituted ‘a hand out to the settings effects men’, resentfully declaring:

The writer David Mercer must be killing himself laughing in some beautiful penthouse while we cough up our licence money (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 6 June 1965, p. 16).

This play received a pitifully low Reaction Index from viewers of 25, a full 53 points below Where the Difference Begins (1961), and even 17 beneath the low figure A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962) attained (BBC WAC, VR/65/296). Only a minority enjoyed this play, with ‘rubbish’ and ‘tripe’ being earthy descriptors, that could almost have come from Laura and Poppy’s mouths! (ibid.). Boredom at the lack of a ‘story’ and groans of ‘Another weird play – no more, please’ and ‘I’ve seen some rubbishy Wednesday plays but this takes the biscuit’ – were common, though some did find it ‘both funny and sad’ and ‘well worked out’ (ibid.).

Troughton, Goddard and Markham were all admired, though many were baffled by the non-naturalistic makeup of Lord Fountain and Nanny: ‘they looked as if they had been stricken by leprosy’ (ibid.). Others, however, liked this element and also great lighting in the ‘striking’ swimming bath scenes. While a ‘nonplussed’ critical mass (a projected 2.13 million giving it the lowest C- score) clearly detested the play, it is worth highlighting that over 693,000 still gave it A+ or A: a hardly negligible appreciative vanguard.

It’s another Wednesday Play that repays repeated viewing, and in many ways perhaps the most stimulating one yet, alongside Horror of Darkness! Aptly, I was writing much of this while listening to all of Cat Stevens’s 1974-78 albums, the gently electronic Itizso (1977) being much the best of those.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.20: ‘For the West’ (BBC1, 26 May 1965)

02.20: For the West (BBC One, Wednesday 26 May 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Toby Robertson; Written by Michael Hastings; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Julia Trevelyan Oram.

On a Saturday afternoon in March 2014, as part of that year’s AV Festival’s Postcolonial Cinema theme, I saw Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011), which concerned the historical legacies of Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in Elisabethsville on 17 January 1961. From memory, a sound documentary took a more conventional approach than Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), yet it left a similarly strong sense of unresolved injustices that deserved a reckoning.

Now, The Wednesday Play was not shown on Wednesday 19 May as usual, due to the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final, in which West Ham United beat TSV 1860 Munich 2-0 at Wembley Stadium. Z Cars was shown, but moved to a 9:30 pm start, within TWP’s customary time slot.

The next Saturday, a Daily Mail article by Brian Dean claimed ‘Drama producers have been warned against unnecessary blasphemy and sex in television protests’, following ‘protests after the screening’ of For the West – ‘which showed atrocities in the Congo’ – without detailing whether any actual pre-screening had actually taken place (22 May 1965, p. 9). This followed a turbulent civil war between the conservative, pro-Western Congo government and Simba rebels, sharing Lumumba’s more left-wing ideals.

L to R: Gordon Gostelow as Morris Stone, Nigel Stock as Captain Bill Nicholson and Edwin Richfield as Stuart Strouse

Ken Hankins noted that writer Michael Hastings has been inspired by Peter Watkins’s Culloden (1964), on TV six months earlier, which he saw as a ‘turning point for TV drama’ and intended For the West to be ‘an attempt in that direction’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 22 May 1965, p. 3). The following synopsis indicates there wasn’t a primary focus on the Congolese pro-Patrice Lumumba side:

“For the West” is set in the war-ravaged Congo, concentrating on the mercenaries who hire out their battle skills for hard cash and the journalists who report their activities. (ibid.)

Nigel Stock is noted as taking the lead role, as ‘a tough mercenary Captain Bill Nicholson – a far cry from his characterisation as the gentle, always obliging Dr. Watson in the recent Sherlock Holmes series’ (ibid.). He had of course also had an excellent role as a fascinatingly unstable character in Alun Richards’s Wales-set Wednesday Play, The Big Breaker (1964).

Nigel Stock, a really key Wednesday Play actor!

Ken Irwin in the Daily Mirror noted Hastings’s attempt to do ‘something completely different in the drama field’, quoting the writer’s claim: ‘It’s not a play, but a protest – a report, if you like, about the Congo’ (26 May 1965, p. 16). Hastings explains there is ‘no plot, as such. It is based more on a series of events, presented in a documentary style’, tackling ‘the life and thinking of modern-day mercenaries’ and three Western journalists ‘each determined to send back the best and most sensational pictures to their European papers’ (ibid.). Irwin indicates there’s an unethical rush for ‘”scoop”‘ pictures and ‘exclusive information’ and notes the BBC call it a ‘tough play’, himself then terming it ‘completely realistic’ (ibid.). Zena Walker is a ‘civilian’ caught up in a ‘tragedy’ of a war situation (ibid.) and ‘stranded in a rebel area’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 26 May 1965, p. 13).

The same preview details Hastings’s recent stage success, The World’s Baby, and affirms that the Congo’s story is ‘every bit as grotesque’ as Culloden‘s (ibid.). The Radio Times had clarified the setting was ‘present-day Congo rent by civil war and political chaos’:

White mercenary forces are about to attack rebel, pro-Lumumbist troops. It is a violent, ugly, and explosive situation. Into it come three European photographer-journalists – Morris Stone, John Moss, and Stuart Strouse – determined to satisfy their editors’ demands for a real scoop, zealous to bring back news ‘for the West.’ (22 May 1965, p. 40)

The article indicates the journalists care more for ‘Their precious camera equipment’ than for their own safety; civilians are caught in the middle of the mercenaries and rebels, while ‘there is the grotesque spectacle of African children aping their elders ‘playing at soldiers.” (ibid.).

Indicating a progressive intent, Hastings’s play ‘highlights events in Africa of which we in the West perhaps know too little – and perhaps do not want to know’, and is ‘the first major work for BBC-tv’ by a writer who recently won the Britannia Bronze Medal for The World’s Baby (ibid.).

Toby Robertson (1928-2012) had a solid acting screen credit as a Naval Officer in Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963), while moving between ITV and BBC as a director, including several Armchair Theatres and this was the first of four Wednesday Plays he directed.

Given the era, perhaps a cast with 36.8% Black actors is actually about as good as it could have been, though it’s noticeable how not one press article connected with For the West even mentions one of these actors, which indicates that the roles were seen as minor. Ghana-born Kwesi Kay (1940- ), Jamaica-born Roy Stewart (1925-2008) and Willie Jonah (1935-2023) all had substantial careers, the latter Sierra Leone born actor even appearing in a 2020 Doctor Who episode and in Conclave (2024). Yemi Goodman Ajibade (1929-2013), from Nigeria, had appeared in notable scenes in 3 Clear Sundays, and would work, much later, with Stephen Frears on Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and in a Silent Witness serial (2007).

Other very familiar names appearing included Freddie Zones, Declan Mulholland, John Stratton, Edwin Richfield, Julian Glover and John Castle, a good many of whom appeared in Doctor Who over the decades.

Some of the play’s studio creation is evoked by a later Observer story reporting how its ‘Congo jungle’, seen on screen, was transported in the back of a van from Hampton, Middlesex: ‘The palm trees, bamboo thickets and jungle grass were hired for the day from a firm called Greenery Ltd.’, which is said to regularly ask as ‘Mother Nature’ for many varied BBC and ITV programmes (30 May 1965, p. 23).

Audience size: 4.46 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 29.1%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon / International Amateur Boxing / Newsroom), ITV (British Song Contest; Final / Wrestling).

Audience Reaction Index: 51%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: Largely a poor reaction from press reviewers, especially London ones. The audience, while highly divided in typical style for a controversy-eliciting Wednesday Play, were I’d say rather more favourable than the journos were.

Barry Norman felt its dramatic impact was less than Cassius Clay’s recent knockout of Sonny Liston, seeing it as a fit subject for drama but feeling Hastings had overegged his commentary:

But war and violence, murder and rape, beatings and cannibalism are sufficient unto themselves. To come across as things which merit a curt nod of disapproval, they don’t need the kind of hysterical treatment Mr. Hastings gave them (Daily Mail, 27 May 1965, p. 3).

Norman saw the play as nihilistically given to portraying all as ‘monsters’: the mercenaries were ‘homicidal villains’, the Africans were ‘mindless savages’ and the journalists ‘inhuman sensation-mongers’ (ibid.). He felt ‘Maybe in the Congo they were and are. But for reasonable dramatic balance the play needed one or two people who could show pity, and therefore, deserve to receive it’; instead, all characters hated each other and Hastings hated them all! (ibid.). Norman’s view here seems uncannily predict what Garnett, Loach and Sanford would do with ensuring audience identification with characters in Cathy Come Home (1966). Norman felt that caricatured characterisation led to sheer disbelief in the play, and didn’t care whether ‘the events he chronicled – notably the delaying of the execution of three African boys so that the journalists could fetch their cameras – actually happened’ (ibid.).

Mary Crozier felt that a ‘horrific’ play was somewhat ‘disappointing’ as it was ‘confusing’ – especially the journalists’ role in the play – but termed it ‘a compelling piece of television, showing yet once again that horror can prove a winner on the screen’, with Stock giving an especially good performance (Guardian, 27 May 1965, p. 9).

John Holmstrom called it a ‘contemptible piece […] about beastliness in the Congo’, claiming it embodied the ‘callous opportunism’ it was claiming to attack, and found it ‘hard to decide whether it was meant as satire or melodrama’ (New Statesman, 4 June 1965, p. 892). Similarly, J.B. in the Daily Telegraph called it a ‘travesty’ full of historical ‘error’, a distortion of ‘the revolt in the Congo which was ended two months ago by the guns of hired white soldiers’ (27 May 1965, p. 21). They felt it ‘failed to make drama’, describing the cameras incident as ‘based in a minor true incident’ wherein ‘Congolese troops some months ago were about to kill captured rebels who had committed murder and paused for two minutes for a Belgian photographer’ (ibid.).

This incident ‘became a peg on which to hang a series of artificial conflicts between caricature characters’; J.B. felt Zena Walker’s was the only ‘convincing portrayal’, with Stock doing what we could with ‘an impossible figure’ (ibid.). A damning review ended with not-so-coded anti-Lumumbist politics wielded:

But this was a play which said nothing and did considerable disservice to an African country now struggling towards civilisation. (ibid.).

Directly below this review, a P.J.K. detailed an entirely unspecified number of telephone protests against the play for being ‘false’, or ‘too violent and sadistic; the BBC’s reply is given:

Any serious play on this subject is bound to have considerable impact on some people, but we feel there was a strong moral justification for this production (ibid.).

This bandwagon was inevitably joined by the Daily Express, reporting Mary Whitehouse’s Clean Up TV campaign had demanded the resignation of Sir Hugh Greene as BBC DG simply over this play being broadcast (28 May 1965, p. 11). The paper, exaggerating the CUTV organisation’s actual committed strength by claiming they were ‘365,000’ strong, reported that from her Claverley, Shropshire home, Whitehouse had written to Harold Wilson to ask for Sir Hugh’s resignation.

*Daily Mirror* headline here, reporting the same story

Her bigotry – unchallenged by that perennial champion of the powerful, the Express – is clear in this highly partial intervention:

“We have asked him if it is a policy of the Government to allow the television screen to be used for propagating obscenity, the technique of violence and racial hatred at a time when the Government is making pronouncements on the need for racial understandingly [sic].”

She claimed the play portrayed the Congo mercenaries as totally sadistic and self-interested, without a trace of the bravery “which saved many lives in the Congo” and without taking into account the atrocities committed by the Simbas (ibid.).

At this point, it is worth clarifying that, geopolitically, the US CIA and Belgian forces and other white mercenaries backed the conservative, pro-Western government headed by President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe. Whitehouse always placed being an anti-Communist Cold Warrior at the forefront of her identity – hypocritically, given her supposed Christian beliefs. Thus she here was predictably weighing in on the side of an anti-democratic, imposed regime. While Kasavubu had been the first President after independence from Belgium and initially worked with Patrice Lumumba’s left-wing nationalist and election-winning Congolese National Movement (MNC), he had participated in the conspiracy leading to Lumumba’s political assassination in 1961. Effectively, Kasavubu’s regime made Congo a puppet of the US and Belgium.

The Liverpool Daily Post clarified that the ‘Congolese charge d’affaires had made a representation to the BBC not to show For the West, as it was ‘inopportune’ to show atrocities committed by the mercenaries ‘at a time when his government is doing everything in its power to settle the situation within the country.’ (28 May 1965, p. 1). That this was a significant row is clear in how this made the front page of a local paper. The charge d’affaires, given the crisis-ridden Congo regime wasn’t even an internal government figure but an external foreign diplomat: almost certainly either the Belgian Harold d’Aspremont Lynden or American G. McMurtrie Godley.

Peter Knight noted the Clean Up TV campaign’s ‘absurd’ protest letter to the Foreign Office a week before it had even been shown, wisely anticipating some of the knee-jerk attacks TV shows like Brass Eye often received decades later; while Knight felt it was a ‘bad’ play, sensationalising and distorting, he knew that any complaints could only potentially be taken seriously provided people have watched the programme (Daily Telegraph, 31 May 1965, p. 17).

Television Today indicated that Whitehouse was stepping up her campaign by taking a petition with 375,000 signatures to the House of Commons on Thursday 3 June – there is a wearying quote from Whitehouse, ‘And this is only for the first instalment’ (3 June 1965, p. 11). Sadly true. The article goes into detail how she’d given up full-time employment at a secondary modern school to organise this campaign (ibid.).

Philip Purser claimed not to generally agree with the censorious anti-BBC campaigning, but felt fully in step with James Dance MP and others over For the West (Sunday Telegraph, 30 May 1965, p. 11). His account points up some of the flaws of the play in its representations:

In a rebel-attacked settlement an Englishwoman identified the headless body of her house-boy and beat off the advances of adolescents who, infected by the prevailing violence, were trying to assault her. A United Nations doctor shrugged the incident aside […] such absurd characters as the spluttering journalists, the mercenary soldier with the statutory homosexual tinge or the comic-strip, dark-glassed Swede.

‘I would have suspected any play which, purporting to be truthful, mixed studio shots with random newsreel footage’: this sounds exactly like what he said six years later about Clive Exton’s The Rainbirds (1971), and, in truth, Purser is right about that one’s wilful crassness (ibid.). Here, he critiques what he sees as the Belgian officer’s risible French-English dialogue – e.g. “Je propose that you and I work out something together….” – thus:

This sort of stuff wouldn’t have done for The Wizard at its most lurid. No dramatist capable of writing it, or actor capable of speaking it, or producer capable of passing it, can ever be taken seriously again’ (ibid.)

All this said, Purser ended by saying his ‘white flag’ to MPs Dance, Shepherd and Dempsey ‘goes back in the locker’ (ibid.).

Fellow Sunday reviewer Maurice Wiggin ‘wrinkled a nostril or two over the so-called “Wednesday Play”‘, which he professed to find ‘rather far from marvellous’ (Sunday Times, 30 May 1965, p. 20). Wiggin then noted that BBC2’s ‘excellent’ Late Night Line-Up afterwards had featured a Reuter’s journalist with experience in Congo discussing the play, who ‘did not think highly of it’, arguing then that the BBC should have sought his ‘or other expert advice before putting it on’ (ibid.).

In the regional press, an unnamed Derby Telegraph reviewer noted how the clashes during the Simba rebellion ‘have sullied the Congo’s name’ (27 May 1965, p. 4), (obviously far more than Belgian colonialism ever could…!). They complained that ‘The conduct of white mercenaries was depicted as being as reprehensible as that of the blacks’, indicating how Hastings’s negative liberal even-handedness would likely find opponents on both sides (ibid.). Their partiality comes into view: ‘The Derby missionaries who owe their lives to the mercenaries’ intervention may well have other views’ (ibid.).

B.L. in the Belfast Telegraph critiqued it along more typical lines as not being ‘a play’, but ‘a horrifying documentary about violence in the Congo’, finding its bleak universalism powerful: the mercenaries ‘are as violent, as unreasoning and as primitive in their sadism as the Africans to whom they feel superior’ (27 May 1965, p. 11). They felt Hastings’s attitude towards the Australian photographers was overly unclear, but also that ‘it would be cowardly to switch off’, overall, analogising the events depicted to a recent film about Belsen (ibid.). They admired ‘impeccable’ acting from Nigel Stock, ‘dedicated to his job, but despising everyone, friends as well as enemies’, and Zena Walker, ‘dazed by the horrors she had seen’ (ibid.).

While the row mostly over the play largely abated, Sydney Newman did issue a reminder to BBC producers that they exercise ‘good sense in the treatment of sex, religion and minorities. Standards, in some cases, had been slipping badly’ (Times, 23 June 1965, p. 8). In a conciliatory tone towards Whitehouse, Newman noted that ‘punchy’ speech could be provided in dramas while avoiding ‘Jesus’ and ‘bloody’ (ibid.). Ever a tenacious annoyance, Whitehouse attacked Greene again for omitting to mention the BBC’s obligation ‘not to offend against good taste and decency’ in a recent Listener article, ‘The BBC’s duty to society’; she had the further gall to claim to want to safeguard the BBC as ‘a democratic institution’ (ibid.). One that she solely wanted to reflect her and like-minded conservatives’ points of view on certain issues.

With viewers, there was a polarised reaction, but closer to that for PfT The Other Woman (1976), say, than several of the really disliked Wednesday Plays so far. About 40% applauded it, 35% disliked it, with 25% in the middle. Many felt that it brought home ‘the brutalities on both sides’, with a Cook/Supervisor congratulating a play which ‘tells the truth about race hatred’ (VR/65/284). A University Lecturer found it ‘a serious warning against complacency’, having ‘terrific impact’ (ibid.).

However, others assailed the characters: ‘it would be difficult to imagine a more odious collection’, who weren’t ‘normal’, with many seeing it as a ‘disgusting play’ riddled with ‘perverts and sadists’ (ibid.). Racist language veered into view with criticism of ‘the ape-like Major Buba’ (ibid.). A more impressed viewer reflected it had ‘made one think of the things that are happening while we go about our pleasant daily routine’ (ibid.). The realism of the acting was praised in making it all so shocking, with many feeling Zena Walker’s terror: the most praised performer (ibid.). While a few thought the jungle sets ‘too obviously artificial’, it was felt to be a convincing production, with the film inserts – presumably the newsreel – ‘adding to the feeling of authenticity’, very much unlike Purser’s opinion (ibid.).

Perhaps Peter Black’s claim that For the West was the start of a run of ‘wildly undisciplined’ Wednesday Plays had some truth to it – we’ll evidently see, at least with next week’s (Daily Mail, 24 June 1965, p. 3). However, while it would undoubtedly have unwise, rough edges in its representations, were we able to watch it now, I feel enabling an alternative view to conventional Cold War propaganda can only have been a good thing. Thus, definitely not for the last time, a flawed play deserved defending on democratic grounds, from Whitehouse’s censorious pitchfork-wielding mob.

I am not entirely sure whether this would actually be a dud, though, especially given the reasonable overall audience reaction and praise of the acting. Other Michael Hastings (1938-2011) works I’ve seen – chiefly, the PfT Murder Rap (1980) and Stars of the Roller State Disco (1984) are far from top drawer, but then they have certain considerable strengths too, and tapped into their times’ zeitgeist and pressure points.

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.🙂

A task complete

As of yesterday, I have now finished watching all that exists of Play for Today – c.264 of the 294 plays.

My review of the last one I watched, Don Shaw’s The Falklands Factor (1983) is here at Letterboxd:

My ★★★ review of The Falklands Factor on Letterboxd https://boxd.it/9JpiKD

Please feel free to follow me on that app/site if you like!

*barring those Canadian ones, etc! I.e. I haven’t seen a fair few also from my unofficial PfTs list – Pillion, some more in 1983-5…

But I do think watching the lot from my main ‘canon’/list feels good to have ‘achieved’!

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.19: ‘A Knight in Tarnished Armour’ (BBC1, 12 May 1965)

02.19: A Knight in Tarnished Armour (BBC One, Wednesday 12 May 1965) 9:45 – 11:00pm

Directed by John Gorrie; Written by Alan Sharp; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Donald Brewer; Music by Herbert Chappell

We arrive now at A Knight in Tarnished Armour, which fits some people’s general idea of what The Wednesday Play was about, while bridging the British New Wave and New Hollywood. Alan Sharp’s play received relatively little publicity, before and after its broadcast. Television Today notes how Harry Pringle can be seen in it, alongside a 30 May episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook (6 May 1965, p. 15).

The Observer says it is ‘about a Provincial boy who dreams he’s not an office clerk’ (9 May 1965, p. 22). The Radio Times described ‘Scots teenager’ Tom (Paul Young) as ‘at odds with world around him’, dreaming of escaping his ‘drab and steady routine’, through being ‘a Raymond Chandler-type private eye, a tough sleuth hunting down gangsters, rescuing damsels in distress, and playing the part of the modern knight errant’ (8 May 1965, p. 39). Tom expresses his Walter Mitty like desires for life to be exciting, like he hoped it would be when a child, to Anna (Leslie Blackater), ‘a hard-boiled office lass’ (ibid.). She expresses an individualist, keep-your-heed-doon conformism:

But she is puzzled and can only shrug : ‘You’ve just got tae look oot for yoursel’ an’ make sure ye don’t get intae trouble.’ (ibid.)

The article notes how Tom’s ‘world is not at all like that of the much-publicised teen scene’ (ibid.). Despite his being in work with a steady income, he is ‘deprived, uncertain’, and is assistant to his ‘disreputable boss’, the seedy private detective Mr Burnshaw (Paul Curran) (ibid.), referred to elsewhere as ‘a seedy inquiry agent’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 12 May 1965, p. 2). In this Glasgow-set ‘comedy’, Tom ‘spends most of his time collecting petty debts and avoiding his own’, but life gets more exciting when he is embroiled in a missing person case (ibid.), becoming ‘the assistant to a seedy private detective’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 12 May 1965, p. 15).

Alan Sharp was noted in one preview for having a successful first novel A Green Tree in Gedde (1966) published and a previous BBC TV play for the First Night strand Funny Noises With Their Mouths (1963), which featured Michael Caine and Ian McShane. Notably, director John Gorrie took a film unit to Glasgow to ‘capture in pictures the local flavour – which is also conveyed in the rich dialogue of the play’ (ibid.). This likely indicates some 16mm filmed inserts of Glasgow used amid the Television Centre shot studio scenes.

Notably, Brian Cox appeared as a character called Nelson, before an illustrious ongoing career which included Nigel Kneale’s visionary satire The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), two Plays for Today (1976 and 1982), Nye Bevan in Food for Ravens (1997) and Logan Roy in Jesse Armstrong’s comedy-drama Succession (2018-23). Cox was a good friend of Sharp, who with Sharp’s widow Harrier helped ensure his papers were gathered at the University of Dundee.

Alan Sharp (1934-2013), was born in Alyth, Perth and Kinross to a single mum, but who grew up in Greenock, raised by adoptive parents – including a shipyard worker dad – who belonged to the Salvation Army. Sharp seems to have done a vast range of blue and white collar jobs, including working as an assistant to a private detective (!), and National Service in 1952-54. His radio play The Long Distance Piano Player was broadcast by the BBC in 1962. A Green Tree..., about youthful self-discovery, was apparently banned in Edinburgh’s public libraries for a time due to its sexual content. He had a sequel published in 1967, but the third in a planned trilogy was incomplete as he became perhaps the first – of many – Wednesday Play/Play for Today dramatists to emigrate to Hollywood, where he took up feature-film screenwriting. Funnily enough, I’m not sure whether his adaptation of his previous radio play as the first Play for Today The Long Distance Piano Player (1970) came before or after he had physically moved to the States.

Sharp had a relationship with Beryl Bainbridge, producing a daughter Rudi Davies, an actor married to Mick Ford, and his passionate but philandering nature comes across in the Scottish playwright William in Bainbridge’s novel, Sweet William (1975), later made into a 1980 film directed by Sharp and Bainbridge’s fellow Play for Today alumni Claude Whatham. Sharp had four wives, six children, two stepsons and 14 grandchildren. He had considerable success in Hollywood, with films in the western and crime genres, and his sensibility fitted closely with that of the deeply masculine New Hollywood, the mid-1960s to early-1980s countercultural wave, associated with Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese, and involving Polanski, Lumet, Corman and many more. I haven’t seen any of the c.25 films Sharp wrote screenplays for that were released over 48 years (1971-2019), which included Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Ted Kotcheff’s Billy Two Hats (1974), Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend (1983) and Michael Caton-Jones’s Rob Roy (1995); alongside Little Treasure (1985), which he directed himself. As the 1980s and 1990s progressed, a fair few of these 25 credits were for TV movies: part of the long-term convergence between the twin screen industries.

The Sharp-penned film which is most on my radar is Night Moves (1975), a thriller directed by Arthur Penn, featuring a brilliant cast headed by the great Gene Hackman. I’ll have to remedy this chasm in my viewing soon!

I can’t watch A Knight… because it does not exist in the archives.

Audience size: 5.45 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Horizon – items on clean air and scientific model-making / Jazz 625, with Bill Evans Trio), ITV (A Slight White Paper on Love / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 45%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 16.6% (needs a more thorough check, this, but a notably low score)

Reception: Generally ignored by London critics, but liked well enough by the two who did report back. Largely a positive reaction outside the capital, but with a few more criticisms of this slice of life narrative for lacking clarity and shape. Viewers were typically rather lukewarm, en masse, as was the case for such plays with regional settings and accents.

Lyn Lockwood felt Alan Sharp had gone about ‘as far as he could possibly go’ in de-glamourising the inquiry agent; her description of Burnshaw – ‘no one could have been seedier or owned more revolting personal habits’ – brings to mind Slow Horses‘ Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) decades before his time! (Daily Telegraph, 13 May 1965, p. 21). Lockwood found Tom’s character ‘refreshingly naive’ compared with so many ‘worldly wise, self-assured’ young TV protagonists, noting he became ‘disillusioned by learning the facts of life in the hardest possible school’ (ibid.). She admired Paul Young’s ‘very sensitive’ acting of a ‘sympathetically written’ character, with Paul Curran and Harry Pringle giving ‘sharply defined cameos’ (ibid.). John Gorrie’s cameras ‘captured a most authentic atmosphere’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson liked Sharp’s ‘good natural dialogue’ and characters who had life, while feeling they overdid the contrast between Tom’s Walter Mitty ‘romantic quixotic fantasies and the squalid reality’ (Observer, 16 May 1965, p. 24).

Tom Gregg thought the play was ‘bursting with marvellous characters’, including the ‘rascally’ inquiry agent Mr Connachie (Harry Pringle), the ‘old-womanish widower’ Anna, and a ‘tarty young secretary’ (Runcorn Guardian, 20 May 1965, p. 6). Gregg admired how Sharp depicted Tom’s steep learning curve having left the shelter of home and school, but felt it dragged at 75 minutes, lacking ‘a strong, cohesive story to pull the many good things it contained into a shapely whole’ (ibid.). Further north, Michael Beale criticised ‘a very slight affair’, but nevertheless felt it ‘made food television’ despite little happening other than the illusions of a 16 year-old boy being shattered (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 13 May 1965, p. 2). Beale liked Sharp’s economical characterisation, noting how Burnshaw is most concerned with collecting debts and then embezzling the money, and felt Blackater and Bell ‘neatly’ played the ‘two girls who came into Tom’s life’ (ibid.). He ends with a useful description of one of the settings:

There was a sharply drawn picture of a library reading room, full of pensioners and unemployed with empty lives, who quietly resented the intrusion of any stranger. (ibid.)

Peter Forth deeply appreciated the acting – Young ‘outstanding’, Curran ‘terrific – and most repellent’ and Leslie Blackater ‘playing a very uninhibited girl clerk was both provocative and amusing’ – while arguing it fully held the attention despite not being a very pleasant play (Bristol Western Daily Press, 13 May 1965, p. 7). Alan Stewart echoed the praise of the playing: ‘Some grand character studies in this dig at private eyes. A good knight’s work from the two Pauls – Young and Curran’ (Glasgow Sunday Post, 16 May 1965, p. 12). An anonymous columnist found it not wholly successful, but memorable for veteran Paul Curran’s performance as the ‘dissolute private detective’ (Cumbernauld News, 21 May 1965, p.10).

Over in Edinburgh, Peggie Phillips acclaimed ‘its exquisitely accurate thumb-nail sketches of Glaswegians’, but felt it lacked ‘sufficient speed and incident in the script to counteract or balance the native [my emphasis!] slowness (Scotsman, 17 May 1965, p. 8). Phillips felt it must have been ‘an exercise in nostalgia’ for producer James MacTaggart, and liked how it conveyed the ‘curious diffidence of both young and old Glaswegians – even the tough Nelson cracked’ (ibid.). She felt Tom’s fantasy moments were monotonously repetitive, with strong production and atmosphere let down by a slight script, with Gorrie’s direction ‘palely loitering as if somebody could not bear to miss a word of such hall-marked dialogue’ (ibid.).

Among viewers, this got a somewhat below par reaction, with 28% giving it the highest scores, and 42% the lowest – and 30% in the middle (BBC WAC, VR/65/257). There was criticism of ‘too thin a plot’, which made it ‘slow and boring’ to many; a Traveller called it ‘a very poor play about nothing’ (ibid.). In contrast to an aforementioned critic, Tom was felt to be unrealistically ‘dopey’, with the wider dramatis personae termed ‘a drab collection of dull oddities’! (ibid.)

Epithets like ‘dreary’ and ‘dowdiness’ were aired, though the smaller number who liked it found it fascinating and sensitive and found Tom a refreshingly ‘unspoilt idealistic youngster’ in contrast with more typical ‘tough’ teenagers on screen (ibid.). This group of viewers loved the vignettes of all the other characters – including Blakater’s and Bell’ (ibid.) The acting was largely admired by all, with Young seeming ‘to give just the right impression of vulnerability’ (ibid.). Final comments indicate ‘lengthy’ outdoor sequences with Tom walking through ‘unnaturally deserted’ streets, which stalled the action, while the authentic settings’ ‘very seediness made the play all the more depressing’ for some (ibid.).

Despite or indeed perhaps because of such partial barbs, it’s a shame we can’t see this, to assess an early work from one of the most significant writers in The Wednesday Play’s very masculine firmament of this time. Sharp’s career clearly made snide metropolitan attitudes against the ‘provinces’ seem absurd, being a clear forerunner of Peter McDougall, while also working in parallel to Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s Billy Liar (1963). It feels like it probably accessed some of the spirit of Eric Coltart’s Liverpool-set Wear A Very Big Hat, which we’ve covered, or indeed, William McIlvanney’s A Gift from Nessus, utterly dour miserablism entirely at home in the spring 1980 run of Play for Today.

There was no Wednesday Play on 19 May 1965, for whatever reason. Instead, story documentarian Robert Barr’s Z Cars episode ‘Checkmate’ was in a later slot than usual (9:30 pm), followed by a piano performance by New Yorker Peter Nero (10:30 pm).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 5.94 million.

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

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 50.2%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

very good, if it had been for local viewing

Congratulations; you have shown everybody up

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

Very funny. A riot. Congratulations.

(ibid.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.17: ‘The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler’ (BBC1, 28 April 1965)

02.17: The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler (BBC One, Wednesday 28 April 1965) 9:40 – 11:00pm

Directed by John Gorrie; Written by Jean Benedetti; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Leo Radford

This play was based on a true story, of a payroll robbery in Massachusetts, USA, on 15 April 1920 – misreported as 1925 in several newspapers. Two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were tried for murder following this, and the case ‘attracted international attention, lasted several years and developed into a political witch-hunt’ (Liverpool Echo, 24 April 1965, p. 2). On 23 August 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were ‘electrocuted for murder’ (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). At their trial, they were defended by lawyer Fred Moore (John Barrie).

Kenith Trodd, previewing Jean Benedetti’s play, acerbically detailed the political and legal context of the events depicted:

They [Sacco and Vanzetti] were not only foreigners but anarchists – that is to say their political views struck right at the narrow bigotry of New England, and this at a time when the country was outraged by anarchist bomb attacks.

On its legal merits, the case against Sacco and Vanzetti was not a strong one. The evidence was shaky, the witnesses unreliable, and both men had strong alibis. But what transpired was not justice and fair play. The two men were tried not for what they had done but for what their opponents believed them to be (Radio Times, 24 April 1965, p. 43).

Trodd added that Vanzetti in particular was ‘a man of fantastic courage and determination’ (ibid.).

Sacco (Bill Nagy) and Vanzetti (John Bailey)

In contrast, Robert Pitman emphasised the two payroll guards as victims, ‘both quiet married men’ and how Fred Moore’s worldwide protest was supported by ‘Shaw, Wells, Stalin, etc.’ (Daily Express, 28 April 1965, p. 10). Pitman went on, very much in crusading right-wing opinion columnist mode:

But were they [Sacco and Vanzetti] really Martyrs ? I used to think so until my wife worked on the case for an encyclopedia. I remember her surprise when she turned from the legend to the facts, namely that this supposedly pathetic pair were both heavily armed when arrested – in Sacco’s case with a revolver which was almost certainly the murder weapon.

Both also undeniably belonged to a group which was amassing revolutionary funds by armed robbery.

Even then I did not realize that Carlo Tresca, revered leader of U.S. anarchists, privately admitted in 1943 : “Sacco was guilty.” Or that another Italian later confessed to being coached by the anarchists to provide a false alibi for Sacco (ibid.).

Pitman detailed how US Liberal Francis Russell changed his mind and felt Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti an accessory after the event and how even Fred Moore confessed to Upton Sinclair that he no longer believed in their innocence (ibid.). Pitman then attacked Trodd’s article and the BBC:

Narrow ? I say that, whatever his motives may be, a ruthless killer of innocent men is surely an enemy of any society. And it is irresponsible and reactionary for the B.B.C. to present him to ordinary viewers as a martyred “good shoemaker.” (ibid.)

Other coverage emphasised people involved in the production. The Daily Mirror emphasised John Barrie’s star status, who plays the defence lawyer here, known for playing the title character in Sergeant Cork (ITV, 1963-68), the long-running series (28 April 1965, p. 16). John London in the London Evening News and Star stresses Jean Benedetti’s status as an actor who had been in Beyond the Fringe for 11 months, but was now writing between parts for the ‘lucrative’ sum of £500 per play (29 April 1965, p. 3). Benedetti is said to find writing

a terrible bore. I only do it for the money. I’m far more interested in acting. My aim is to get to the Comedie Francaise or Stratford-upon-Avon (ibid.).

London’s article nevertheless states there are two more Benedetti plays ‘in the melting pot’ (ibid.). Benedetti is quoted giving a slightly more measured account of the case than Trodd or Pitman:

We may never prove conclusively whether Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent or not. Their accusers could only see them as subversive and murderers. Many of their supporters were only too willing to exploit them as martyrs of the Left.

Political passion raged and destroyed justice. This is what I have tried to show – as well as something of the two men’s human qualities during their long and bitter ordeal. (Liverpool Echo op. cit.)

Benedetti (1930-2012), was actually born as Norman Bennett in Barking, Essex, changing his name by deed poll in 1965 to reflect his passionate love of French and Italian culture. He advised Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre on the European repertoire and translated Brecht plays and became a leading scholar on Stanislavsky. He also worked as Principal at Rose Bruford College during a ‘golden period that produced a new breed of British stage and screen actors including Gary Oldman’ (Guardian, 20 April 2012)

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail described the case simply as ‘the most famous and controversial’ trial of ‘the century’ (28 April 1965, p. 3).

Audience size: 6.93 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (Liza of Lambeth – Part 1 – Innocence / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Sound of Motown / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 69%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 61.5%

Reception: Mixed-towards-positive among London critics. At least from the evidence of cuttings provided, it was comparatively ignored outside London. Viewers were largely appreciative of a play that felt like familiar fare in several ways.

An anonymous reviewer perceived that Sacco and Vanzetti ‘live as symbols of the power of blind prejudice’ and felt the drama valid and found John Bailey’s growth into spirituality as Vanzetti made the ending ‘deeply moving’ (Times, 29 April 1965, p. 17). However, ‘everything that followed the combination of passion with quiet, resigned nobility in his courtroom speech was an anticlimax’ (ibid.).

Clive Barnes gives a more nuanced account than Robert Pitman, by noting it doesn’t matter whether the men were innocent, but whether they were given a fair trial (Daily Express, 29 April 1965, p. 4). Despite the play ‘suppressing certain facts’, it made ‘gripping television’, while demonstrating probable bias against them from the judge and foreman of the jury, and how witnesses lied and evidence conflicted (ibid.). Barnes, however, ends by emphasising how the play, while based on the trial transcript, ‘ignored a completely impartial contemporary committee report which found both men guilty’ (ibid.).

Peter Black described it as ‘dealing honestly enough’ with a case which had outraged the world, establishing ‘beyond anyone’s capacity for doubt that they did not have a fair trial’ (Daily Mail, 29 April 1965, p. 3). Black therefore derides ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pitman’ for obtusely claiming it was clearly about their innocence, while praising a ‘very strong and troubling play’, distinguished by John Barrie as the ‘bull-headed lawyer-politician’ and John Bailey’s ‘simple dignified’ Vanzetti, whose speech from the dock ‘still rings with the voice of the unjustly accused’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood professed to find courtroom drama fascinating, especially when ‘taken from life’ like this ‘excellent reconstruction’ of a ‘furiously discussed and now almost legendary’ case’ (Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1965, p. 20). Lockwood sees the trial as representing an earlier period of McCarthyism, with ‘poor, even coerced, evidence on which they were convicted’; again, Bailey and Barrie received particular praise (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson regarded the material as strong, centring on the Red scare which followed the First World War, and admired John Bailey’s ‘simple eloquence’, calling Benedetti’s use of verbatim transcripts ‘not unskilful’ (Observer, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Yet, he found the production and acting often monotonous, meaning the ‘symbolic quality tended to get lost’, and saw this as ‘one of those rare cases for a more televisual style of presentation, with even, perhaps, a commentator’ (ibid.).

Maurice Wiggin was more positive, regarding Benedetti’s play as stronger than Marc Brandel’s Goodbye Johnny, about the last hours of the troops on Anzac Cove (Sunday Times, 2 May 1965, p. 24). Wiggin’s claim ‘court rooms are eternally dramatic, trenches have had their day’ points wisely towards Crown Court (Granada for ITV, 1972-84, 2007) and Showtrial (BBC One, 2021- ) (ibid.). He noted how both plays ‘rubbed in the lesson that we can never afford to assume that our leaders are over-endowed with either intelligence or integrity’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws notes how ‘we’ felt Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution was unjust in the 1930s, though felt the play was not fully satisfactory bar the ending; he did find John Bailey’s Vanzetti ‘effective as a cry of innocence’ (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681).

Marjorie Norris expressed feelings of desensitisation towards such true-life stories, when the tale’s telling was ‘ponderous’, ‘wordy and boring’: ‘we have supped too full of horrors to care unless the victims can be made to live again for an hour and their wounds can bleed afresh’ (Television Today, 6 May 1965, p. 16). Norris found Sacco and Vanzetti either too wordy or ‘as motionless and lifeless as the figures in the Chamber of Horrors’, while John Gorrie did little ‘to bring home to us’ how long they were imprisoned (ibid.). She admired John Barrie’s ‘naturalist style’ but felt even his performance was constrained by the play’s undramatic ‘adherence to the facts’; similarly, Cec Linder – who she admires – has a few ‘good scenes and vanished’ (ibid.) Robert Ayres’s performance justified it being on TV rather than radio, his face staying with her, ‘personifying unyielding prejudice’ as ‘a sleepy-eyed unmoveable bigot’ of a judge (ibid.).

The audience response was rather more consistently positive: 69 places it alongside the O’Connor plays, if somewhat below Moving On. Viewers liked its ‘strong and moving theme’ and basis in a true story, though quite a few felt it was overly slow, boring – ‘I felt no pity or passion’ (VR/65/223). More were engrossed in a play which was easy to follow, while also feeling glad to live in England, not America; a Piano Tuner could have been forecasting Trump’s America, with its attempts to make the orange fascist’s word law:

Extremely well written, bringing out political bias as the jumping off platform for legal judgement (ibid.).

Costumes, settings and performances were all enjoyed, with viewers liking Barrie and Bailey as much as the critics had; typically, ‘a few found the two rapid sequences of ‘stills’ somewhat trying to look at’ (ibid.).

While clearly Benedetti’s subsequent TV writing was not going to be prolific given his attitude in the aforementioned interview, he did write extensively for BBC Two’s Thirty Minute Theatre, at least: three plays in 1969, about dictators Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin (with Brian Cox starring as the latter), and the two-part Lilly (1970), centring on campaigning muck-raking journalist William T. Stead (Iain Cuthbertson).

Significantly, in summer 1977, Sacco and Vanzetti received posthumous pardons from Massachusetts Governor – and future Democrat Presidential candidate – Michael Dukakis, who declared ‘their conviction was permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility towards unorthodox political views’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 July 1977, p. 17). In a lengthy article, Richard Boston declared himself totally certain both men had received an unfair trial and that Vanzetti was definitely innocent of the crime, and Sacco probably was too (Guardian, 27 August 1977, p. 9). Boston also traced the significant backdrop of FBI and state repression and imprisonment of left-wing politicians like Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, the first Socialist member of the House of Representatives: which amounted to a now-forgotten precursor to McCarthyism (ibid.).

This history should be urgently remembered anew when the world witnesses a US gulag in El Salvador and evil specimens like Stephen Miller given excessive power. It is a shame this doesn’t exist, as it would provide another corrective to the view that The Wednesday Play was simply one thing. True-life crime and legal dramas were clearly part of the offering, anchoring its appeal to those with mainstream tastes. It would also be good to see John Bailey, another actor familiar to me via Doctor Who, where his performance in ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967) showed his skill in conveying pathos.

— With thanks again to John Williams for the press cuttings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: KEVIN STONEY

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 8.42 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 53.1%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 14.3%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.15: ‘The Interior Decorator’ (BBC1, 14 April 1965)

02.15: The Interior Decorator (BBC One, Wednesday 14 April 1965) 9:30 – 10:55pm

Directed by James Ferman; Written by Jack Russell; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Richard Wilmot; Music by Norman Kay

Magritte your heart out, ye staid telly visioners!

This play centres on a Georgian townhouse, residence of millionaire Frederick Carter-Carter (Michael Finlayson), whose chic and incredibly elaborate interior decoration was done by a Mr Bellamy (Barry Foster). The Radio Times itemises some of them: ‘alligator shoes, Louis Quinze tables, ancestral portraits, tropical fish ponds, Greek statues, and a circular bed.’ (8 April 1965, page unclear).

Bellamy escorts Frederick’s wife – ‘as fragile and exclusive as the treasures she moves among’ – around the house, and gradually this ‘skilled craftsman’ and his work fascinate Susan:

At this point you begin to realize that you are looking in on much more than a conducted tour. Although apparently preoccupied with marvellous surfaces and material excesses, The Interior Decorator is also concerned with the strange and unpredictable depths of a woman’s mind. (ibid.)

Designer Richard Wilmot’s work is trailed, with a note he won the Television Guild Award as designer of the year; the only mention in any press coverage of writer Jack Russell is that he was new to television (ibid.). Several previews, including in the Coventry Evening Telegraph drew attention to how Wilmot had crushed ‘a new Rolls-Royce into a sculptured mass’ and had ‘a table, laden with cut crystal, descending from the ceiling’ – while then quoting Wilmot that it wasn’t actually a Rolls, but ‘we did concoct a nice bit of sculpture out of car spares and wood’ (14 April 1965, p. 2). The Daily Mirror preview solely focused on this, noting the ‘problem’ facing the play’s producers was ‘how to wreck a Rolls-Royce’ (14 April 1965, p. 18).

The Rochdale Observer mentioned other challenges for Wilmot: ‘Plan a room to represent medieval hell. Recreate the beauty of a Grecian bathroom’, while also quoting him on the need for ‘large photographic reproductions of Boticellis and pictures of medieval devils, which were designed from reference books’ (14 April 1965, p. 9).

This ultimately modernistic, non-naturalistic Play is a video-film hybrid, where two of the three (?) filmed sequences are actually fairly substantial and almost work like mini short films in their own right. In a historical curiosity, this play was directed by James Ferman, who became Secretary of the BBFC for a marathon stint (1975-99), and was seen to be somewhat less liberal than his predecessor Stephen Murphy. Michael Brooke calls Ferman ‘complex, contradictory figure, both liberal and reactionary, open and secretive’.

The play exists in full, but isn’t widely available to access yet; I have managed to watch it via Learning on Screen’s Box of Broadcasts, available to subscribing universities.

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

Now, where to start with this?! It’s a messy Frankenstein’s human of clashing parts: studio drama and European art cinema; bombastic staged rhetoric (in said studio) and visual storytelling (on 16 mm film); Theatre of the Absurd meets ballet and surreal Bunuel or Bergman film. It’s a domestic set psychodrama fused with interior dream logic.

While such ambition couldn’t hope to work, fully, this vaulting intent is refreshing to watch compared with the intellectual and aesthetic timidity of our current era. Before even reading the reviews, I can safely assume they often judged it negatively against a default yardstick of realism. In the era following Troy Kennedy Martin’s ‘nats go home’ (1964) polemic in Encore theatre magazine, surely some critics would hold out for visual artistry and original imagery?

There are hints of the excellent set dressing of the BBC Two version of Pinter’s A Slight Ache (1967), even if the range of references seems overly dizzying – Ancient Rome, the French Revolution, Japan, the Marquis De Sade – there is a clear implicit critique of acquisition, appropriation and societal power relations. Certain misfires occur when we get unspeaking Black and Asian characters, compounded also by one being shown in an excruciating moment just when the word “white” is uttered on the soundtrack. There may just be a good defence in that this is all an addled dream of an insecure lady with racist leanings.

The odd Jacobin-leaning interior decorator Mr Bellamy – who notably doesn’t design or create anything – seems more like a Svengali or shaper of personality through his artful assembly of existing visual styles. This play rather impressively and literally explores the theme of how tastes in the decor and furnishing of rooms can communicate vivid truths about their inhabitants – echoing more overtly the underlying significance of domestic environments in four house party Plays for Today, The Saturday Party (1975), Tiptoe Through the Tulips (1976), Abigail’s Party (1977) and Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978).

The play positions Bellamy as imagining Susan and bringing into being who she is, within what is finally revealed to be a dream narrative. The reality of her far more grotty, loose bedsprings and nails sticking out the floor environment is a clever twist. We are brought back into a different part of London: kitchen sink urban decay, which a tensed-up Susan inhabits. The rest of the play has been a strange, askew imagining of Susan with herself as a ‘beautiful’ aristocratic lady, in an exotic and eclectic modern home. Richard Wilmot’s exceptional design work conveys the rich difference of each and every room, which further illuminates the crushingly empty expansiveness of Susan’s worldview.

There’s also something of the familiar Wednesday Play broadside against modern advertising rhetoric’s stilted, frozen register as in the first Wednesday Play Barry Foster appeared in and Dennis Potter’s debut. This is highly effective in the dining room scene where banal cliches are uttered by the assembled dummies around the table, prompting Susan to ask for some more human response, wherein The Woman Who Thinks (Marcia Ashton) gives a monologue where feeling is revealed to be subordinated to status-seeking and materialistic desires. It’s a bit like Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot, but perhaps just a bit too easily interpretable and needed more of that earthy Beckettian strangeness to it!

The Woman Who Thinks and Susan, who also thinks

The climactic bedroom scene undeniably brought to mind Sartre’s In Camera, which we have covered, which featured Jane Arden. Arden’s voice even takes on the deeper, harsh sonic attack of her performance in that play.

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

While Richard Wilmot is clearly the star, rising to the challenge of a play intrinsically about visual culture and design, and I admired Barry Foster’s Alan Partridge-anticipating consonantal pronunciation: “it’s pure h-white!”, it has to be Jane Arden, a divine, strange presence and a seer unmoored in the world. Interestingly, given her Doris Lessing-like progression into radical feminism and then Sufi spiritualism, Arden here plays a lost materialist.

Hair woven high above her head in Medusan expanses, Susan Carter-Carter appears to be a self-absorbed, snobbish lady with an absent rich husband. She is vain, colonialist in attitudes and openly admits she loves money and objects, claiming to be “cultured” in a way linked to status and possession. I feel Arden’s performance grows in stature as this develops, coming alive in the “theatre” sequence in the dining room, in the Sadean bedroom and then when she is thrust back into a bleak kitchen sink ‘reality’ at the end.

Arden’s sorceress-like attempts to evoke a preening, privileged lady are faltering enough that, once you know the twist, take on a greater depth. It’s a shame that some of the earlier sections of the play feel somewhat protracted, and lacking in concision. However, while I’d fully understand 2025 viewers tuning out due to the opening scenes being slow and dull-seeming, I feel they would lose out on an awful lot that is bizarre and gripping in the play’s second half. Arden here does some enrapturing work which captures the insecurities in those who chase the glossy Sunday Supplement aspirational lifestyle ideals people were being sold. It seems to me part and parcel of her incredible screen work, which included her intellectually and morally righteous response to Salvador Dali’s misogyny and political cowardice.

Jane Arden was a fearless searcher and magnetic screen presence. RIP.

Best line/s: “I wanted to cause a ripple of doubt. And, at the same time, comment on everything I had excluded from the room: the phony world of the Big Sell. Now here they are. The ruins of our Pompeii. Turning to ashes, fossilising as we watch…” (Bellamy)

Elaborate wall collage assaulting phoniness!

Bellamy also says: “I would have killed Corday. History is always wrong. The wrong things happen! Men of vision were destroyed and the fools lived on. What kind of a world is that?” This reflects from a kind of Machiavellian bourgeois revolutionary perspective on the Wednesday Play strand’s ongoing subterranean feature of undermining ‘heroes’ and ‘heroism’.

Audience size: 7.43 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – part 4 / Horizon – The Other Side of the Pill and Search for the Original Mind / Jazz 625 presents the Wes Montgomery Quartet), ITV (Carroll Calling / The Bacharach Sound / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 26%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 69.2%

Reception: The London critics were fairly evenly divided between appreciators and denigrators, with a few somewhere in the middle. Outside London, it was more ignored and those who did review it showed antipathy, by and large. A small minority of viewers was intrigued; far more detested it.

Mary Crozier praised ‘well poised acting’ by Barry Foster and ‘an emotional tour de force’ by Jane Arden, but felt the play was overlong and unconvincingly symbolic and fantastic, ceasing to ‘be interesting long before it came to an end with the apparent collapse of the luxurious house into a filthy slum’ (Guardian, 15 April 1965, p. 9). Crozier felt this play actually deserved the criticism that Pinter’s Tea Party had (unfairly) received for being obscure and tough to follow (ibid.).

In contrast, Peter Black felt this style of play ‘has become almost a cliche of the pretentious puzzle’, but it struck him ‘as remarkably viewable’, with each room ‘more surprising and splendid than the last’ (Daily Mail, 15 April 1965, p. 3). For Black, the ‘writing showed an unusual mastery of the business of combining words and pictures in separate layers’, while he admired its ambiguous yet incisive conclusion, which proved that Russell’s ‘construction was solid and true whichever ending you chose’ (ibid.). Black’s only complaint was Jane Arden’s casting: ‘Her face, with that thrusting lower lip and Bedlington terrier hair-do, was too strong and characterful on its own to stimulate one’s imagination about the character it was playing’ (ibid.). Oddly, the same paper carried a brief item on its front page noting how ‘scores of viewers rang the BBC and the Mail last night to complain they ‘could not understand the play, which involved long dream sequences and was filmed as if through a fog.’ (15 April 1965, p. 1).

The print I saw: not really ‘as if through a fog’!

Lyn Lockwood admitted it was a visually spectacular play but claimed Russell’s ‘message about material excesses, selfishness and inhumanity tended to get buried’, noting the actors just about ‘managed to keep their heads up’, but that Wilmot dominated and that the BBC’s current demand for a higher license fee doesn’t surprise her in this context (Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1965, p. 19). Such reviews, desiring all plays carry simple ‘messages’, seem haplessly jejune.

Anon in the Times felt concerned such plays ‘may thus repel conventionally minded viewers’ (Lockwood was one of these!), yet acknowledged Russell’s dialogue was elliptical, dealt in paradox and cunning wordplay (15 April 1965, p. 17). Despite the skills of Ferman, Wilmot, Arden and Foster, they saw the ‘sultry, attractive’ Susan Carter-Carter as insufficiently interesting a person, lacking ‘importance’ and professed not to care when ‘we discover this to be the dream of a slattern in a house that has decayed into slumminess’ (ibid.).

Furthering the split verdict, Maurice Richardson defended the play, especially Richard Wilmot’s production design: a ‘marvel of ingenuity’ (Observer, 18 April 1965, p. 25). He liked the room full of ‘actor zombies’, Arden’s wistful playing and the revelation that Susan was ‘a self-obsessed, lost girl with a mind full of advertisement-induced status longings and sex snobberies.’ (ibid.).

Richardson noted how this scenario of a ‘slut’ in a ‘decaying Notting Hill-type slum’ had been planted lightly by the opening sequence, though, like Anon, doubted Susan was interesting enough to have ‘such a singularly elaborate dream’ and desired ‘to know more of her conscious world’ and the true state of her husband (ibid.). This said, Richardson ended by praising ‘devilish clever’ direction by Ferman and how even the dream-within-a-dream dance sequence was ‘bearable’ (ibid.).

John Woodforde found that the ‘settings alone held the eye’, acclaiming ‘Superbly extravagant furnishings’ by Wilmot, claiming Russell’s message about ‘inhumanity and selfishness among very rich females of humble birth’ were swamped by the play’s desire to be ‘different’ (Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 1965, p. 13). He much preferred a Dr. Finlay’s Casebook episode, a tour de force on the theme of abortion, surprisingly for a series with a cosy image! (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin gave a slightly better review than usual, noting that such ‘groping attempts to connect […] need sympathy and encouragement’, and reflecting how ‘This strange, ambitious play by a new writer is still snapping at my heels like – well, a Jack Russell terrier.’ (Sunday Times, 18 April 1965, p. 24). Wiggin waxed literary about Russell’s ‘luxuriant proliferation of image, symbol and innuendo; a sort of Jamesian richness of surface texture, combined with a Joycean richness of sub-surface suggestion’, yet ultimately wanted it to be less pretentious and ‘Over-opulent’ and its writing to be ‘clear, or at least in a code we can break on the run’ (ibid ).

T.C. Worsley also praised Wilmot’s sets and ‘one funny scene’, where Susan and Bellamy ‘draped in napkins […] supped on ortolans’, but ultimately felt the play was a great idea whose ‘treatment’ was lacking in ‘intelligence, imagination and invention’ (Financial Times, 21 April 1965, p. 22). Frederick Laws welcomed its ‘visual inventiveness and plain cheek’; I agree with his admiration of the ‘entertainingly morbid’ dining room scene, though feel his claim ‘all that had been communicated was crossness towards women, wealth, taste or just living’ a tad overblown (The Listener, 6 May 1965, p. 681). While it’s clearly critical of status-obsession and materialism, it’s not having a go at all women from a puritanical perspective.

Clifford Davis used the play as one example in a stinging attack on the BBC’s financial excesses and Hugh Greene’s perceived lack of business acumen, making arguments horribly prescient of the Checkland-Birt BBC reforms of the 1980s-90s, which destroyed in-house production and subjected the BBC to marketisation (Daily Mirror, 21 April 1965, p. 21). Davis noted how a play of 90 minutes like The Interior Decorator would fend to cost between £8,000 and £12,000 but that Wilmot’s lavish sets and filmed inserts put it in the ‘£20,000 bracket’, then attacking the play as ‘a flop’ with ‘most viewers’ (ibid.).

Outside London, Argus felt it was now a critic’s ‘duty’ to comment on such a widely watched ‘programme’ as The Wednesday Play, but bemoaned a ‘tortured and ugly […] Absolutely potty’ play (Glasgow Daily Record, 15 April 1965, p. 15). They mocked ‘the woman’ as representing ‘every empty-headed human being who ever found difficulty in dividing life into reality and unreality’ (ibid.). Fascinatingly, Peggie Phillips questioned its focus on visual detail given it was made for the television medium, where due to the smallness of the visual field, ‘spareness’ and ‘shape’ are important: thus sensing that the fuzziness of people’s TV receptions and the meagre size of their sets could render Richard Wilmot’s great designs unclear (Scotsman, 19 April 1965, p. 3).

W.D.A. felt past caring about ‘the mixed-up fantasy life’ of ‘heroine’ Susan, finding ‘a certain compulsive interest’ but also decrying the ‘cheating’ use of a dream being the explanation (Liverpool Echo, 15 April 1965, p. 2). In the same paper, ‘Onlooker’ had easy fun at the play’s expense, claiming it ‘made Harold Pinter seem very nearly as easy to follow as Enid Blyton’ (19 April 1965, p. 4). The next day, W.D.A. linked Pinter’s Tea Party, Russell’s play and David Adam’s We Thought You Would Like To Be Caesar (ITV) together as excursions into fantasy (20 April 1965, p. 2).

Among viewers, the play received an abyssal RI of 26%, by far the lowest of all Wednesday Plays we’ve surveyed so far. 14% gave it the high A+/A ratings, while 68% gave it the low C/C- scores (BBC WAC, VR/65/199). Most responded with anger and irritation, with several viewers complaining that it represented the squandering of public money, just as the BBC licence fee was being increased (ibid.). A steel smelter claimed it took the ‘prize for poppycock’ and called: ‘Let’s get back to sanity, please!’ (ibid.). A chartered engineer termed it ‘honestly […] the worst thing I have ever seen on television’ (ibid.).

There were characteristic attacks on a play which seemed to lack clear meaning, with some also objecting to ‘distasteful undertones’ they claimed to have detected (ibid.). However, an ‘intrigued’ minority praised its ‘fascinating originality’ (ibid.). There were more doubts about the acting than usual, though the handful who protested about overacting did concede this was deliberate for the style of play (ibid.). The main factor that kept many watching was Wilmot’s design, indeed it was seen as ‘a designer’s play’, though some felt it ‘far too lavish for such material’ (ibid.). My anticipation of critical attacks due to its lack of realism better fitted the audience response: ‘some reporting viewers were irritated by the dancing which struck an absurdly artificial note in a ridiculously far-fetched play, they declared’ (ibid.).

Similarly, in a letter to the press, a C.D. Loader of Haylease Crescent in Hereford found it lacking in ‘entertainment’, deriding ‘an hour and a quarter of dreary, and often stupid dialogue’ (Sunday Mirror, 18 April 1965, p. 22).

I would say I personally was inclined initially to feel this was an unengaging failure of a play worth a 4/10, but I was, eventually, won around to a large degree by its ambition to do something unique on TV, matching many of the Six productions on BBC Two (1964-5) which the magnetic Jane Arden had also been involved with as actor and also writer on the existentialist and surrealist The Logic Game (1965) which features an appearance by R.D. Laing. Costly or not, Richard Wilmot’s production designs are incredible here and alongside an intriguingly overambitious script and theatrical performances, they make it gradually fascinating viewing for anyone open-minded enough.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.14: ‘Three Clear Sundays’ (BBC1, 7 April 1965)

02.14: Three Clear Sundays (BBC One, Wednesday 7 April 1965) 9:45 – 11:10pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Jimmy O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Music by Nemone Lethbridge (lyrics) & Harry Pitch (harmonica)

Now, we are onto a play which began defining the Wednesday Play’s iconoclastic populism. Story editor Roger Smith notes how ‘hundreds’ of letters were received praising James O’Connor’s A Tap on the Shoulder, asking for more from the writer (Radio Times, 1 April 1965, p. 35). Just three months on, their wishes were granted.

Barrow boy Danny Lee (Tony Selby) pushes a man down in a pub brawl and gets landed in prison on a six-month sentence. Herein, he is manipulated by two wily inmates into hitting a police warden – he hits him over the head, sufficient to kill the man. Thereafter, he pleads guilty, honestly, and is faced with the death penalty under law. Despite his formidable Mum’s (Rita Webb) machinations, he is found guilty and is executed by the state via hanging. The play’s title comes from ‘the three clear Sundays a condemned murderer spends in jail before execution’ (Daily Mirror, 7 April 1965, p. 18). The same preview indicates O’Connor wrote the play when in Dartmoor, but revised it for TV (ibid.).

The Daily Mirror reported that ‘the BBC are awaiting Parliament’s decision on capital punishment before fixing a screening date’ for 3 Clear Sundays (6 January 1965, p. 12). Indeed, this play had been the first of O’Connor’s accepted by the BBC, before A Tap on the Shoulder which was screened on 6 January (Television Today, 25 March 1965, p. 9). It has an added non-naturalistic element wherein ballads, with lyrics by Nemone Lethbridge and harmonica playing by Harry Pitch, periodically summarise or comment on the on screen action.

The Daily Express indicated the sensational nature of the play, showing an image from its conclusion, and claiming it was the first hanging scene in TV ‘to be shown in detail’, while emphasising how O’Connor himself was under threat of ‘a REAL noose’ only to be reprieved 48 hours before he was due to he hanged (18 March 1965, p. 7). O’Connor claims the play was not propaganda but was written from the heart and was ‘an emotional autobiography’ (ibid.).

A certain androcentric bias at the root of a drama like this was plainly indicated in a Daily Mail article about Andrea Lawrence’s appearance in the play, titled ‘Andrea stars with 56 men’, though it excludes mention of Finnuala O’Shannon or Rita Webb entirely, both who give significant, substantial performances here (15 March 1965, p. 4). Another newspaper mentions the large cast of 69, while noting the play concentrates on the effect Danny has ‘on the other inmates and those waiting and praying outside the jail’; furthermore, it intriguingly adds that A Tap on the Shoulder ‘is to be made into a film.’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 April 1965, p. 3).

The Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail reflected how O’Connor’s decade in Dartmoor prison means ‘there is a great deal of feeling and warmth in the play’, also expressing surprise how he ‘has managed to bring a touch of humour to this frightening situation’ (7 April 1965, p. 4). It’s notable how few of the reviews mention Ken Loach’s part in the production as director; one of the few which does calls him ‘Kenneth Leach’. The emphasis in the press build-up was squarely on Tony Selby, with at least six papers publishing images of him behind bars, and O’Connor, who is praised thus by Roger Smith:

But what is remarkable is that in spite of the genuine outrage he feels his writing is warm and compassionate, with an extraordinary joy of life. In the worst situation he can find humour – something very rare in a writer (op. cit.)

In other words, the classic working-class survival – or gallows – humour.

You can watch the play here on the estimable Play For Forever’s YouTube channel (or indeed the excellent Ken Loach at the BBC DVD box set from some years back…):

YouTube video (accessed: 7 April 2025)

Rating *** / ****

The earlier sections of this play felt much in the same brash capering tone as A Tap on the Shoulder, but its tragic development felt very different, all in aid of an impassioned anti-capital punishment stance. The illiterate Danny Lee is unable to deny he did what he did and meant to do it. But is not able to identify the blame that also ought to have been attached to the two men, including self-styled “King of the Underworld”, Johnny May, who persuaded him to do what he did.

The point isn’t really that he was innocent, but just that no one is deserving of state execution, whatever they have done. He’s a wretched individual in terms of what he did, and Tony Selby performs brilliantly to ensure we believe his limitations and gullibility, but then also feel for him as the inexorable fate of the death penalty is cruelly applied. The play’s ending is well edited and sparsely suggestive, not prurient in any way. Then we get three on-screen captions including ones by Albert Pierrepoint and Arthur Koestler.

The songs, lyrics written by Nemone Lethbridge, and music played on accordion and/or harmonica by Harry Pitch, felt an odd, novel gesture, somewhere between Brecht/Weill and English folk song a la Ewan MacColl and the Radio Ballads. They had a worldly, sardonic air.

The drama overall felt like had astute perceptions about varying working-class underworld attitudes and distinct hierarchies of crime. This includes the perception that thieving and making material gains is the way to go, rather than just getting in the nick for violence, as a mug does. Johnny May and Robbo Robertson know how to manipulate a mug, which Danny foolishly allows to happen to him.

This felt like it gave an unvarnished, real blast of experience and untidy, vigorous but painful life in 1965 London. Yemi Goodman Ajibade and Henry Webb get small roles as a Black man who a racist landlord refuses to serve and a Jewish man accused of financial cheating who faces reprisals – it’s not really made clear the truth of this latter situation. These roles, dialogue from some of the lags about “poofs” and also the spirited but constrained Rosa – who lacks the freedom to have a safe abortion – indicate just how restrictive British society still was, in many different ways. We also hear from an appallingly unrepentant murderer of three “whores”, who, in the most macabre of the songs, wants to commit a fourth murder. As with Tony Parker’s plays, you feel you are an eavesdropper of some horrible, unpalatable but true human behaviours and attitudes that exist. It was an uncomfortable moment which reminded me of reading Blake Morrison and Gordon Burn about the Yorkshire Ripper killings.

As is sometimes the case with Ken Loach, you get a clearcut moral judgement on the narrative situation, but here Jimmy O’Connor avoids a neatness and the whole scenario, if not glorifying crime, certainly has something of the Graham Greene-Bonnie and Clyde attitude of fascination and some admiration for these people. But there’s good writing and playing of Danny’s manipulation and betrayal by May and Robbo, which is keenly observed in documentarian style by Loach. The cast is perhaps excessively large, which even more than the previous O’Connor play, makes it somewhat hard to follow the various strands, but it conversely helps to create a rich, untidy tapestry of the life of the times.

As with O’Connor’s previous Wednesday Play, there is a rich variety of colloquial language: ‘Mush’, ‘snout’ (packet of cigarettes), ‘in the family way’, ‘a slash’, ‘chokey’, ‘the screw’, ‘the nick’, ‘geezer’, ‘got his collar felt’, ‘bit of bird’, ‘cock’, ‘done me nut’, ‘a stretch’, ‘nicker’, ‘let’s get down to brass tacks’, ‘straightened’, ‘the cat’ and ‘a diabolical liberty’. And that’s just a cursory list!

I’d say this play’s overall vigorous spirit and campaigning heft – through a tragic human story – made it a fine and crucial addition to the now established, ongoing Wednesday Play project.

Best Performance: TONY SELBY

Television Today noted this was Selby’s thirtieth TV role (1 April 1965, p. 11). Nine days after the play’s broadcast, an article noted that Pimlico-born Selby’s first acting job was in 1949 at the Scala Theatre alongside Margaret Lockwood in a version of Peter Pan (Westminster & Pimlico News, 16 April 1965, p. 1). It reveals also that Chelsea FC fan Selby lived with his wife Jackie Milburn and parents at Kent House, Tachbrook Estate, and he and Milburn were about to buy a house of their own (ibid.).

Now, Rita Webb was very close to getting my nod here, with an indomitable performance as a matriarchal battleaxe. I think I recall reading about how Liz Smith regarded her as a close friend in her early days after moving to London, among many others part of the cosmopolitan theatre circles Smith moved in after the Second World War.

But Selby, whose performance Roger Smith praised as ‘one of the most moving’ he had seen (op. cit.) edges it as he makes the latter stages so tense and, gradually, moving. O’Connor’s script and Selby’s playing convey a hapless man, guilty, but who deserves a better fate than this and clearly deserved some measure of forgiveness and chance at redemption.

Best line: “You ain’t missing much in ‘ere, y’ know… It’s a miserable bastard life outside! What with my back, Aunt Lil’s operation and atom bombs in Scotland, and now there’s a load of flu about, I think I got a dose meself. Now where’s me snuff box?” (Britannia Lee to her son Danny, who is soon to die)

I do also like some of Nemone Lethbridge’s folk ballad lyrics, e.g. “Mother’s got the geezer straightened! She won’t ever let a chance go by!”

Audience size: 9.90 million.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 68.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Madame Bovary – Part 3 / Jazz 625 – Tubby Hayes Big Band), ITV (The Budget – response by Mr. Edward Heath / The Tigers are Burning – dramatic reconstruction of a 1943 battle between the Russians and the Germans / Professional Wrestling from Bradford)

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46% (to be checked later)

Reception: Fairly good response from London critics, if miserly in number and with certain reservations. However, the reviews gathered from outside London are almost uniformly glowing, which, as with A Tap on the Shoulder, says something about how The Wednesday Play was now communicating well beyond metropolitan journalistic elites. This is corroborated by the viewer responses from the time, from a vast audience nearing 10 million.

Anon acclaimed its ‘shattering effect’, Loach’s lucid direction, Selby’s ‘remarkably accurate’ and ‘moving’ performance and Webb dealing with a ‘caricature’ role with ‘strident gusto’s and O’Shannon ‘touchingly gentle’ (Times, 8 April 1965, p. 6). Gerald Larner questioned the structure and plausibility of the first two-thirds’, but admired the harrowing final third, see it as ‘not a play but a plea against capital punishment’, which was ‘valuable’ (Guardian, 8 April 1965, p. 9). Generally, though, Larner felt it undisciplined, with excessive ‘stock’ characters (ibid.). The paper later apologised to O’Connor for an erroneous reference to him having written the play while in Broadmoor, potentially influenced by a stray line in the play mentioning that establishment (Guardian, 10 April 1965, p. 6).

The Daily Express front page rather vaguely reported that ‘Viewers protested to the B.B.C. last night at a hanging scene’, odd given the brief and suggestive rather than lingering and graphic nature of the said scene! (8 April 1965, p. 1). This same page’s main story ‘JAIL FOR RACE HATERS’, reported on Labour Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice’s Bill to outlaw racial discrimination in public places (ibid.). While this had many loopholes, it was a significant step forward in creating a new offence of inciting racial hatred. O’Connor’s play has a scene where a White publican won’t serve a Black man: its truth is demonstrated by the words of Councillor Austin Webb, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers’ Central Protection Society: ‘”We do not preach a colour bar, nor do the brewers. But I know some publicans do not allow coloured people on their premises.”‘

This reveals how multifaceted certain Wednesday Plays could be: focusing on one overall societal problem – here, the death penalty – but then also squarely highlighting others in single scenes: racism and abortion.

Like Larner, Maurice Richardson appreciated the message but felt the characterisation and construction were ‘amateurish’ (Observer, 11 April 1965, p. 29). He found it very viewable and revealing of prison life, though, feeling that O’Connor’s underworld dialogue is ‘the most authentic in the business’ (ibid.). Frederick Laws felt the main story of Danny was unconvincing and lacked sure pacing, but found the use of modern hanging ballads ‘persuasive’, the language ‘vigorous and plausible’ and acclaimed Rita Webb’s ‘proper gusto […] a splendid invention – receiver, mother of crooks, and humbug’ (The Listener, 15 April 1965, p. 575). Laws thus expresses a desire for O’Connor to write comedies (ibid.).

Marjorie Norris again showed a deep frame of reference, noting similarities to Victorian Melodrama and inversions of morality akin to the Carry On… films (Television Today, 15 April 1965, p. 12). Norris felt seeing ‘the snare closing round’ Danny ‘was pitiful’, and praised Rita Webb for making Britannia Lee an admirable but not loveable ‘harridan’ (ibid.). She liked how Ken Loach knows ‘when to leave well alone’ and not show off with visual techniques, and handled the folk tune sequences effectively: ‘They linked the suffering of a 1965 innocent to all those who have preceded him’ (ibid.). Norris noted ‘Another success from producer James MacTaggart.’ (ibid.)

Jess Conrad, a footballing crony of Tony Selby noted his ‘old chum’ had been ‘hoofing in Edwardian bathing draws – ‘stripes going The wrong way, and all that gear’ – at the Players Theatre near Charing Cross: as a means of unwinding from his ‘sterner performing chores’ elsewhere and with filming of TCS in the bag (The Stage, 29 April 1965, p. 7). John Holmstrom did not see it as all that stern a challenge, describing Danny as an ‘absurdly innocent victim-hero’, with his progress to the gallows achieved via ‘a series of bizarre accidents’, though he did like O’Connor ‘apt yet stylish’ dialogue (New Statesman, 23 April 1965, p. 660).

B.L. thought it both a great play and great propaganda, admiring the various settings’ atmosphere, including the home of Britannia, ‘the Cockney female Fagin’ (Belfast Telegraph, 8 April 1965, p. 15). B.L. likened the play to Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow – which Selby had appeared in on stage – especially in its use of ‘extremely effective incidental music’ (ibid.). They also felt, tellingly, that Z Cars, in comparison, lacked authenticity and was beginning to feel more like Dixon of Dock Green in its cosy focus on the Newtown police having ‘hearts of gold’ (ibid.). Argus found it ‘stark and powerful’, ‘a tremendous, exciting story [that] came over with a rare strength’ (Glasgow Daily Record, 8 April 1965, p. 19).

W.D.A. spoke up for the importance of emotions, in justifying O’Connor’s appeal to them over reason, and how Danny, the rare straight one in the Lee clan earns our sympathy (Liverpool Echo, 8 April 1965, p. 2). They noted how ‘A combination of the author’s writing and Tony Selby’s excellent acting communicated most powerfully the sensation of the numbing sickness of fear overtaking the condemned man as events took their inexorable course’ (ibid.). Michael Beale felt it avoided over sensationalising or sentimentalising the situation, and emphasised with ‘poor, bewildered’ Danny and found Britannia ‘repulsively fascinating’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 8 April 1965, p. 2).

Accolades grew. In the Somerset-based Western Daily News, Peter Forth avowed it was ‘no play for the squeamish’, hitting ‘home with savage force’ and will be remembered ‘with respect for the author and those taking part’ (8 April 1965, p. 7). Jim Webber went so far as to say The Wednesday Play had ‘contributed very largely’ to the BBC’s ‘return to grace’, with this play’s ‘trenchant bite’ a good example (Bristol Evening Post, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Webber loved the ‘sheer authenticity’, likening it to a filmed documentary which avoided staginess:

Never once did one get the impression of cardboard sets and puppets mouthing lines; so powerful was it all that the mood of the viewer was of complete belief and absorption. (ibid.)

Linda Dyson found all the characters ‘obviously authentic’ and loved the ‘street songs’ and made a rare direct political comment:

It was a bitterly tragic human story. And if public opinion isn’t ready for Mr. Silverman’s Bill to abolish capital punishment – as has been said – it must have shifted towards a more civilised view as a result of this play (Birmingham Daily Post – Midland Magazine supplement, 10 April 1965, p. IV).

Bill Smith felt he had made the wrong choice in opting to watch ATV’s The Tigers are Burning, after watching the last thirty minutes of O’Connor’s play: ‘I laughed, felt sad and, by play’s end, very sorry and emotionally disturbed […] A more crushing indictment of capital punishment has yet to be seen’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 April 1965, p. 15).

Peter Quince praised a ‘savagely eloquent tract’ but joined some of the London critics in finding it less successful as a play (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 10 April 1965, p. 5). Quince would have liked a more odious murderer, as ‘the case against hanging is not selective’, but this was retrospective reflections; when it was on ‘I had been capable of nothing but stunned, horrified concentration on the screen’ (ibid.). He felt this ‘strong meat’ needed a warning beforehand for ‘viewers of a nervous disposition’, ending with praise for Rita Webb: ‘quite ‘outstanding’ as ‘his dreadful old bag of a mum’ (ibid.).

A review from the US was similarly positive. Rich. in Variety found O’Connor less a skilled playwright than ‘observer and shrewdly savage commentator on villainy’, with ‘vivid characterizations, punchy dialog’ and realistic settings (14 April 1965, p. 35). While Rich. regarded the cast as ‘unnecessarily large’, they admired an authentic tragedy, finding Selby’s performance ‘fascinating’ and the scene with the priest movingly acted (ibid.). There was further praise here for Webb as ‘his raucous, unscrupulous hoyden of a mother’, whole O’Shannon was said to give the most ‘haunting’ performance (ibid.).

Rich. regarded the scene with the Executioner (Howard Goorney) and assistant ghoulishly discussing their job unnecessarily ‘overloaded’ the anti-capital punishment argument, where a more implicit approach would have been better, but this was another largely positive review (ibid.).

Viewers regarded it as ‘a moving, dramatic and powerful play’, which brought home the ‘full meaning and horror’ of capital punishment, with one wise comment: ‘An eye for an eye does not solve anything – it just confirms man’s inhumanity’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/185). One comment picked up on a doubt I felt when watching: ‘whether a boy with Danny’s background and upbringing would be quite so gullible’ (ibid.). Tellingly, however, a Housewife declared that ‘All the scenes of prison life and crime depicted in other plays suddenly seemed bogus and one realized that this was the reality’ (ibid.). This matched the majority opinion in favour of a ‘warm, down-to-earth’ play, with only a minority complaining of dialogue that was ‘a bit too “natural”‘ (ibid.).

Most felt there was a truth underlying Britannia and ‘her brood’, seeing them as ‘typical denizens of the East End underworld’. The ballads came in for a mixed reception, with some finding them overdone and breaking up the continuity, others feeling they were ingenious and built up the right atmosphere (ibid.). Another Housewife eloquently revealed just why this had scored a RI 12% higher than the recent Wednesday Play average, and which had nearly matched that of O’Connor’s first play:

The play had the resemblance of a modern Beggars’ Opera and had a spark of brilliance both in writing and treatment (ibid.).

There were several letters to the press. M. Kelly of Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh wrote into the Daily Record calling for it to ‘be made compulsory viewing for everyone who favours hanging a murderer’, and expressing hopes the government will help us ‘start recognising crime as an illness that a rope won’t cure’ (12 April 1965, p. 2). B. Howells of Glamorgan, South Wales claimed to have been swayed totally against the death penalty by the play; previously undecided, they now saw it as a ‘barbaric act’ (Daily Mirror, 12 April 1965, p. 6).

In contrast, and in an interesting anticipation of a few responses to Adolescence sixty years hence, Miss E.M.V. Watford of Hertfordshire called for ‘a play giving the other side’, showing ‘The victim struck down; the news being broken to his wife; her struggle to keep the home together. Why does the killer corner all the sympathy ?’ (Daily Mirror, 17 April 1965, p. 4).

The People viewing panel notably championed Three Clear Sundays, with nine of the ten participants rating it ‘tip-top’ (2 May 1965, p. 4). The paper reflects how much better it went down than ‘phoney attempts at daring and tough plays which irritate viewers and the kinky, “way-out” stories drive them to despair’. They claimed that O’Connor’s play provided a corrective moral to TV producers: ‘People will take “tough stuff” so long as it is true to life, and has understandable characters – as this play had’ (ibid.).

On 16 July 1965, the play was repeated on BBC Two at 8:20pm in the Encore slot. A further repeat planned in summer 1966 was cancelled, the BBC claimed due to the World Cup and international horse show (Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1966, p. 17).

More broadly, the play contributed to a climate of significant legal change. The last hanging for murder in the UK was on 13 August 1964. Sydney Silverman MP’s The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 received royal assent on 8 November 1965, suspending the death penalty for murder, which was made permanent in 1969.

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.🙂