Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.11: ‘A Little Temptation’ (BBC1, 17 March 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.

02.11: A Little Temptation (BBC One, Wednesday) 9:25 – 10:40pm

Directed by Peter Duguid; Written by Thomas Clarke; Produced by James MacTaggart; Script Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Michael Wield.

The first BBC Glasgow production so far, but oddly this is ‘a comedy of manners’ set in Hampstead (Torbay Herald Express, 13 March 1965, p. 4). This makes it more a play which actually fits Philip Martin’s shorthand view of what Play for Today generally was than, say, The Bevellers (1974). Compared with Roddy McMillan’s gritty, incisive work play, this is an entirely domestic story, involving Ella Cartwright (Barbara Jefford), separated, and Vincent (Denholm Elliott), unhappily married, who is having an affair with her. Vincent, a middle-aged poet, is annoyed by Ella taking in various random strays, like a young secretary Celia (Caroline Mortimer), ‘a semi-permanent resident in the house’ and a Nigerian student Dan (Harry Baird) (Radio Times, 11 March 1965, p. 37). Ella’s ‘worldly-wise’ daughter Heather keeps rats in the sitting-room (ibid.). Vincent’s irritation grows due to constant interruptions from Ella’s various other household residents.

The Coventry Evening Telegraph notes how Hampstead is ‘where, the play suggests, people spend all their time embracing progressive causes and each other’, claiming that ‘their enlightened attitudes make their personal problems more complicated’ (17 March 1965, p. 2). This prose feels a muddled mix of regurgitated press release and standard, anti-‘modish’ smugness. Bill Smith moans about recent ‘distinctly “odd”‘ TV plays, hoping that A Little Temptation would not be ‘”another of those queer things”‘; presumably he is meaning Horror of Darkness there (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 17 March 1965, p. 13). Smith notes how the ‘odd-ball’ assortment of people in Ella’s abode includes Celia, who he brands ‘a chick’ and who ‘makes a play for Vincent (ibid.).

I gather its writer Thomas Clarke probably isn’t the Tom Clarke who wrote notable Plays for Today screened in 1972 and 1978, and he isn’t even mentioned in any of the previews. There are no interviews with any of the cast, the Felling-born director Peter Duguid (1923-2009), nor producer MacTaggart. Duguid, initially an actor, was, oddly, nearly cast as the lead in Doctor Who in 1963, but he had enrolled on a BBC director’s training programme (Michael Coveney, Guardian, 25 May 2009). Of course, the part went to William Hartnell, with whom Duguid had appeared in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963), playing a small-d doctor! Duguid became a prolific director on Callan from 1967-72 and settled in Hampstead Garden Suburb for a long time (ibid.). Intriguingly, Coveney mentions Duguid’s association with George Devine at the Old Vic and the Royal Court, and then James MacTaggart at the BBC but how ‘he unwittingly fell out of step with the political tide in the drama department’, which came to a head with a 1965 Wednesday Play we will come to… (ibid.)

Rating ** / ****

I really took against this at first when trying to watch it at night, and indeed it took me a full second viewing to even finish it. When watched at a more relaxed Saturday morning hour, its socio-cultural interest became a lot clearer and I could enjoy the performances, to a degree. Initially, I was just annoyed at the people and the setting. There are very long scenes packed with floridly verbose dialogue. This isn’t always a bad thing, but as a view of domestic life in 1965 Hampstead, it felt a tad superficial.

Indeed, Clarke’s social and political observations are awkwardly scattergun. He does repeatedly get across the point that young people live for the day due to the atom or H bomb, thereby contrasting Celia with Ella, ten years older, and Vincent, twenty years her senior. Its breezily cynical tone feels more akin to Tom Clarke’s Victims of Apartheid (1978) than the open idealism of Barrie Keeffe’s Waterloo Sunset (1979).

Where it’s most interesting is in portraying Ella as a heart-on-her-sleeve earth mother, who opens her home to all and sundry, while holding down a job on a £2,000 salary at a small advertising agency, where she appreciates being able to let off steam about her dislike of advertising! You take to her all the more when we hear of her expressing a political belief in favour of boycotting a canned fruit product from a “neo-fascist” regime. Presumably a reference here to Apartheid South Africa…? In contrast, Celia has an increasingly acquisitive materialism and sex obsession. Ella’s talk, so often about, rather than with, Dan the Nigerian student is clumsy – e.g. pulling him over at the house party to correct somebody’s claims about Ghana. However Celia makes several outright racist comments about him, and the play’s decision to make Dan – according to her – sexually aggressive in an offstage incident, is a cultural stereotype out of keeping with how he is presented otherwise.

The play’s mixed record is clear in how it vacillates between this scene and Dan’s reasonably eloquent dialogue about falling in love with the city of Lagos and out of love with the village he came from. There is also odd discordance between Ella’s righteousness at work and this otherwise liberal-left earth mother’s implied homophobic attitudes in being worried about her son being at public school and ending up being frightened of girls. I suppose it’s all part of that yawn-worthy, if occasionally relevant, cultural mode: the satire of liberal hypocrisy. Earlier, in a scene aimed to show Ella’s intellectual knowledge, she describes one of Celia’s friends who purports to be Marxist as more of a “queer”, in a manner Clarke and Jefford do not clearly establish as being approving or disapproving: which conveys something of what is meant to be Ella’s practical, loose brand of liberalism.

The acting burnishes the play reasonably well, but they have a difficult job communicating anything deep; it’s all just life’s a muddle and – hey, yes! – we’re going to have that final shot of the fish in the bowl. There’s simply a resigned air about Vincent at the end as Ella has taken in another stray young woman, Julia: he now tolerates this home which is clearly akin to his previous characterisation of Black culture as ‘pell mell’. This comedy doesn’t make this liberalised microcosmic environment seem humanly vivid enough to make this ending chime as sufficiently happy or wise, though.

The occasional music, invariably upbeat piano-led jazz – with vibraphone audible at the end – summarises the light gloss of urban sophistication being depicted. Costuming generally seems apt. Vincent’s jacket has those classic elbow patches, which you would still see on ageing male teachers into the 1990s.

Ultimately, there are too few events or actions of consequence or significance, beyond Vincent haphazardly moving in and his smugly gentlemanly rebuttal of Celia’s nymphomaniacal advances. While Clarke is to be mildly commended for created two relatively substantial roles for women here, you get the distinct impression it’s written from Vincent’s perspective of baffled, profesedly non-political amusement. Always be wary of such disavowals!

So, a telling play to watch as a window into 1965 representations, and how modern Britain’s secular loosening was seen through a comedic lens. But it is as guilty as any ‘slice-of-life’ play of lacking a consequential or structured narrative. The performances elevate it into something very watchable and interesting, even if it’s perfectly understandable that many – then and now – would want to switch off such a play with its setting playing to hackneyed Hampstead cliches – or, to be generous, archetypes.

Best Performance: BARBARA JEFFORD

Barbara Jefford (1930-2020) is excellent here, really showing how the modern liberal career woman, but with conflicting morals. Her domestic habitat shows the incipient Elizabeth David and Terence Conran type middle-class aesthetic in an earlier phase than certain 1970s Plays for Today. Initially, Jefford reminded me of Jane Arden, in hairdo and voice, and clearly bears the accumulated gravitas of her major experiences in theatre.

Jefford always ensures that Ella’s garrulous nattering was intelligent, wherever the script enabled this, and made her a likeable protagonist, who does play off well against the gnarled middle-class pomposity of Denholm Elliott (1922-92). Jefford conveys a fusion of warmth and intensity that contrasts with Caroline Mortimer’s distinctly brattish hedonistic nihilism and performative sexy posing with her arm in the air, as in the contrived and silly scene where Celia tries to seduce Vincent.

Jefford is described by Michael Coveney as the ‘leading classical actor of her generation’ when at the Old Vic in 1956-61, able to shift between ‘intensity and stillness’, ‘joyful exuberance’ and ‘majesty and a grandeur’ (Guardian, 16 September 2020). She was later to play Molly Bloom in the film of Ulysses (1967) and a charity worker in the PfT Edna, The Inebriate Woman (1971) and worked with Stephen Frears on several occasions. She was the youngest civilian to be awarded an OBE, in the very year of 1965…

Best line: “I tolerate my job, because I’m permitted an occasional protest at what it stands for…” (Ella)

“Oh come on, love, we’ll never have time for the drink” (Ella, may as well be to the viewer here) had been my initially flippant thought. But it had to be one of her occasional more developed pithy displays of wit. Indeed, Ella also has a good go at Britain’s “dreary hypocrisy”. It’s a shame really that the play doesn’t more directly revolve around Ella’s verbal barbs. There’s no one really for her to joust with in a sufficiently dramatic or entertaining way.

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 51.8%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / Turn Again Ted, with Ted Ray / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (Night Spot / Wish Upon a Star)

Audience Reaction Index: 42%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: Not that many London critics reviewed it, but the response was largely positive from those who did; there was a stark divide with critics outside the metropole – the two who bothered to assess it disliked it. The audience reaction was generally more in line with the regional critics and my own response to it, though some of the play’s assailants put too fine a moral point on it.

The anonymous Times reviewer drew the lesson from an ‘admirably moral, quietly hilarious’ play that marriage is easier than a liaison (18 March 1965, p. 9). They pick up on Clarke’s conservative intention, describing Ella’s home’s ‘atmosphere of hardly bearable emancipation’, praising his ‘cool gravity’ in allowing the viewer to ‘realize for himself [sic] the appalling implications of Ella’s emotional hothouse’ (ibid.). They praised the central trio of actors, including how Jefford conveyed Ella’s key grasp of others’ weaknesses – ‘a means of achieving a total emotional dictatorship’ – and Mortimer’s ‘study of a tigress in embryo’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood also praised a ‘sophisticated, nicely buoyant comedy’ about ‘Courtship a la mode’, handled expertly by the actors, which produced ‘a healthy amount of chuckles’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 March 1965, p. 19).

Maurice Richardson notes that the play answered a viewer’s request on Points of View directly beforehand, for a TV equivalent of Dodie Smith, having ‘distinct strong Dodie-ish affinities’ (Observer, 21 March 1965, p. 24). He noted how the characters including Celia, ‘the irresponsible semi-beat girl-lodger’ were close to an updated take on Smith’s ‘unforgettable ambience’ (ibid.). He far preferred this play to John Hopkins’s latest Armchair Theatre, liking the ‘devilish viewable’ antics of the characters, and Clarke’s ‘cunning playwright’s knack’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws was critical of the play’s ‘fatuous’ ideas concerning ‘the principles and conduct of progressive persons, left-wing idealists, Nigerian students, and ‘the young”, also finding Vincent’s later development of intelligence and understanding too ‘sudden and unlikely’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws identifies Ella’s richly paradoxical quality in terming her ‘bossy but permissive’, while identifying Celia’s mercenary materialism in going ‘directly on the make’ (ibid.).

Bill Edmund concurred more with the other reviewers, finding it ‘delightful’ and ‘modern’, comparing it oddly to Noel Coward, French farce and the Goons (Television Today, 25 March 1965, p. 12). Edmund seemed startled by how irresistible Caroline Mortimer was, but understood Vincent’s resistance due to how Jefford made Ella ‘a lovable person’ (ibid.). He admired how Michael Wield’s sets – ‘cluttered with books and divan beds and burnt toast’ – aided Clarke’s comedy (ibid.).

Among a notably minimal response outside the capital, T.J.D. found it ‘ineffectual’ and unfunny: ‘slow, superficial and [which] induced no response other than irritation’ (Leicester Mercury, 18 March 1965, p. 10). They took a moralistic view, calling daughter Heather’s acceptance of the affair ‘pitiful and squalid’, which in itself ruined the play, which had capable performances but which were ‘to no purpose at all’ (ibid.). M.G. similarly found it insubstantial and ‘laboured’, with a ‘fine’ cast struggling with the ‘superficiality’ of their characters (Liverpool Daily Post, 18 March 1965, p. 6).

Audience reaction included a 2% higher RI than Horror of Darkness, but with notably fewer polarising scores of A+ and C- (BBC WAC, VR/65/145). A group of viewers liked its character development and how it exposed the ‘modern untidy and sloppy conception of individual morality’ (ibid.). Among those not impressed, they was at least the telling comment that it had ‘no one actually “nuts” or a “queer”, just “living in sin”‘, which gives an idea of hierarchies of attitudes to different deviant behaviours in 1965 (ibid.). Most, though, just expressed boredom at watching people without morals or purpose, with  others highlighting the shapeless plot and lack of interesting incident (ibid.).

The cast however were acclaimed, Jefford and Mortimer especially so, with the latter praised by a Housewife for conveying Celia’s personality development ‘from that of a moody teenager to that of a woman with ambition and awareness of herself’ (ibid.). Denholm Elliott made the most of this ‘somewhat ‘seedy’ character’, according to some (ibid.). Production comments were limited to some awed admiration of Ella’s Hampstead home – ‘what a comfortable living-room they had’ – annoying doors ‘forever banging and swinging’ and Heather’s ‘ridiculous’ clothes (ibid.).

Adding to the somewhat negative audience response, Mrs. O. Scott of Loundsley Green, Chesterfield, noted her own household had switched off ‘in disgust’, asking, pointedly – and not unfairly: ‘When will we sever see a play with some action in it, instead of a load of inane chatter?’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 March 1965, p. 22).

While I would say I liked watching this much more eventually than Ashes to Ashes, it was a case of a disappointing, rather ill-planned play fitting far too neatly into some people’s mistaken thumbnail idea of the typical topical Wednesday Play about, and of, the ‘chattering classes’. For once, I am fairly in accord with audience and regional critics’ views, even if my reasoning differs in some respects. But it’s definitely a pleasure to watch these actors at work. While Denholm Elliott clearly doesn’t have the material here to match Nothing but the Best (1964), he is always going to be watchable. Barbara Jefford uses her vast Shakespearean experience to bring considerable life to what could easily have been a caricatured straw women.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating **** / ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: NICOL WILLIAMSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 7.92 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 57.1%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 40%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 61.5%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is taking realism too far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.09: ‘Campaign for One’ (BBC1, 3 March 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.

02.09: Campaign for One (BBC One, Wednesday 3 March 1965) 9:30 – 10:45pm

Directed by Moira Armstrong; Written by Marielane Douglas & Anthony Church; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by John Hurst

Barry Foster, again! In space!

This isn’t one I feel like I knew anything about, before researching it! While I’ve interviewed the fine director Moira Armstrong, I did not have the time to discuss her earlier Wednesday Plays. I had known nothing about the writers Marielaine Douglas and Anthony Church, and the press cuttings add zilch information about them. In some cursory web scouring, I’ve been able to glean that a Marielaine Douglas acted in three productions at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1964, including alongside Ian McKellen in a stage version of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. And that she seems to have been a University friend of Margaret Atwood, married Church and died in 2014, by the signs of this tweet.

The Coventry Evening Telegraph emphasises Jeremy Kemp being formerly of Z Cars (3 March 1965, p. 2). Jack Bell’s very routine article focuses on the ‘Accent Brigade’ of mainly Canadian actors based in Britain who stand in for Americans in British screen works, listing Lionel Murton (also currently in Compact), Jerry Stovin and Robert Arden (Daily Mirror, 3 March 1965, p. 14).

The plot revolves around an astronaut Squadron-Ldr. Philip Osborne (Barry Foster), who spends ten days in space, but ‘During his mission he suddenly disobeys instructions and finally refuses to come down’ (Rugeley Times, 27 February 1965, p. 13), having reached ‘breaking point’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 27 February 1965, p. 8). Set in the USA in the near future, the Glasgow Daily Record trails it as a ‘tense drama’, questioning whether such a stint in space would have ‘any physical or mental effects’ (3 March 1965, p. 14). Squadron-Leader Jack Cooper (Jeremy Kemp) is the man on the ground ‘fighting against time for the survival of his friend in outer space [as] events move towards an equally drastic solution’ (Radio Times, 25 February 1965, p. 39).

I feel this is part of a run of plays covertly or overtly representing mental health issues – with Barry Foster’s two 1965 Wednesday Play protagonists and Stanley Baxter as Hazlitt being referred to as mad, eccentric or similar. Here, Phil is said to begin to ‘behave peculiarly’, refusing ‘to obey routine instructions’ (Torbay Herald Express, 3 March 1965, p. 4), to lose ‘control of his faculties’ (Observer, 28 February 1965, p. 22), or to have ‘cracked up’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 3 March 1965, p. 2), in the parlance of the time.

Interestingly, on the day of the play’s broadcast, the Daily Telegraph mentioned a constant spate of cases of ‘Mental and nervous breakdown’ coming to light concerning people who had served in both World Wars (3 March 1965, p. 20). This article is on behalf of the Ex-Services Mental Health Welfare Society, asks for donations and notes they can provide secure employment at their Thermega Electric Blanket Factory, and accommodation in hostels or cottage homes with families allowed to be present and psychiatric help available – or end their days in their Old People’s Home (ibid.).

Again, Campaign for One does not exist as a recording in the archives. It is a shame not to be able to see what is surely the closest The Wednesday Play or Play for Today ever got to the terrain of Countdown (1967), Marooned (1969), Solaris (1972), Moon (2009) and Gravity (2013).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 66.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton serial – episode 6 / Hollywood Palace variety / Newsroom), ITV (Night Spot / Colossus at the Crossroads – documentary on Trades Unions)

The main ITV opposition being a documentary on trade unions, implicitly a serious topic, surely helped this BBC play gain double the audience.

Audience Reaction Index: 66%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 38.5%

Reception: One of the least reviewed plays, this received a fairly split verdict from the critics who did bother to assess it. Its large viewership however was rather more positive overall.

Mary Crozier saw this play as essentially televisual, and ‘highly dramatic’; she thought Phil’s resentment at being used as a ‘guinea-pig’, or as a ‘machine’, was credible (Guardian, 4 March 1965, p. 9). Ultimately, Crozier gave a mixed verdict: technically admiring it, including fast cutting between scenes, but feeling it was ‘much a thesis’ and not involving enough (ibid.). Crozier saw Jeremy Kemp as giving the ‘outstanding’ performance (ibid.).

Jeremy Kemp and Richmond Phillips in Campaign for One. Photo courtesy of Liverpool Echo and Evening Express.

The usual Anon Times reviewer criticised the depiction of the psychologist and felt ‘As is usually in this genre, technology and suspense were more profitable than the human problems involved in them’ (4 March 1965, p. 17). They felt that Foster stood out above the rest of the large cast: despite being ‘almost completely hidden in a space suit, managed to be considerably more real than the urgently active people down below him’ (ibid.). Lyn Lockwood expressed some reservations initially, but was won over by the ‘grand slam’ of ‘space, psychology and sex’ that Douglas and Church’s play provided, making ‘one sit up and goggle at the box, particularly towards the climax’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1965, p. 19).

Patrick Skene Catling felt palpably bored with its routine narrative and serious tone – compounded by the wider televisual offerings of the week – wishing ‘Good riddance’ to Philip and his wife: hoping the following week would bring ‘nothing but laughs’ (Punch, 10 March 1965, p. 368). In Wednesday Play terms, Catling might not quite have got his wish…!

In contrast, Frederick Laws found it the ‘most rewarding and cohesive’ play of the last three weeks: ‘The sulks and fury of the experimental man who chose not to come down were cleanly developed, and so was the anxiety and anger of his mate on earth, played by Jeremy Kemp’ (The Listener, 25 March 1965, p. 463). Laws felt it was a rare play which included credible psychologist and journalist roles; he reveals the ending whereby Phil’s capsule is destroyed by a missile due to his rebellion and as he ‘might just be giving information to the other side in the cold war’ (ibid.). Laws thought this a politically logical, but dramatically ‘exaggerated’, conclusion (ibid.).

Outside London, reviews were few and far between. There were diverging views from two great cities. In Glasgow, ‘Argus’ felt that Foster’s ‘deranged’ astronaut was a ‘compelling’ protagonist, with his ‘brilliant’ performance making it far from the dull Play it could have been, but instead a ‘thought-provoking and immaculate production’ (Daily Record, 4 March 1965, p. 15). In Belfast, E. McI. indicated that Phil has a tiff with his wife, and that this ‘attempt to equate the cramped style of the eternal triangle with the vast range of outer space never really got off the launching pad’ (Belfast Telegraph, 4 March 1965, p. 11). They were disappointed how Foster’s appearances were just on a flickering TV screen and the lack of ‘filmed shots of the heavens’, resulting in an overly confined feeling studio piece (ibid.). They ultimately felt the situation developed ‘was more suited to comedy than dramatic outbursts’ (ibid.).

Viewers were largely hooked by the play’s suspense and admired a ‘shattering’ climax (BBC WAC, VR/65/117). For a smaller number, it dragged and some got tired of ‘too many people milling around to no avail’; scattered complaints about bad language were, however, outnumbered by viewers feeling gripped by the play (ibid.). While some questioned the American accents, acting was mostly acclaimed, especially Kemp and Foster (ibid.). Viewers generally admired the brisk pace and a Housewife commended the realism:

It was marvellous, the setting. I never once thought of it being done in a studio (ibid.)

There don’t seem to have been any letters published in the press from viewers; generally, my impression is of a play that went down well, if to a fairly muted extent. The main coda I’m aware of is that it was repeated on BBC Two on 3 September 1965 in the Encore slot at 8:20pm. It went up against another repeat, of Dr Finlay’s Casebook on BBC One.

A rare online mention is provided by Keith Topping in 2008, who here describes it as a ‘tensely topical play’ with a ‘compelling and almost documentary-style attention to detail’, which explored how meticulous planning failed to account for the ‘human factor’, in terms of Phil.

While this would be somewhat nearer the bottom of my ‘wants’ list of the lost Wednesday Plays thus far, I sense this would be a perfectly decent, interesting play. While I’m unsure quite how good this will be as a script, a fine cast suggests it would be humanly watchable. Plus, Moira Armstrong as director is always a good thing. In addition, the play’s scenario suggests something of the pulp tragedy of the Rah Band’s magnificent synth pop hit ‘Clouds Across the Moon’ (1985); it’s never a bad time to be (re)acquainted with that:

Top of the Pops, BBC One, 11 April 1985

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 – 02.08: ‘The Confidence Course’ (BBC1, 24 February 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.

02.08: The Confidence Course (BBC One, Wednesday 24 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:45pm

Directed by Gilchrist Calder; Written by Dennis Potter; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Lionel Radford.

Which of these desirable attributes would you most likely to possess? 1. Self confidence. 2. Self expression. 3. Good appearance. 4. Good manners. 5. Good memory. 6. Business flair. 7. Ambition. 8. Concentration. 9. Perseverance. 10. Ability to relax. Choose for yourself. We can give you the confidence which gets you places!

   That is how the advertisement read on the Underground. Some people of course were indifferent when they saw it. Some were rather above it, or were frightened maybe that if they considered the offer seriously they were admitting their own failure. Some thought there might be something in it for them, and took note of the address and went. They were curious after all, and the advert. did stress that there was ‘no obligation.’

(Roger Smith, Radio Times, 18 February 1965, p. 39)

Dennis Price as The Director in The Confidence Course

We come now to Dennis Potter’s first TV play, The Confidence Course, which Roger Smith’s article links to an Underground advert and which develops a ‘theme of gullibility’ concerning how ‘a huge but subtle confidence trick’ is perpetrated (Birmingham Express and Star, 24 February 1965, p. 13).

Firstly, Professor Emeritus of Glasgow Caledonian University – and Potter expert – John Cook provides a detailed contextual account of how the play came about (the section that follows is all John’s barring one paragraph I’ve inserted marked *)

24 February 2025 may mark the sixtieth anniversary of Dennis Potter’s debut as a television dramatist. But by 24 February 1965 and the transmission of The Confidence Course, Potter was already a known name within the public sphere.  Previewing the broadcast, the Radio Times made clear that ‘at twenty-nine, [Potter] has already made his mark in a number of fields – leader writer, television critic, parliamentary candidate, and now a television playwright’.[1]

It was particularly his recent stint as TV critic for the Daily Herald, between 1962 and 1964, which provided him with some name recognition amongst a wider public.  Adrian Mitchell of the pre-Murdoch Sun newspaper noted that in his fierce championing of the best and excoriation of the worst TV had to offer ‘Dennis Potter is already well known as a passionate critic of apathy and the forces which exploit it’[ii]; while The Stage and Television Today indicated ‘Dennis Potter has shown himself to be a writer of words worth listening to’.[iii]  The same journal headlined the arrival of The Confidence Course as ‘First Play from Former Critic’[iv], thus encapsulating the pull and fascination for audiences in terms of how this new veritable poacher turned gamekeeper might do.

*Potter is quoted as saying, ‘The experience of watching television for two years nearly, and writing those silly little pieces in a silly little newspaper, was such that I (like millions of people, no doubt) felt, well, I can do better than this…’[v] The Confidence Course had two elements departing from naturalism, an unseen narrator and the visitation of a man calling himself William Hazlitt, after the great literary critic, who, like Potter, was from a radical and Nonconformist background. These devices acted on Potter’s insight that ‘one of the troubles of supposedly showing things-as-they-really-are… is how difficult it then becomes… not to make people feel deep in their souls that this is also more or less the way things have to be.’[vi]

The path to Potter’s debut as a TV playwright had been by no means straightforward, however, as the writer of that Radio Times preview, Roger Smith, made clear in a personal interview I conducted with him way back in 1990.[vii]  In February 1964, Smith, who had worked for several years as a scriptwriter-adaptor for the BBC TV Drama Department, was appointed story editor of the BBC1’s premier contemporary play slot named First Night; later to be retitled The Wednesday Play when, pre-launch, it was decided to move it from its traditional Sunday night slot to a new transmission berth mid-week.  Smith’s brief was to work alongside producer James MacTaggart in order to make a more popular series of single plays, at a time when the very existence of the single TV play itself was under scrutiny at the BBC due to falling ratings.[viii]  Part of this brief from the new Head of the BBC TV Drama Group, Sydney Newman, was to find new writers to help attract a younger play-watching audience.  Given a year to commission, produce and get on to the air twenty-six new original TV play scripts, Smith turned to all his contacts, including his best friend from Oxford University days, Dennis Potter. 

Potter, however, was far from convinced he could write a TV play script.  Smith remembered: ‘He said “No, I can’t write plays”.  He had to be persuaded’.  It was only when Potter got back to him with the more modest suggestion of adapting a novel he had half-written that Smith was finally able to secure from him a script of The Confidence Course, delivered to the BBC in June 1964 and set out in Potter’s own ‘meticulous handwriting’.  Drafts of the original novel version of The Confidence Course have survived however and can be found within Potter’s own private creative notebooks where he would first hand-draft all his material.  These now form part of The Dennis Potter Archive collection and are publicly available for consultation at the Dean Heritage Centre within Potter’s native Forest of Dean.[ix]  Though undated, the proximity of these drafts to other contemporaneous writings within the notebooks suggests several versions of the novel were worked on by Potter at different times. The earliest seems to consist of nine chapters of prose, approximately eleven thousand words, detailing the backgrounds of the various confidence tricksters, prior to The Confidence Course event itself actually taking place.[x] 

Cover of the Camera Script, courtesy of John Cook

Significantly, these drafts reveal the original name of the character Hazlitt in the play was to have been ‘Crippen’ – an undoubted nod to the notorious wife murderer Dr. Crippen (1862-1910) but also having resonances with the word ‘cripple’.  The most telling clue to making sense of these dark undertones comes from a remark about The Confidence Course Potter made many years later to journalist Graham Fuller, as part of his interviews conducted for the Potter on Potter book, published in 1993 – namely, that the real self-motivation courses, on which the original idea for The Confidence Course had been based, was beginning to trouble Potter at that particular time.  This was because of the so-called confidence factor that ‘was about self-functioning at a time when I was beginning to feel that I couldn’t self-function’ – in other words, following the 1962 onset of psoriatic arthropathy, a particularly severe form of psoriasis blighting the skin and arthritis crippling the joints, which Potter would suffer from that time onwards until the end of his life.  As he told Graham Fuller: ‘The people running [the self-motivation course] were saying “We can give you confidence”’.[xi]

If, in the play, on one level, Hazlitt is the avenging angel, exposing the hypocrisy and taking down the phoniness and cant of the Director and his Confidence Course, he is also a troubled individual who, in his counter-advocacy of failure, doubt and lack of confidence as immutable features of the human condition, stands outside of the group and by extension wider human society.  Indeed when Hazlitt first appears outside the door of the hotel conference room where the course is being held, Potter’s script directions describe him as ‘little more than a shadow-with-eyes, standing in a pool of gloom.  A sinister feeling’.[xii]  Seen literally in this light, Hazlitt is as much an invading demon as avenging angel and it is this ambiguity of motive and intention which fuels much of the tension of the play, animating the conflict between himself and the Director as embodiments of opposing poles of the arguments for and against teaching and selling self-confidence and self-motivation.

In later years, Potter would often to tend sideline The Confidence Course when asked to discuss his origins as a television playwright, usually focusing on the subsequent and better known The Nigel Barton Plays (1st tx. The Wednesday Play 8 and 15 December 1965). 

The lukewarm reception The Confidence Course received at the time from reviewers, with criticisms about its verbiage and general untelevisual nature, may be one reason accounting for this.  But so, too, may be the way in which the play tends to argue and work against ideas of the ‘sovereign’ importance of human agency and self-transformation which Potter’s most celebrated work of the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, reaching its apotheosis with The Singing Detective (BBC One, 1986), would later tend to espouse.

Nevertheless, The Confidence Course, according to Smith, was judged at the time by The Wednesday Play production team to be a very sharp and trenchant critique of ‘the Admass society’: exactly the sort of piece the slot was looking for.  Accordingly, it was decided in June 1964, immediately after Potter’s delivery of The Confidence Course script, to commission another from him.  This became Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, delivered to the BBC by Potter in December of that same year.  In his private notebooks, however, there is evidence Potter continued to attempt to complete a draft of his The Confidence Course novel, now envisaged, perhaps, as an extended tie-in with the forthcoming TV play.  Amongst much marginalia Potter would doodle in his notebooks at this early stage of his creative writing career, there is a note to himself, urging himself at one point to ‘spend one day on The Confidence Course and two weeks on Nigel Barton’, with the aim of getting a serviceable ten thousand words completed on this newer draft of his novel by January 1st 1965.[xiii]  

But with no other job at this time – Potter had resigned his position as leader writer of the pre-Murdoch Sun in September 1964 in order to contest unsuccessfully the East Herts constituency as Labour candidate in the October General Election – and with a wife and two young children to support together with another on the way (his son, Robert, born March 1965), accepting commissions to write TV plays was always going to prove far more lucrative and provide far more immediate financial returns than attempting to finish a novel.  By 1965, The Confidence Course novel was quietly dropped as Potter now embarked fully upon life as a TV playwright, creating and completing on average three full-length TV play scripts per year over the course of this nineteen sixties period.

Many thanks to John Cook for that! The play is one of just two of Potter’s TV plays missing from the archives.[xiv] According to W. Stephen Gilbert, Potter was paid £600 out of the production’s £4,000 budget.[xv] The Hertfordshire Mercury emphasises Potter as a defeated local Labour Party candidate at the recent General Election, and outlines the premise of his debut TV play:

a quack course, supposed to promote confidence and worldly success.

The action covers one evening in one room – the hired room to which come the timid customers of a course in business flair and self-expression. There the clients are tricked and humiliated until they are ripe for plucking. One among them, however, is made of sterner stuff.

He is Hazlitt, played by Stanley Baxter, who tackles the course director (Dennis Price). (19 February 1965, p. 6)

The play sounds to me a close forerunner of Andrew Carr’s fascinating Play for Today Instant Enlightenment Including VAT (1980), if somewhat less clearly centring on a cult than that play did. Carr’s play is an archetypal room-based ensemble play that will feature notably in my forthcoming book about PfT.

Instead of Simon Callow’s brash American Max Schreiber, the course leader here is acidic Dennis Price, best known by me for Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), described as ‘smooth, well spoken and utterly confident’ (Birmingham Express and Star, op. cit.). Hazlitt is set up as a similarly sceptical ‘awkward customer’ to journalist Malcolm (Tim Wylton) in Carr’s play, though he is infinitely more successful in turning the tables on the con artist (ibid.).

Dennis Price and Yootha Joyce in The Confidence Course

Television Today (28 January 1965, p. 9) records Yootha Joyce rehearsing for the play, immediately after appearing in Basil Warner’s Try For White (BBC2). The Daily Record reports Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter appearing in Potter’s play as his ‘first straight acting part’ after TV adverts, stage variety and feature-films (4 February 1965, p. 4). In the Radio Times, story editor Roger Smith notes that director Gilchrist Calder was coming straight from a ‘Broadway success’ (op. cit.).

Notably, Smith informs us that this is the fourth first play from a writer new to TV among the eight Wednesday Plays so far in 1965 (ibid.). This could teach TV commissioners today a historical lesson in giving new voices a chance in prime-time slots, and giving them freedom, not simply the chance to write for long-running precinct dramas (even that valuable option is now severely curtailed).

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 44.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Parade / Newsroom and Weather), ITV (The Prime Minister speaks on Britain’s production and exports / Richard Boone Show – Arena, Part 2 / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 49%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 42.9%

Reception: There was a mixed-towards-positive reaction among London critics, getting steadily more favourable outside the capital. The audience was quite starkly divided, with many quite simply not getting it, but others impressed.

Richard Sear enjoyed it, with effort, but found it hard work, commenting that even Dennis Price ‘stumbled over his lines’ (Daily Mirror, 25 February 1965, p. 14). Sear commended a play ‘full of original thought’, though felt it resembled three or four plays crammed into one, with Potter using the confidence seller ‘to attack advertising, sheeplike audiences, TV quiz shows, and life itself’ (ibid.). In a largely positive review, Adrian Mitchell in The Sun termed it a ‘powerful parable’.[xvi]

Mary Crozier liked the play in its opening sections, praising a ‘cynically amusing tone’ – somewhat less black and mordant than Clive Exton – ‘sharp and imaginative’ direction and fine performances, but felt that Hazlitt’s character was ‘alien’ and undermined the play’s ‘validity’ (Guardian, 25 February 1965, p. 9). Nevertheless, ‘In many ways this was an interesting play and it certainly held out hope that Mr Potter may do better yet’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood felt for Price’s trickster when ‘a tousled-haired interrupter’ threw a spanner in the works by shattering the course’s ‘illusory and purely temporal’ ideas of success (Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1965, p. 19). She felt its satire on ‘modern psychological promotion’ was heavy-handed, and Price’s and Baxter’s characters were ‘mouthpieces for the argument instead of characters’, also bemoaning ‘that ubiquitous plague of television drama, the commentator’ (ibid.). This narrator was Geoffrey Matthews.

Bill Edmund mentions more of the cast, admiring performances by John Quentin as a man with a stammer, Yootha Joyce as the repressed and ignored Rosalind and John Blythe as ‘the overwhelming salesman’; feeling also that Hazlitt gave Baxter the chance to show he was ‘a very fine actor’ in breaking through the manipulation (Television Today, 4 March 1965, p. 12). Edmund did question the way the Director was so easily deflated by his failure, feeling that it needed stressing that the Director and Hazlitt’s battle is ‘eternal […] which was perhaps what the writer meant to say’ (ibid.).

Frederick Laws felt the play ‘made several points sharply’ and that Price’s Director evoked ‘real hypnotists and humbugs in the trade’ (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347). Laws admired how ‘properly painful’ the stutterer being bullied was, and how ‘reasonable neurotic’ man calling himself William Hazlitt slices through the cosiness of proceedings with ‘a tirade on the necessity of accepting the reality and inevitability of death’ (ibid.). He noted how operatives manhandle Hazlitt off the premises, but his words enable the ‘potential students and victims’ to escape exploitation (ibid.).

The end of Laws’s review is worth quoting in full for how it summarises Potter’s already formed unmistakably eccentric originality, as well as misgivings over the narrator device:

I was considerably puzzled by the bringing of the historical Hazlitt into the battle but it could be justified. An all-knowing, invisible narrator who finally gave a commentary on the defeat of the bully and the triumph of the unconfident was strikingly unnecessary. Potter’s wit, eloquence, and tough-mindedness make him a most welcome recruit to television drama (ibid.).

Outside of London, critics were largely positive. An anonymous reviewer perceived ‘an amusing tale of how a nut case [sic] barged into a pep talk session, took it over and made the self-assured director of the course lose his faith, and his audience – with his synthetic philosophy shattered by the sincerity of sheer lunacy’ (Belfast News Letter, 25 February 1965, p. 10). Alf McCreary waxed even more positively in favour of a ‘cruel and realistic play’ about silent, unnoticed human misery, proclaiming that Potter showed ‘remarkable talent’ (Belfast Telegraph, 27 February 1965, p. 8).

Peter Forth praised Neil McCarthy’s, Stanley Baxter’s and Arto Morris’s performances, but most especially Dennis Price’s ‘personal triumph’ as the Director, which ‘turned what could have been an unutterably boring lecture into a gripping play, and one which will be remembered for a long time by those fortunate enough to see it’ (Western Daily Press, 25 February 1965, p. 7). A.B. was impressed by ‘a statement of doubt about the aims of hundreds of years of consumer civilisation’, with Hazlitt ‘movingly played’ by Baxter, conveying ‘the inanity of human goals’ (Leicester Mercury, 25 February 1965, p. 7). Analysing the TV flow in a way Potter would have approved of, A.B. felt this was a sharp rejoinder to some of the assumptions underlying Harold Wilson’s speech to the nation beforehand on BBC One, while also commending Alan Plater’s Z Cars story, commenting how collectively, ‘These twentieth century parables make Wednesday top television night, week in, week out.’ (ibid.)

David Taylor noted how the play followed an impressive PPB by Harold Wilson, Labour PM, ‘a father figure we could be proud to own’ (The [Newcastle upon Tyne] Journal, 25 February 1965, p. 5). Taylor admired how Dennis Price revelled in delivering the Director’s ‘cliches and platitudes’, displaying an ‘urbane charm’ (ibid.). However, he felt the conclusion overly optimistic in its weak become strong and the strong weak scenario – as expressed by the narrator (ibid.). K.H. assailed excessive ‘verbiage’ and the ‘disembodied’ narrator’s voice, but found Price’s acting the ‘saving grace’ and some of the dialogue ‘very smart’ (Peterborough Evening Telegraph, 25 February 1965, p. 2).

The audience sample in the BBC research report saw some hatred and misunderstanding of the play, with some claiming it was ‘ethically wrong’ to put such wise words in the mouth of the ‘madman’ Hazlitt and wrongly feeling the play was a ‘mockery’ of the physically or mentally handicapped, as with the stammering character (BBC WAC, VR/65/102). One viewer railed:

do such people as “Hazlitt” exist outside mental homes? […] this unreal character made nonsense of the whole play, whose message could have been put over much more effectively without such excessive eccentricity (ibid.).

Stanley Baxter as a ‘madman’, apparently…

Stanley Baxter himself rated the play highly and noted he’d seen it as important to retain the ambiguity as to whether his character really was William Hazlitt or not. Baxter, who had read Hazlitt’s essays at school, notes how he ‘played him, in a kind of raincoat, shuffling in’, as a ‘tortured soul’, fucked up by the world.[xvii] Roger Smith termed the Hazlitt character ‘a weirdo’, but Humphrey Carpenter feels Potter ‘may have been portraying the apparently contradictory elements in his own personality.’[xviii]

The play was clearly too caustic for many in the audience, with a finely divided balance of 32% giving it A+/A and 34% the lowest C/C- scores (VR/65/102 op. cit.). The setting’s drabness was disliked but also widely admitted to be realistic for the sort of place such an event would be held (ibid.). The acting was praised, though some felt that Baxter was overacting (ibid.). A section of viewers loved how subtle wit and humour were balanced with ‘moments of truth’; somewhat more desired more of a ‘good story, scenery and warmth’ (ibid.). A William McLachlan, of Dunoon, Argyll, shared the negativity of many, feeling Stanley Baxter was miscast and the play ill served his comic talents though felt he did his best with ‘poor material’ (Sunday Mail, 28 February 1965, p. 16).

Potter explained a key background element: ‘It is really about the self-motivation courses run by bodies like the Dale Carnegie Institute, which I covered as a newspaper reporter at one of their so-called free sessions. The Herald wouldn’t use the article because Dale Carnegie was advertising in the newspaper’.[xix] In a particularly significant reaction, the Dale Carnegie Institute wrote to the BBC to complain about the programme, a claim the BBC easily batted away: ‘You yourself have pointed out that there were differences between the demonstration shown and the one which you run’.[xx]

The play was unusually overt in its politics in the context of Potter’s oeuvre, where his Christianity and socialism, his radicalism and conservative sides, usually act at a deep subterranean level in his works.[xxi] As Gilbert explains, ‘Hazlitt bestowed upon Potter a vehicle for articulating in a play the rage against admass that he was denied on Panorama. He was a mouthpiece.’[xxii] Here, as John Cook explains, the narrator basically ‘urges the viewing audience to recognize its power to overturn the existing social order’, pronouncing in voice-over:

The party’s over and the game is done. The weak have become strong and the strong weak. Soon it will be time to turn out the lights and the Director will walk out into the rain… a failure.”[xxiii]

Potter’s attack on a society ‘based on class and money’ is not accompanied by ‘a coherent vision of the future but rather in the name of the past’, via Hazlitt’s visitation.[xxiv] However, it would be a complacent person who claimed that the core of Hazlitt’s speech here does not still have great relevance to our society today:

It is, of course, a gigantic conspiracy. We, as human beings, are all the time and everywhere being mocked and tortured by poster-big images of the Ideal Family, the Ideal Girl, the Ideal Husband… An arbitrarily defined Perfection assails us all the time.[xxv]

It’s a real shame that this doesn’t exist. It seems to carry on the assault on consumerist “Admass” culture from Hugh Whitemore’s satirical Dan, Dan, the Charity Man. I’d love to see this ‘outsider’ or ‘visitation’ play, which John Cook links well to key 1960s texts by Mercer and Pinter and the burgeoning counterculture.[xxvi]

References

[1] Roger Smith, ‘Dennis Price Gives The Confidence Course in Tonight’s Play’, Radio Times, 18 February 1965, p. 39. 

[ii] Adrian Mitchell, The Sun, 25 February 1965, p. 9. 

[iii] Bill Edmunds, The Stage and Television Today, 4 March 1965, p. 12.

[iv] Anon., ‘First play from former critic’, The Stage and Television Today, 25 February 1965, p. 14. 

[v] Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 142.

[vi] Ibid. p. 144.

[vii] Roger Smith, interview with the author, recorded 16 March 1990, Peckham, London.  All citations henceforth attributed to Smith are taken from that interview. 

[viii] The then Controller of Programmes for BBC1, Donald Baverstock, wanted to ‘wipe out all single plays’ from the channel: a move to which Head of Drama Sydney Newman was fiercely opposed.  For further on the controversy, which was eventually resolved in Newman’s favour following the success of The Wednesday Play as well as the departure of Donald Baverstock from the BBC in 1965, see John R. Cook, ‘Between Grierson and Barnum: Sydney Newman and the Development of the Single Television Play at the BBC’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, November 2004, vol.1, no.2, pp. 211-25. 

[ix] The Dennis Potter Archive, Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean, was opened to the public in June 2013 after the local Forest of Dean community won Heritage Lottery funding to purchase Potter’s handwritten scripts, writer’s notebooks and typescripts from his estate and house these within a dedicated facility.  The archive is searchable online using the following link:  https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/dennis-potter-archive

[x] Notebook containing The Confidence Course novel drafts (undated), accession no.: DP2012.22.7, Dennis Potter Archive catalogued materials, https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/_files/ugd/dce9b1_a9a0063790c54cbc944e5d251b174aad.pdf

[xi] Dennis Potter, Potter on Potter, edited by Graham Fuller (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 19.

[xii] Dennis Potter, The Confidence Course, BBC Camera script, February 1965, Wednesday Play 21/64/1040, p. 8. BBC Television Script Unit.

[xiii] Notebook containing The Confidence Course novel drafts (undated), accession no.: DP2012.22.8, Dennis Potter Archive catalogued materials,  https://www.deanheritagecentre.org/_files/ugd/dce9b1_a9a0063790c54cbc944e5d251b174aad.pdf

[xiv] Dennis Potter, The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction, 1953-1994, edited by Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams (London: Oberon Books, 2015), p. 335.

[xv] W. Stephen Gilbert, Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter (London: Sceptre, 1995), p. 112.

[xvi] Gilbert op. cit. p. 112.

[xvii]  Ibid.

[xviii]  Carpenter op. cit. p. 147.

[xix] Potter in Fuller (ed.) op. cit. p. 19.

[xx]  Gilbert op. cit. p. 112.

[xxi] Potter in Fuller (ed.) op. cit. pp. 19-21.

[xxii]  Gilbert op. cit. p. 113.

[xxiii] John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 26.

[xxiv] Ibid. p. 25.

[xxv] Quoted in Carpenter op. cit. p. 147.

[xxvi] Cook op. cit. p. 25.

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 – 02.07: ‘Wear A Very Big Hat’ (BBC1, 17 February 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.

02.07: Wear A Very Big Hat (BBC One, Wednesday 17 February 1965) 9:30 – 10:35pm

Directed by Ken Loach; Written by Eric Coltart; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Peter Kindred.

The Radio Times explained this latest Wednesday Play was a story where an evening out is spoiled by an ‘incident’, suggesting this would be common experience for ‘MOST people’ (11 February 1965, p. 35). This revolves around Ann (Sheila Fearn) buying a new hat – ‘a daring stetson’ – for a night out with husband Johnny (Neville Smith) (ibid.) “Seriously. It’s gear,” is Johnny’s verdict on it, as they go out for a meal followed by a drink with friends in a local Liverpool pub (ibid.).

The RT continues thus:

When they meet Johnny’s mates, Harry and Billy, a very pleasant evening seems to be in prospect. But then something happens. Two rather foppish men are standing by the bar when Ann passes – with her striking new hat still perched cockily on her head. What follows is a small, slightly disagreeable ‘incident.’ It passes over inconclusively, but it leaves a mark – particularly on Johnny’s mind. Endlessly he broods over it; he plays and replays the scene in his imagination; the mods he thinks about it the more determined he becomes not to let the matter rest (ibid.)

The RT emphasises this as ‘a play about ordinary, very human people’, ‘social insecurity’, ‘honour and a sense of humour’, ‘being stubborn and being reasonable’ and the ‘untidiness of life compared to the simplicity of the world of the imagination’ (ibid.). It was Eric Coltart’s first TV play after two Z Cars scripts, and stresses the ‘regional authenticity’ of its dialogue, Coltart being ‘a Liverpool toolmaker’ (ibid.). I know Coltart’s name from his decidedly offbeat Play for Today Doran’s Box, screened eleven years after this and which doesn’t have a particularly clear geographical location. The Aberdeen Evening Express noted that Coltart was working on a selection of short stories, which he had began while on National Service in the Army (17 February 1965, 2).

Interestingly, this loving tribute to Coltart implies that he was a father to someone now closely associated with the weird pop band the KLF.

The Liverpool Daily Echo promoted local lad Neville Smith, born in Liverpool’s Cornwallis Street, as having gone from Ellergreen Commercial School to Hull University to radio drama to this leading role (16 February 1965, p. 6). Smith, from a working-class background – ‘the son of a fitter’s mate’ – didn’t have theatre training but did amateur acting at University and was now living in London, the main regret being ‘He doesn’t see Everton very often.’ (ibid.). The Liverpool Echo also emphasised local angles, like the play being shot in Liverpool itself, ‘against the backdrop of all our familiar Merseyside scenes’: it is a safe bet that ‘the scouser slang will be gear’ (16 February 1965, p. 2). It also reveals that Smith spent some time teaching drama, and his parents are outed, in pre-data protection days, as currently residing at 8 Caledonia Street, Liverpool 7 (ibid.)

Fascinatingly, the Echo carried an advert the same day by local Speke firm Whiteley Lang & Neill Ltd., mentioning that the BBC filmed part of Coltart’s play on their premises and jokily disclaiming that any of their workers resemble Johnny Johnson, while also offering work for any aspiring toolmakers, toolroom machinists, tool draughtsman or planners (ibid., p. 10). All a sign that Britain’s economy was doing very well in 1965 in terms of offering people skilled work. The intense local flavour of this play is clear in its adoption of a local saying:

“If you can’t fight, wear a big hat. The brim might protect you.” (Aberdeen Evening Press, op. cit.).

Coltart seems to be addressing a masculinity in flux, with old toughness vying with more peaceful attitudes, within the protagonist Johnny, who ‘prefers discussion to violence. But what is the manly thing to do when a “hard case” insults you in front of your wife?’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 17 February 1965, p. 2).

Sheila Fearn probably as in Wear A Very Big Hat. Image courtesy of Coventry Evening Telegraph

While the cast has a few quite familiar names – William Gaunt, David Jackson – I can’t picture too many of them. An exception is Alan Lake, an interesting actor of incredibly varied screen roles, latterly married to Diana Dors. Lake is specifically mentioned as ‘busy filming and rehearsing’ as Harry in Wear A Very Big Hat (Television Today, 4 February 1965, p. 11). I know Neville Smith from the Play for Today Long Distance Information which he wrote and starred in; fellow lead Sheila Fearn is mostly known for sitcom roles, including as a regular in The Likely Lads. Helpfully, we are informed she was a member of The Scaffolds, the group ‘that brought a touch of TW3 to Gazette, the late night ITV show from which The Eamonn Andrews Show was obviously fashioned.’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 17 February 1965, p. 9). William Holmes plays the ‘Liverpool tough who wants to pick a fight’ with the play’s ‘hero’ Johnny (Daily Mirror, 17 February 1965, p. 14).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 60.0%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton – part 4 / The Hollywood Palace), ITV (Night Spot, with Frank Berry, Christine Holmes and The Seekers / The Fall and Rise of the House of Krupp*)

*’The story of two generations of German arms barons’, who armed Germany in both World Wars.

On radio, the Third had a symphony concert, the Light the cloying-sounding Time for old Time, and Luxembourg had David Jacobs’ Plays the Pops.

Audience Reaction Index: 48%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46.2%

Reception: A fairly scant number of reviews, by and large. However, the reaction it elicited from the critics who mention it was highly positive, certainly better than usual. Reaction from (the many) viewers was polarised.

Johnny Clive and Neville Smith in Wear A Very Big Hat. Image courtesy of Radio Times.

Anon of Times-shire helpfully places Johnny as a Mod and indicated that Ken Loach had used much ‘nondescript “pop” type’ music to root the play in Liverpool, in what they found an ‘absorbing and effective’ TV play (18 February 1965, p. 16). They feel that initial difficulty in hearing the dialogue against ‘the twang and jangle of electric guitars’ was overcome by an unusual story deftly directed by Loach:

risking sequences of unusual slowness for the sake of truthfulness rather than for the degree of suspense they might carry. (ibid.).

Fearn – in a ‘charmingly grotesque hat’ – and Smith are said to have given ‘unassailably truthful’ performances, and the play’s final message is approved of: ‘his honour cannot be destroyed by a mindless drunkard.’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood found the drama’s focus on an unpleasant incident relatable: ‘a good human situation’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 February 1965, p. 19). While she was a little worried by its effect on ‘the sensitive ear’, ‘What with the authentic, hot potato in the mouth accents and the medley of background noises, my mind was reeling more than a little towards the end’, she ultimately liked an ‘extremely well acted’ play (ibid.) While this clearly falls prey to metropolitan sociolinguistic prejudice, it’s far from the worst TV critic instance of such that I’ve encountered in my PfT research.

Patrick Skene Catling saw the play as ‘skilfully harrowing account of Liverpool pub bullies and the underdog’s consequent Mitty reveries at a Sillitoe lathe’ (Punch, 24 February 1965, p. 290). Catling’s admiration for this and Cleo Laine on Jazz 625 (BBC2) far exceeded that for Dr. Who – ‘The Web Planet’, not unreasonably, I feel! :

a series that has descended from the wonder of daleks to the ludicrous bathos of giant cardboard ants. (ibid.)

Continuing the acclaim, Bill Edmund reflected on it having ‘some of the most genuine characters I’ve ever seen on television’, with a textbook realism discourse praising ‘real words and real actions’ (Television Today, 25 February 1965, p. 14). Edmund liked how it stayed focused on ‘the way a small incident can rankle and get out of proportion’, and expounded in greater detail on the plot than any other reviewer (ibid.). He clarified Ann and Johnny were out to celebrate their wedding anniversary, while lapsing into a fetishistic ode to Ann’s hat: ‘If was rather a startling hat but it looked very attractive perched on the top of her blonde hat.’ (ibid.).

Edmund admired Smith’s acting range, from ‘haughty and proud’, to ‘loud-mouthed and bullying’ and ‘calm and sarcastic’, and Holmes at the snarling Snapper Melia: ‘Here was a man toh longed to see dealt with as he deserved. I revelled in the scenes where Johnny dreamed his victories over Snapper.’ (ibid.). Loach’s direction was admired as perfectly putting us in Johnny’s position, ‘sharing’ his ‘doubts and puzzlement’ over what was going on (ibid.).

Frederick Laws was somewhat grudging, echoing the brickbat about loud music at the start, while also describing it as not being ‘major treatment of great passion’; however, he admired its sanity, wit and ‘shrewd’ observation, with a ‘detailed atmosphere’ evoked from its pub and Chinese restaurant scenes (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347).

Outside London, reactions were also largely positive. A.B. gave a rare mixed reaction, feeling unsure whether it was ‘a sermon about pride and violence, with real people as props for the message, or about a young man who had the misfortune to become the enemy, temporarily, of a psychopath’ (Leicester Daily Mercury, 18 February 1965, p. 8). The first of two Liverpool critics, anon in the Daily Post, felt that Coltart gave the production a ‘splendid Merseyside flavour’, commending Loach for the ‘very live’ feel and Stanley Spell for documentary style photography (18 February 1965, p. 3).

They also note the ‘foppish’ young man Peter (William Gaunt) who steals Ann’s hat – a description implying the toughs are teddy boys – while emphasising how Johnny’s nagging insecurities are resolved ‘only by a sense of humour’ (ibid.). W.D.A. in the Liverpool Echo was surprised more plays hadn’t ploughed this one’s original furrow, given its universality (18 February 1965, p. 2). While they felt it was slightly overextended in length, they loved a ‘thoroughly and convincingly explored’ situation, and a satisfying ending, though felt let down somewhat by how the Liverpool locations lacked specificity: they ‘could have been shot in almost any large city’ (ibid.).

Peter Quince liked how it was ‘in no sense a “significant” play (thank goodness) or an exciting piece of drama. It was a play about ordinary surroundings told in ordinary language that held the attention from start to finish and kept one viewing to see what happened next’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 20 February 1965, p. 5). Quince praised a most ‘agreeable’ play, especially singling out William Holmes’s ‘character acting’ as Snapper and ‘his cronies’ (ibid.). Further North still, Michael Beale found the dialect ‘painfully real, but also rather boring’, though he admired Fearn and Smith’s performances, noting how it ‘showed how easily a little incident could lead to a pub punch-up.’ (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 18 February 1965, p. 2).

The audience response from another very large Wednesday Play viewing public was decidedly, even archetypally mixed: evidence of James MacTaggart’s good sense to know that producing plays which would delight a third, and disgust another third of a large audience, would be proper Public Service Broadcasting. That telling adjective ‘sordid’ appeared among negative responses, which betrayed a partiality: ‘yet another unsavoury picture of Liverpool and its ‘semi-illiterate’ inhabitants’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/87). Coltart’s play clearly hit that significant spot, later achieved by many Plays for Today, whereby realistic scenes of working-class life were either refreshing or distasteful to see, depending on the viewer.

About a third of the sample really liked the play, admiring its capturing of Liverpool’s mood, with a Night Sister and a Sales Representative admiring its identifiable, human qualities and an ending – Snapper, flush with a darts match win, does not even recognise Johnny – ‘exactly right’ (ibid.). Others could not deny how it was horribly realistic, but didn’t find it ‘particularly edifying or entertaining’ with one Machinist enjoying it up to a point but bemoaning, ‘What about showing us the other half of Liverpool some time!’ (ibid.). The play’s earthy freshness is clear via how a few question a scene in a gent’s toilet, alongside ‘jerky’ visuals, though there was some praise for the dream sequences (ibid.). 

One public letter from a H. Merrick of South Harrow, Middlesex, complained of the ‘monotonous guitars’ in the opening sequence, which ‘nearly succeeded’ in driving him ’round the bend’ (Sunday Mirror, 21 February 1965, p. 20).

Overall, I’m sad that Ashes to Ashes exists and this doesn’t. Pubs are great settings for contained dramas of human diversity and conflict, much like train carriages or broken down lifts. It’s a real shame that Julia Jones’s and Eric Coltart’s first TV plays, both Northern-set, aren’t available to watch. They would present evidence of precisely what-happened-next after British New Wave cinema in 1959-63 to go alongside The Beatles’ films and Albert Finney and Shelagh Delaney’s Charlie Bubbles (1967) and John McGrath and Jack Gold’s The Reckoning (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.🙂

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.06: ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (BBC1, 10 February 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.

02.06: Ashes to Ashes (BBC One, Wednesday 10 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Alan Cooke; Written by Mark Brandel; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Norman Percival

Our next Wednesday Play, Ashes to Ashes runs on the presumably not entirely original promise that go-getting Barbara (Toby Robins), an executive in a London advertising agency, in her 30s, becomes a blushing ‘young bride’ after meeting Paris (Scott Forbes) in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 10 February 1965, p. 2). She soon moves into his isolated Cornish abode by the cliffs, a cottage which ‘contains an urn full of ashes. She also discovers a slaughterhouse and electric furnaces that could have other uses than firing pottery’ (ibid.).

Aye, you might just have guessed: her new husband’s wife… disappeared… mysteriously.

The Radio Times told readers that one character makes a ‘significant’ statement: ‘Inside every woman is a victim begging to be let loose on a man’ (4 February 1965, p. 35). An of-its-time flippancy is evident in the mention of Dr. Crippen’s waxwork, visible in a still image, clearly framing Brandel’s play as a black comedy.

Anglo-American writer Marc Brandel (1919-1994) specialised in thrillers – including many novels, including series – who also wrote for many US play strands like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, alongside Armchair Theatre and Danger Man in the UK and two subsequently Wednesday Plays after this. Despite Brandel’s grounding in the thriller genre, Bill Smith notes how the BBC did not give the play a comedy or thriller ‘tag’ in the pre-publicity, presumably aiming to maintain ‘an element of surprise’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 10 February 1965, p. 13).

Toby Robins is referred to as a ‘Canadian star’ (Staffordshire Sentinel, 10 February 1965, p. 4). Smith notes that Robins apparently had her own television panel show in Canada and had worked at Stratford, Ontario on stage with James Mason, though he can’t bother to get her name right, spelling it as ‘Tony Robins’ (op. cit.).

This play can be watched here, again via the PlayForForever YouTube channel. See what you think! :

Ashes to Ashes

Rating * 1/2 / ****

While there are echoes of Gaslight, Rebecca and even, very vaguely, Robin Redbreast, this doesn’t feel an especially gripping or suspenseful tale. Marc Brandel’s script and Alan Cooke’s direction feel ordinary and conventional, besides what I saw in Fable and gather was Dan, Dan, the Charity Man‘s experimentalism. The apparent links between Whitemore’s play and this, suggested by the opening in the advertising agency, are quickly dispelled with the crushing inevitability of another Nigel Farage appearance on Question Time.

The Wednesday Thriller was to follow in the summer 1965 break months between Wednesday Play series, and this seems rather in the humdrum mainstream vein of those I’ve seen from. Too much nattering about apple strudel; a fair bit more musical underscore than in the typical Wednesday Play or Play for Today. It feels like the Wednesday Play equivalent of the PfT The Chief Mourner (1979): barely apt for the strand, with only very vague hints of insightful topicality.

It’s understandable that there needed to be the occasional play in this mould which merged more with ongoing series, but it seems a bathetic change of style after the previous weeks. I had been quite engaged by the opening centring on the advertising agency and depicting Barbara Manson as a camply domineering boss. Yet, it dives from the moment the absurdly named Paris Belmont appears. Scott Forbes plays this tediously ‘suave’ ‘charmer’ Paris who doesn’t have the charisma or menace of a Hitchcockian husband. Despite, or linked to, the bizarre touches in his Cornish home decor: ashes in a large urn, a kiln, a slaughterhouse on the premises. Forbes’s performance is as leaden as one of the Zarbis pictured above him in the Belfast Newsletter (10 February 1965, p. 4).

The ending just felt smug, from Paris with his pipe in the mouth, to syrupy light music, right down to that final, crushingly obvious zoom into the outbuilding after the couple have gone in. The breezy jazz music over the end credits feels out of kilter with a very traditional comedy-thriller, which abandons the barbed modernity promised in its opening scenes. Aptly, there’s a fussy antediluvian type face used for the end credits: for me, this summarises the play’s temporal retreat into humdrum androcentric hi-jinks.

I love a good Hitchcock thriller, or something like Wait Until Dark (1967), say, but I didn’t feel this was thrilling enough, nor did it have the strangeness of John Bowen’s plays in this genre. It lacks richness of subtext, thrills or indeed anything tangible to comminicate about British society in 1965, and thus seems out of kilter to me as a Wednesday Play.

Best Performance: TOBY ROBINS

Just about, as she’s very good in the opening scenes. She struggles with having to sport a lampshade around her neck for much of the second half.

Worst Line: “Ah, Jack the Ripper. Now there was a real artist!”

Audience size: 8.42 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (Labour Party Political Broadcast / The Hollywood Palace / Newsroom; Weather), ITV (Labour Party Political Broadcast / Woody Allen / Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 46%

Reception: Well received, critically, though they weren’t notably rushing to review or even mention it in their columns, compared with some others. This was very much a Wednesday Play better received by the viewers, who strongly admired its familiar brew of macabre comedy and thriller.

The anonymous critic found pleasure in writing that was ‘cheerfully, glibly, and unpretentiously trivial’, and a play that had ‘validity’ if ‘judged simply as a game’ (The Times, 11 February 1965, p. 15). However, they see the flipside of this, observing that neither Barbara nor Paris ‘can be seriously considered as personalities’, implying that we should have our sympathies or antipathies provoked on a human level. They are especially critical of Barbara’s thin characterisation, but claim that Scott Forbes cleverly maintained ‘a sinisterly delightful ambiguity’ (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood felt Ashes to Ashes was a ‘very entertaining’ spoof or parody of Frank Vosper’s theatrical warhorse Love from a Stranger, adapted from a 1924 Agatha Christie short story – itself adapted for film, TV and radio (Daily Telegraph, 11 February 1965, p. 19). She felt Robins and Forbes acted ‘with just the right touch’ (ibid.).

Maurice Richardson liked how ‘a tremendous detensioning scene, when all seemed to be collapsing into an ecstatic uxorious anti-climax’ was followed by the final shed pay-off, though it had ‘gone almost too far over to the bright side’ for this to work (Observer, 14 February 1965, p. 24). Richardson praised ‘a perfectly acceptable, glossily slick little entertainment piece that was streets better than the average British B picture’ (ibid.). It’s far from in the same league as Don’t Talk to Strange Men (1962) or Smokescreen (1964), in my book!

33% of the London press critics who assessed this play were called Maurice: huzzah! Maurice Wiggin found the smugly inconclusive ending ‘frustrating’ but nevertheless enjoyed it, ‘Which is more than can be said for nine new plays out of, say, eleven’ (Sunday Times, 14 February 1965, p. 44). Frederick Laws far preferred Brandel’s ‘slight but thoroughly enjoyable’ play to Graham Greene’s The Living Room (BBC2, 18/02/1965), appreciating how Paris’s ”picking up’ technique’ in Madame Tussaud’s ‘had a healthy charnel-house jollity’ (The Listener, 4 March 1965, p. 347).

Marjorie Norris, not for the first time, had a more rounded, thoughtful take on the play: arguing it declined from the ‘off-beat humour and sophistication’ of the early London scenes to the ‘heavy-handed obviousness’ of its Cornwall majority (Television Today, 18 February 1965, p. 12). Norris alone berated the action’s slowness, and how Toby Robins was so ill served overall, after being ‘superb in her early scenes as a bitchy advertising executive with a contempt for men’ (ibid.). She admired the wider cast and Eileen Diss for conveying the brash ‘showiness’ of Barbara’s office and how her Cornwall cottage sets were ‘So exactly right for the man who lived there’ (ibid.).

Outside London, the play was extolled. M.G. gave brief praise of a ‘comedy-thriller’ in which seeds of suspicion were ‘well-sown’: ‘It certainly kept us guessing’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 11 February 1965, p. 3). Argus waxed more lyrically, about a ‘triumph’ and a ‘spell-binder’ well above the general run of TV plays:

This play has everything. It was gruesome but tender, horrifying but delightful. It had more facets than the Koh-i-Noor diamond. (Glasgow Daily Record, 11 February 1965, p. 13).

Anthea Hall’s response feels markedly alien to 2025 sensibilities in acclaiming Robins enacting how Barbara’s ‘sharp intelligence […] just melted away when she was swept off her feet by Paris Belmont’ (Newcastle Journal, 11 February 1965, p. 5). Hall acknowledged the play’s ‘trick may be an old one’, but felt acting and writing ensured it worked ‘beautifully’ (ibid.).

Michael Beale admired a gripping evening’s television including ‘tycoonery’ in Northern England on regional programme Prospect, and, echoing Lockwood, felt Ashes to Ashes resembled Frank Vosper’s theatrical warhorse Love from a Stranger, adapted from a 1924 Agatha Christie short story – itself adapted for film, TV and radio (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 11 February 1965, p. 2). Beale regarded Brandel’s play as similarly ‘compulsive’ (ibid.).

The audience Reaction Index was one of the higher we’ve seen, equalling A Tap on the Shoulder‘s 72, with a substantial majority enthused by a play they found gripping, where tension ‘was said to have been cleverly contrived’ (BBC WAC, VR/65/74).

There’s a fine domestic snapshot here:

Wonderful! Even my husband who is not a play fan became absorbed in it, so much so he allowed himself to miss the first part of his beloved wrestling! (ibid.).

A minority did find it boring and unoriginal, with rather more questioning the inconclusive ending, which spoilt the play for some, though as many liked being allowed to draw their own conclusions (ibid.). Acting and production were praised, if not in especially detailed or distinctive terms by the panel! (ibid.)

In letters to the press, a Mrs Weldon of Glasgow, C.5, acclaimed the best TV play for a while, which, unusually for her, made her stop her usual knitting and even forsake her ‘usual “cuppa.”‘ (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 14 February 1965, p. 16). In the same paper, Mrs W. Donnelly of Glasgow, E.1, praised the suspense while being pleased that ‘you were left wondering if the husband really was a murderer’ (ibid.).

The play’s broad success with critics and viewers is clear in how it was repeated as soon as Wednesday 7 July on BBC One in a slightly earlier time slot of 9:25pm, coming up against a tough BBC2-ITV one-two of The Likely Lads and Nye! (a documentary about Welsh socialist legend Aneurin Bevan), respectively. Lyn Lockwood’s review of Patricia High Smith’s The Cellar, shown as the last in the Wednesday Thriller spin-off strand in September indicated her strong preference for Ashes to Ashes over a ‘routine affair’ in which Scott Forbes as George ‘was almost a repetition of his lady-killing husband’ in Brandel’s play (Daily Telegraph, 23 September 1965, p. 19). Lockwood named this alongside Dan, Dan, the Charity Man as one of her six best plays of 1965 (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17).

Overall, it can be argued that this sort of play, a mainstream crowd pleaser, was necessary to have in the Wednesday Play mix, and it clearly displeased few among critics and viewers. However, this clearly needed to be a very occasional part of the roster, rather than dominant; else, the Wednesday Play would have been a blander, more toothless prospect with less to communicate about contemporary society.

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 – 02.05: ‘Dan, Dan, the Charity Man’ (BBC1, 3 February 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.

02.05: Dan, Dan, the Charity Man (BBC One, Wednesday 3 February 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Don Taylor; Written by Hugh Whitemore; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Peter Seddon; Music by John Sebastian.

Writer Hugh Whitemore was an ex-actor – self-confessedly ‘terrible’ – who worked in the PR department of Rediffusion TV company, but whose first play was too experimental for them and then he went to the BBC (Observer, 27 February 1966, p. 22). After his career was over, director Don Taylor was in the 1990s a key polemicist in favour of theatrically influenced art of studio drama on video, and was critical of Sydney Newman’s general pro-film influence. Key BBC works Taylor is remembered for today include The Roses of Eyam (1973), about the plague in a Derbyshire village, and The Exorcism (1972) for the Dead of Night strand, a superb Marxist ghost story that I saw screened at the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2011.

Dan, Dan, the Charity Man was first trailed as ‘a comedy with a twist’ (Television Today, 17 December 1964, p. 9), and then ‘q play about the men who bring gifts to the door to those who have enough vouchers and say the right words’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 30 January 1965, p. 10).

The Torbay Herald Express had a fuller outline of a play which

takes a close look at one kind of advertising stunt – the quaintly dressed people who knock at the door and offer money or gifts.

Dan Sankey (Barry Foster) is an out-of-work actor who gets a job dressing up as a yokel and offering £5 grocery vouchers to further the sales of a new milk drink Vita-Moo. But soft-hearted Dan gets himself sacked by feeling sorry for one housewife and giving her all his vouchers – £500 worth. (30 January 1965, p. 4)

Script editor Roger Smith termed it a ‘riotous farce’, telling viewers, ‘be prepared for the unusual’; for example, characters moving in ‘slow motion like goldfish in a bowl’, while also emphasising Foster’s credentials in other media – the film King and Country (1964) and the Light Programme radio serial The Quarry (Radio Times, 30 January 1965, page unidentified).

Sankey referred to as becoming ‘a national figure beloved by housewives and worshipped by the supermarkets’, after being built up as a man of charity (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 3 February 1965, p. 2). The same preview notes Barry Foster as ‘one of the country’s most popular actors’ and how Don Taylor ‘used all the resources of the BBC film studios’ for this ‘unusual comedy’ (ibid.). Bill Smith notes how Dan has to come to terms with the question: ‘”How long can he stand the trickery and lack of humanity?”‘ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 3 February 1965, p. 11).

Image courtesy of the Peterborough Evening Telegraph.

The Daily Mirror adds further detail, noting how the play was recorded in summer 1964 and that Ernest Clark and Philip Locke play the two ad-men and Dora Reisser is the au pair girl Dan falls in love with (3 February 1965, p. 14). Wryly, Jack Bell notes how Barry Foster is currently out of work himself after a West End flop Maxibules, though Foster is quoted laughing: ‘I don’t think there’s any danger of having to take a job like Dan’s’ (ibid.).

The play’s cast was 73% male, and one of the three credited women’s parts in the Radio Times is a ‘Fat housewife’ (Madge Brindley), emphasising again the notably androcentric nature of the Wednesday Play at this juncture: this tendency which would be challenged subsequently by certain plays. Perhaps not too fine a feminist point should be applied here, though, given there is also a ‘Huge man’ billed, played by none other than Arthur Mullard!

Foster’s involvement here was clearly a continuation of the policy to use some recognisable actors to promote unfamiliar plays to the public. Coverage of Whitemore’s play indicates he had an image of a cheery everyman –  comparable even to a Cribbins (?) – which sounds ideal casting for the role of Dan Sankey here. I mainly know Foster from Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), unquestionably a heartless film, but one where Foster is cast with and against his type to memorably disturbing effect.

L: Dan Sankey (Barry Foster), R: Pritchard (Ernest Clark). Photo courtesy of the Leicester Mercury

Audience size: 5.94 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton, a serial / Heavyweight Boxing – Chic Calderwood v Freddie Mack), ITV (America – The Dollar Poor (Intertel documentary) / Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 44%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 50%

A lower figure than most, though certainly still higher than the overall average I’ve discerned for Play for Today between 1970-84.

Reception: Similarly mixed reaction to Fable for critics, but with some really ardent voices in support of it, especially outside London. One of the most divisive Wednesday Plays yet with audiences, with some minority support.

Gerald Larner liked how this was an exaggerated, surrealistic view of Britain and its refraction through adverts – which Don Taylor made into ‘a true television event’ (Guardian, 4 February 1965, p. 9). Larner expressed delight in the on-screen captions, characters directly addressing the viewer, an ‘instant vicar’ and even elements of a Granada-style documentary; though he did feel the ‘commercial holocaust’ finale was overlong (ibid.).

Lyn Lockwood similarly admired a ‘highly entertaining […] excellent satire’, following the progress of Dan towards ‘becoming the idol of the supermarkets’, but felt that adverts themselves were self-satirising and that this play had too many ‘visual tricks’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 February 1965, p. 19). Despite these reservations, it was later noted by L. Marsland Gander that Lockwood had named Whitemore’s play as one of her six best of 1965 (Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1966, p. 17).

Among the Sunday notices, Philip Purser felt it was the best Wednesday Play yet, ‘though still improvable’, critiquing Don Taylor’s ‘compulsion to seek out significance’ (Sunday Telegraph, 7 February 1965, p. 13). Purser did praise Foster’s performance and ‘Some very satisfying satire’ – chiefly the TV parson (Michael Barrington) and a comic emergency conference during the singing of ‘Abide With Me’, but felt the climax ‘laboured’, when it needed a higher level of fury; such a fantastical leap had only worked for him before in David Perry’s Armchair Theatre play, The Trouble with Our Ivy (1961) (ibid.). Maurice Richardson in the Observer admired the same satirical bits as Purser, but was a little disappointed at how the ‘take-offs of commercials missed the insidious flat fantasies of the originals’ (7 February 1965, p. 25).

Frederick Laws in The Listener liked an entertaining morality play: ‘It was made clear that were St Francis within anyone’s reach today, somebody would try to use him to sponsor a dog biscuit’ (11 February 1965, p. 239). Laws, himself its ideal audience, being an ‘an ex-copywriter, do-gooder, worrier about mass culture, agnostic and premature believer that television might be some use to simple men’, liked the technical tricks, but felt that the story wasn’t sufficiently coherent and did not believe that Dan could have been ‘so much deceived’, and felt the ending was overdone (ibid.)

In a critical piece on 1960s TV plays which looked back to the 1950s as ‘the golden age of British television drama, the Times‘ ‘Special Correspondent briefly mentioned Whitemore’s play as being part of the one slot which allows for ‘occasional experiment’ (20 February 1965, p. 6).

Reactions outside London seemed to have been proportionately more frequent and also warmer. F.C.G. in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph gave a review that’s a bracing rejoinder to the idea that TV critics just wanted straightforward naturalism, praising its freedom of camera, caricatured scenes and how ‘It had as much commentary as dialogue’ (4 February 1965, p. 2). They admired how this was a TV drama moving well beyond reproducing stage plays on screen, and ‘It wouldn’t have needed much revision to make it a commentary on salesmanship in the 1960’s’ (ibid.).

M.G. in the Liverpool Daily Post discerns a ‘tragi-comedy’ wherein the housewife ‘felt a failure because she couldn’t keep up with the adverts’ (4 February 1965, p. 3). Alongside praising Edward du Cann’s ‘excellent television debut’ appearance as Conservative Party chairman, the reviewer noted how the finale was of a ‘consumers’ hell, with housewives indoctrinated by slogans finally overcome by the commodities’ (ibid.).

Laurence Shelley in the Nantwich Chronicle described it as a satire which had ‘a thick layer of truth’, signifying that many people in 1965 had experience of door-to-door salesmen, while also relishing how it was having a pop at ITV:

one wonders why it took the B.B.C. so long to thumb its nose at the absurdities unloaded by the other TV service during its natural breaks (13 February 1965, p. 11).

Michael Beale in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle saw it as a ‘very serious farce’, satirising the ‘commercial promotion of a new food-drink’, also admiring sudden switches into silent cinema-like off-key piano, exaggerated make-up’ and ‘pandemonium’ at the end (4 February 1965, p. 2). Beale felt that Whitemore’s play ‘exposed the humbug behind the image-making trends, and showed the dangers that might arise when the image is broken and violence rushes in to fill the vacuum’, while acclaiming the cast beyond just Foster, naming Ernest Clark and Michael Barrington (ibid.).

John Tilley in the Newcastle Journal perceived it as a ‘condemnation of modern advertising methods’ of a kind only possible in a TV play, conveying how ‘decency and kindness are manipulated to market a product’ (4 February 1965, p. 5). Tilley valued the skilful presentation of how Dan, the ‘pop saint’, who gradually sees through the glib and ruthless advertising men, who were ‘magnificently portrayed’, exploiting a ‘futile aggressive instinct’ in people-turned-consumers (ibid.). Tilley saw it as a cautionary tale, which even the more responsible advertising workers should heed (ibid.).

North of the border, Peggie Phillips in The Scotsman noted an influence of the Great War TV documentary on drama here, finding its ‘near-Guernica final passages’ interesting, though felt them ‘too lingeringly held, too crowded for the black-and-white of the medium, and too gruesome, really (8 February 1965, p. 8).

‘Argus’ in Glasgow’s Daily Record praised a very funny play’s ‘admirable malice’ and quotes a ‘lovely line’ which is indeed good:

The sum total of my life is pathetic. Two years in drama school; eight years flogging around in rep. and three lines in ‘Compact’. (4 February 1965, p. 13)

However, this reviewer bemoaned how the fun stopped with a ‘cruel and unfair moralising’ ending at the expense of advertising – without which it would have been a ‘masterpiece’ (ibid.).

Steve Andrews in the Aberdeen Press and Journal found ‘advertising techniques and their effects on a gullible public’ to be a very good subject for a play, but was ‘overdone’ and its message ‘lost beneath a floodtide of exaggeration which reached almost Orwellian proportions’ (10 February 1965, page unclear). Andrews details a finale where ‘a group of women shoppers went berserk in a supermarket and started fighting among themselves’, regarding this as using the same bludgeoning methods of ‘indoctrination’ the play was purporting to condemn (ibid.).

E. McI. in the Belfast Telegraph admired Whitemore’s versatility: ‘Rollicking comedy, harsh realism and a near horrific climax were sensitively welded together in a piece which exposed the frailty of human nature’ (4 February 1965, p. 9). They saw Barry Foster as playing ‘warmly and feelingly’, with the play only marred by the other characters being less convincing, yet they end with a glowing endorsement:

Little by way of exploration has been done in the field of television drama. Mr. Whitemore was testing its full range and to a high degree of success (ibid.).

Part of this play’s relative acclaim is discernible in how it was repeated on BBC Two on 1 October 1965 at 8:20pm.

Viewers were far less positive than critics. While 35% gave it A/A+, 43% gave it C/C-, with a very high C- score of 24% (VR/65/63, BBC WAC). This play received by far the most indignant response of any Wednesday Play so far, with ‘A load of tripe!’ a typical response among this large group of sceptics (ibid.). Whitemore’s play was seen as flitting and incoherent, with strong agreement with most London critics about the climactic supermarket scene: ‘a shocking and ghastly ending’ (ibid.).

While many hated the ‘sidekicks’ at religion, a minority did appreciate a ‘brilliant’ and original satire which conveyed truths about life; with some comparing the finale’s ‘horror’ to Huxley’s Brave New World (ibid.). Foster, Clark and Berrington all received praise even if the vocal critics among the sample felt the cast’s talent was wasted on a play whose tone they fundamentally resented (ibid.). The production was praised, including its filmed inserts being ‘skilfully placed’, though some found the use of flashing still images irritating, alongside a general tiredness at Keystone Cops stuff, with ‘a substantial number’ feeling their inclusion was pointless gimmickry (ibid.).

Viewer letters to the press largely confirmed the generally negative public reaction. Mrs J. Valentine of Forfar wrote in with a review where it’s difficult to determine whether its tone is positive or negative:

B.B.C. really went to town with this one. It was like one long commercial, mixed up with film of the Keystone Cops – not to mention the free-for-all at the end (Sunday Mail, 7 February 1965, p. 16)

B.G. Champion of Manaton, Devon, wrote in to decry a waste of a promising premise and acting talent, ‘and good groceries’, with ‘A messy ending – in every sense of the word !’ (Sunday Mirror, 7 February 1965, p. 22). J.C. of Manchester 18 provided a distinctive perspective not seen anywhere else in the recorded press or public reactions, critiquing a ‘degrading’ play specifically as he felt there wasn’t ‘anything entertaining in the subject of mental illness’ (Manchester Evening News, 11 February 1965, p. 10).

Overall, no one heralds this, but I’m willing to wager that if it turned up, it would surprise a fair few people, similarly to how the Troughton Doctor Who story ‘Enemy of the World (1967-68)’ did when it was recovered. For me at least, this sounds like the most intriguing of the ‘lost’ plays we’ve covered thus far.

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 – 02.04: ‘Fable’ (BBC1, 27 January 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.

In order to convey accurately the coverage of, and reaction to, the following play under analysis, some racially offensive language is quoted.

02.04: Fable (BBC One, Wednesday 27 January 1965) 9:35 – 10:50pm

Directed by Christopher Morahan; Written by John Hopkins; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Tony Abbott

How much worse off would we be if controversial, thought provoking and hard hitting plays such as “Fable” were banished from the screen altogether by some unseen Big Brother (Desmond McMullen, Belfast Telegraph, 29 January 1965, p. 7).


Our next Wednesday Play as far as I’m aware began an occasional trend in screen works which inverted established racial power hierarchies, being followed by BabaKiueria (1986), an Australian mockumentary, the Hollywood film White Man’s Burden (1995) and the BBC TV adaptation of Marjorie Blackman’s novels, Noughts + Crosses (2020). While further away narratively, Fable shared certain resonances with aspects of Black Like Me (1964), Planet of the Apes (1968), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) and The Brother from Another Planet (1984).

The first mention of Fable noted a ‘provocative’ plot, ‘about a Britain in which the white man is in a minority and subjected to the laws of apartheid’ (Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1964, p. 15). The same writer L. Marsland Gander pointed out the ‘unlucky’ original broadcast date of 20 January, due to the Leyton by-election, before a change was made (Daily Telegraph, 11 January 1965, p. 15).

Writer John Hopkins wrote the play in May 1964, after reading an article about South African legislation to move non-whites to reservations (Aberdeen Express and Journal, 13 January 1965, p. 7). Yet, annoyed by the postponed, Hopkins argues the play ‘is not political’ – never a convincing claim – while noting he was using irony, ‘a complex little weapon little used on television because we think our medium has to be written for the children to understand’ (ibid.). Setting the play in England enabled ‘the degredation of racial intolerance’ to be brought closest to us (ibid.).

Hopkins came from a London Grammar School background, studied English at Cambridge after doing National Service in 1950-51. He had been a prolific TV writer since 1957, including a prodigious number of  Z Cars episodes, including ‘A Place of Safety’ (24 June 1964) which, as Sarita Malik highlights, focused on police racism (op. cit. p. 95). Fable was broadcast the same year two films were released with Hopkins screenplays: Two Left Feet and the third James Bond film, Thunderball. This was broadcast on his 34th birthday. There will be more on Hopkins later in The Wednesday Play story…

Director Christopher Morahan became closely associated with screen versions of plays or prose by varied, and at least somewhat canonical, writers like W. Somerset Maugham, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn, Peter Nichols, Harold Pinter and Anthony Powell, among others. Morahan became BBC Head of Plays 1973-76, thus playing a crucial distant enabling role in PfT’s solidly mainstream heyday when it adopted the Carl Davis piano-led ident and title images using actors’ faces from the upcoming plays. This approach marked, for many viewers, a welcome change from a play as bizarre and alienating as David Mercer’s The Bankrupt (1972), directed by Morahan! Much later he later directed Granada’s adaptation of Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (1984), which has been associated with an upturn in ‘Heritage’ screen representations.

On Sunday 24 January 1965, Winston Churchill died, an event often understandably seen as part of the transitional nature of a year which ended with Edward Bond’s Saved at the Royal Court and The Wednesday Play Up the Junction being on BBC One concurrently. Churchill’s legacy is complex; many racist and classist utterances and actions when in power, but he was also a central galvanizing force leading our coalition government in the Second World War, who alongside the US, the Soviets, the French Resistance and troops from all around the world, defeated the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany.

In words about Churchill, Maurice Wiggin made a somewhat Canute-esque protest at how Britain was changing:

He lived on into the age of the anti-hero, and perhaps he almost lived right through it for it cannot go on for ever. It is an aberration, lying athwart the mainstream of British tradition like a shifting shoal. It is foreign to the native temper and it must give way. A nation does not  nourish and renew itself on the cynicism and petty self-regard of tiny men (Sunday Times, 31 January 1965, p. 44).

Amid such tumult, the Radio Times promised that Fable would be ‘stark, explosive and contemporary’ play, startling not cosy, noting its pugnacious approach in contrast to ‘crusading coloured [six] hero’ Mark Fellowes’s sentimental liberal bromides (16 January 1965, p. 35). Hopkins is quoted:

We the whites have made the problem – that we are frightened of them for various reasons including the sexual challenge that we imagine they offer. It’s our problem and we’ve symbolised it – the fact that they are black and we are white. (ibid.)

Interviewed by Clifford Davis, 28 year-old actor Kenneth Gardiner, who plays a policeman, is concerned about viewers getting ‘the wrong idea’, given how the play is ‘quite realistic’ (Daily Mirror, 27 January 1965, p. 14). ‘This is the first time I have been called upon to act this type of role… I didn’t particularly enjoy it’, but he appreciated it as a ‘challenge’ (ibid.). Actor Carmen Munroe noted:

it was actually very frightening… because suddenly you were being asked to perform the sort of acts that were performed against you in real life (Malik op. cit. p. 95).

Martin Jackson’s Daily Express article reports a TV announcer saying, before Fable started,

We want to make it clear that Fable, as its title suggests, is in no way a forecast of what could happen in this country.

The author, in order to bring home what racial discrimination means, assumed a situation in which white people find themselves oppressed second-class citizens, living in fear and trembling of their coloured [sic] masters.

What you are going to see is a play against prejudice and intolerance (28 January 1965, p. 6)

Rating *** / ****

While it’s somewhat over-extended, not necessarily needing 75 minutes to convey its philosophical points, and for its sometimes slight drama to unfurl, Fable has an electric topicality, plugged into the grid of Britain’s collective unconscious at this time. A progressive vanguard across the world wanted to challenge Apartheid South Africa, and I’d argue John Hopkins takes a highly effective stance in using an allegorical morality play form to assail the racist authoritarianism of Apartheid rather than a worthy realistic mode. It feels infinitely better judged than Charles Wood’s Drums Along the Avon (1967), as witnessed by Sarita Malik’s praise of its ‘radical drama’ which challenged the social order, like the later Shoot the Messenger (BBC2, 2006), in comparison to Gavin Shaffer’s (2014) critique of the latter, Bristol-set Wednesday Play. [1]

Britain was far from in a position to be smug, as the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 revealed, and the ascendancy of politicians using racist rhetoric to their advantage like Tories Enoch Powell and Peter Griffiths. Hence, Hopkins’s play directly ruffled feathers by challenging racism with its narrative of an inversion in racial power dynamics: displaying Black policemen (like the one Rudolph Walker plays with frightening banality) treating an ordinary White couple as subhuman.

As Sarita Malik wisely discerned, Fable ‘took viewers on an imaginative voyage in order to remind them that racial discrimination is based on social and conceptual, rather than biological, differences that have manifest [sic] themselves politically’ (op. cit. p. 95). The play implicitly calls for people of all hues to go beyond rhetoric and put their bodies on the line in actively resisting tyranny.

In British screen history, this is vastly progressive for its time, in giving so many roles to Black actors which transcend stereotypes they were often used to. Thomas Baptiste plays the key role of Mark Fellowes, a writer of weighty, conscience-venting tomes, kept under the sort of comfortable house arrest familiar in Eastern Europe: the velvet prison. Hopkins exposes Fellowes’s cowardice and ultimate haplessness, with his wife ensuring their comfortable existence is not threatened by burning everything new that he writes about the horrendous Black-led regime.

This is an intimate video studio drama showing us art on the walls, a stair carpet, the litany of high-minded but irrelevant books Fellowes has written on his own book shelves. The film inserts deal in the kind of dank, urban imagery helpfully scattered throughout the then-recent Doctor Who serial, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, screened in November to December 1964. With the often extensive use of still photographs with a voice-over, it felt oddly like Chris Marker’s superb science fiction short film La Jetee (1962) infused usefully with some of the analytical insights of Stuart Hall et al’s Policing the Crisis (1977). Thus, however clumsy and dragged-out Fable can occasionally feel (random allusion to some odd link with Norway, just left hanging!), it will engage anyone interested in art and ideology.

This play feels rather in the lineage of certain, directly political entries of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, or, indeed, Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968). It is a dystopia in being basically a tilted version of the present, fusing aspects of South Africa and the UK, and aiming to change Viewers’ minds by upturning the familiar. It is an excellent example of subversive counter-theatre, broadcast into people’s homes, aiming to disconcert and jolt. I value its serious, challenging intent.

Appallingly, we aren’t in a world which has turned its back on this. After the disastrous, enabling actions of the Biden administration as regards Gaza in 2023-4, 2025 sees the USA turning towards a right-wing authoritarianism that will gradually progress down the path of fascism, steered by Elon Musk, a businessman and social media mogul whose own family history is rooted in the evils of Apartheid. This drama’s focus on ID cards, work permits and forced labour camps accesses fears of totalitarian, and illiberal democratic, regimes. Therefore, this is sadly the most significant play for today so far in our chronicles of The Wednesday Play.

The narrator’s final words indict societal inaction, complacency and ignorance towards racism, and it’s a somewhat more didactic variant on the final phase of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023).

Best Performance: THOMAS BAPTISTE

There is a fine range in the performances, including Ronald Lacey and Eileen Atkins, who are movingly fragile and theatrically emotive as a harassed and victimised White couple; the latter implied to have been brutally raped, but who is blamed in the media as a ‘prostitute’, in a significant echo of trends in real reporting.

But Thomas Baptiste is stunning as Mark Fellowes, capturing the veneer of sophistication and being ‘civilised’, while ultimately cleaving to the racism of his society. A licenced fool, whose writings do not reach anyone, least of all speak any truth to power, or crucially the powerless!
His forlorn awareness of his comfortable impotence is crushingly etched on his face at the end. He is in house arrest, in a velvet prison where his own wife is the shrewd, controlling warder.

Best Line/s: “The people should know what sort of lives they lead. It’s sordid, yes, but it’s the truth and the people must be told the truth… They’d rather not know. It is our duty to tell them. Prostitutes, pimps, murderers, living right among us now. We have to know. The people have to be told. Get some pictures…” (Editor, played by Leo Carera)

Audience size: 6.93 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.7%

The opposition: BBC2 (Night Train to Surbiton / Victor Borge / Newsroom & Weather), ITV (It’s Tarbuck / America on the Edge of Abundance, narrated by  James Cameron)

Audience Reaction Index: 52%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 84.6%

Reception: A very mixed reception from London critics, with as many hating it as admiring it, but a generally warmer reception from critics outside the capital. Viewers in the large audience were highly polarised: this was the first such instance of a Wednesday Play generating strong, clashing views. This would become a hallmark that lasted pretty well into the Play for Today era; see, for instance, reactions to The Other Woman (1976). Relatively few were mixed, neutral or indifferent, understandably given the play!

In the Express, Martin Jackson notes how an ‘anonymous phone caller threatened that petrol bombs would set fire’ to the BBC Television Centre Studios at White City if the play was broadcast (op. cit.). Jackson notes the BBC claimed to have received protests but wouldn’t reveal how many; he himself rather misses the point by terming the regime ‘a Congo-style black dictatorship’ (ibid.).

The usual anonymous Times reviewer felt that while the theme was unoriginal, the inversion and use of news film ‘achieved an unusual degree of intensity’ (28 January 1965, p. 18). They discern Hopkins’s critique of Fellowes’s condescending liberalism, which is truly not an act of fellowship with the persecuted (ibid.). Much of the play’s success is down to Morahan expertly deploying ‘effective journalistic and documentary techniques’ (ibid.).

Mary Crozier approved of the decision to have postponed the play, given how ‘a thousand misunderstandings’ are possible with TV (Guardian, 28 January 1965, p. 9). Crozier admired ‘a powerful play’, impressively acted, especially by Eileen Atkins, feeling it would reinforce hatred of apartheid and ‘awaken conscience’ in other viewers (ibid.). Richard Sear mused that the play was weakened by just having one despairing white couple, but admired the ‘strong meat’ this parable offered, with Ronald Lacey ‘outstanding’ (Daily Mirror, 28 January 1965, p. 14). Sear also notes that ‘Even ITB received protests’! (ibid.)

Contrarily, Maurice Richardson reflected that, while its blunt message would get across to ‘less imaginative customers’, ‘as a play it was so inept that it came rather near to defeating its own ends’ and was not as disturbing as ‘it ought to have been’ (Observer, 31 January 1965, p. 24). Richardson described Fellowes as played ‘like a zombie’ and Len as a ‘total no-hoper’; in 2025 friendly mode, he bemoans, ‘There was nobody to identify with’ (ibid.).

Another Maurice, Wiggin, was even more scathing, bemoaning ‘wretched stuff’ which he perceived as ‘didactic propaganda’, which only Shaw ‘could get away with’ (Sunday Times, 31 January 1965, p. 44). He sees Hopkins as modishly influenced by James Baldwin in attacking liberalism (ibid.). Similarly, Philip Purser lamented a ‘tract play’, where character is ‘subjugated to Thesis’, like in J. B. Priestley’s Doomsday for Dyson (Sunday Telegraph, 31 January 1965, p. 13). Purser then makes a questionable reference to how reversing the usual roles in The Black and White Minstrel Show could have ‘made the point equally graphically’ (ibid.).

Similarly, John Holmstrom – himself a disturbing figure, by several accounts – attacked Fable‘s ‘hysterical bludgeoning’, ‘stereotypes’ and, pejoratively, as ‘melodramatic’ and not ‘real’ (New Statesman, 5 February 1965, p. 210). Patrick Skene Catling appreciated what Hopkins was trying to do, but regarded Fable‘s overall view of mankind as overly ‘despairing’ (Punch, 3 February 1965, p. 180). He felt Hopkins’s characters were symbols, rather than articulate people; this shifts into the questionable view that a single drama inherently needs to offer balance (ibid.). Catling has a touching EngLit veneration of the word:

the final message seems to be that in the battle for men’s [sic] minds, actions speak louder than words. Well, Hopkins, they don’t, and shame on you for trying to get people all worked up without explaining much better why. (ibid.)

Marjorie Norris liked its clear bluntness, but not how Hopkins ‘became so fascinated with the characters of Mark and his wife that he let them pull his story out of shape’ (Television Today, 4 February 1965, p. 14). However, Norris felt Ronald Lacey was moving and compelling, and grows in ‘acting stature every time I see him’ (ibid.).

Norris also, alone among reviewers, praised how the largely Black cast got to ‘act real men and women – good or bad, wicked or weak without being lumbered with the chip-on-the-shoulder or much-too-good-to-be-true roles they usually get’ (ibid.). She praises many by name, including Baptiste, Assoon, Carmen Munroe, Dan Jackson and Leo Carera and even advocates proto-colour blind casting:

In the light of this, it seems to me there is a strong case for occasionally taking an ordinary play and casting it entirely with coloured [sic] actors. If the acting were as good as this, the strangeness would be forgotten within minutes. (ibid.)

Amen to that, Marjorie!

Frederick Laws felt Thomas Baptiste played Fellowes ‘excellently’, but that the play was blunted by the announcer’s prefatory remarks, ‘some of the irony was over-sophisticated’ and, like Catling, questioned its attack on intellectual writers (The Listener, 11 February 1965, p. 239).

Reactions outside London were, by and large, more consistently positive. Geoffrey Lane felt it wasn’t dramatic enough in ‘recognisably British terms’, and, oddly, called for ‘fuller treatment’ of Mark Fellowes’s story – which, unquestionably, is given significant focus – alongside the rape accusations against Len (Birmingham Express and Star, 28 January 1965, p. 13). However, Linda Dyson rejoiced in a TV play that, ‘for once’, had ‘something to say’; noting its cleverness, while pointedly asking, ‘would the average viewer have felt the same sympathy for a Bantu family in unfamiliar surroundings?’ (The Birmingham Post, Midland Magazine supplement, 30 January 1965, p. IV). Dyson here identifies how Hopkins successfully got many British viewers to empathise through the inversion technique, which a ‘straight’ drama wouldn’t have done.

Reviews either side of the Pennines were good. N. G. extolled fine production and performances, which had an ‘impact’, pointing out ‘the lesson of human degradation visited on both colours in any battle for supremacy’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 28 January 1965, p. 3). Peter Quince appreciated a ‘vivid, powerful and quietly sickening piece of writing’, but also that it should really have been ‘a straight report, in dramatic form, of conditions in South Africa’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 30 January 1965, p. 4). Quince admired Baptiste’s ‘great skill’ and Lacey’s and Atkins’s ‘outstanding’ performances, which put the seal on ‘a formidable production, both technically and intellectually’ (ibid.).

Tom Gregg noted how ‘compelling’ it was in details like the forced labour camps in Scotland to redress overpopulation in the South East, and its portrayal of media manipulation (Runcorn Guardian, 4 February 1965, p. 6). However, Gregg did not feel it would work to lessen prejudice, or win converts from ‘those who believe in white supremacy and segregation’ and may even have the opposite effect to what Hopkins intended (ibid.). This is basically the Till Death Us Do Part argument: i.e. Alf Garnett being claimed as a hero against Speight’s intent.

Desmond McMullen acclaimed ‘a ferocious assault on the whole concept of apartheid’, with writing ‘as taut as a hawser knot’; its dramatic points ‘were driven home with brutal precision’ by Hopkins, who ‘is none the worse’ for retaining some of the ‘dust of Newtown’ (op. cit.).

Audiences were highly divided, with 38% of the BBC sample giving it A/A+, 34% the low C/C- scores, and 28% being in the middle (BBC WAC, VR/65/50). Many did ‘genuinely misinterpret’, clearly not bothering to listen to the prefatory BBC announcement in feeling fearful that ‘the tables could be turned’ (ibid.). Those against Fable generally expressed an ’emotional repugnance’ combined with feelings Hopkins overstated his case.

The slightly larger more favourable group praised its honesty in dealing with the problem of racism; one viewer perceptively notes how ‘It made me realise that “coloured” [sic] can mean any colour and that to think of black people as in any way different from white people in their basic virtues and vices is the first step on the road to apartheid.’ (ibid.). I appreciate how several found the production ‘jumpy’, with the editing, changes of scenes and newsreels confusing or distracting (ibid.). As usual, acting was praised, with Atkins, Lacey and Baptiste singled out (ibid.).

Two letters in the press matched the more positive group of viewers. In the Sunday Mirror a Mrs A. Goring of Brixham, Devon, praised Fable as ‘a blow beneath the belt’, well outside ‘the syrupy run of TV plays’; stark newsreel further aided what was ‘television at its seating best’ (31 January 1965, p. 22). Maureen P. Morris of Usk in Monmouthshire, Wales, wrote to the Radio Times, finding Fable ‘thrilling and frightening’, linking it to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in prompting her ‘apprehension for the future’ and thus entirely missing Hopkins’s point (25 February 1965, page unclear).

In more unusual fallout from the play, Colonel Frederick Wagg, a retired Royal Artillery Officer wrote to the DPP as a common informer against the play, misunderstanding it as ‘likely to inflame racial hatred and prejudice’ (Guardian, 6 February 1965, p. 1). Wagg is noted as offering accommodation in properties he owns to nationals of Pakistan, India, Ceylon and the West Indies and having received ‘many threatening letters’ as a result; that he turned his fire on a play rather than these letter-writers says something about the time (ibid.).

This reflects the situation wherein Hopkins ‘was getting letters of protest before it was even shown’, due to the publicity around the postponement, which in itself generated ‘preconceived attitudes’; causing ‘surprise, one of the chief weapons at a playwright’s disposal’ to be ‘totally lost’ (Observer, 7 March 1965, p. 23).

Another, especially disturbing response was manifested in a letter that Thomas Baptiste received, which exuded the prevalent racism the play was challenging:

How dare you appear on our television screens, even as a friend or liberal. Get back to your country! Hideous ape! (Quoted in Malik op. cit., p. 95)

[1]. Sarita Malik, ‘Black British drama, losses and gains: the case of Shoot the Messenger‘, in: Sarita Malik and Darrell M. Newton (eds.), Adjusting the Contrast: British Television and Constructs of Race. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 95-6.

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.🙂

N.b. one curious anomaly is that extensive sequences of classical music are used throughout the play, but I’ve been unable to identify what these are. If you might have any more idea than Shazam and SoundHound, drop me a line!

— With thanks again to John Williams for sourcing much of the press coverage.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.03: ‘The Navigators’ (BBC1, 20 January 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.

02.03: The Navigators (BBC One, Wednesday 20 January 1965) 9:40 – 10:55pm

Directed by Vivian Matalon; Written by Julia Jones; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by: ??; Music: ??

Now, historically, the term ‘navigators’ meant the workers who carried out the arduous labour needed to establish Britain’s commercial canals, sometimes known as ‘navigations’; ‘navigators’ gave rise to the phrase ‘navvies’, sometimes used in a snobbish derogatory way.

An article notes that Jones got the idea for her ‘warm, human comedy’ from ‘watching navvies working outside her London home’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 20 January 1965, p. 2). The play, set in suburban Lancashire, features a middle-aged widow and ‘dowdy librarian’* Enid (Patience Collier), living with her unmarried daughter Alicia (Andree Melly). Outside a large hole is being dug in the road by workmen Fatty (Richard Pearson) and his mate, the huge ‘Vera’ (George Baker).

*(quoted from Michael Coveney, Guardian, 29 October 2015)

George Baker as ‘Vera’ (L) and Andree Melly as Alicia (R). Image from Coventry Evening Telegraph.

Fatty and Enid begin to fall in love with each other, abetted by Enid’s love of cooking, appreciated by Fatty, ‘a regular Billy Bunter’, in Bill Smith’s words (Express and Star, 20 January 1965, p. 11). However, Fatty goes too far, tries to dominate and makes a suggestion which results in disaster.

Coverage included focus on Julia Jones’s shift from acting to writing and how she thinks of her ideas while doing housework, writing up her ideas at home (Bristol Evening Post, 20 January 1965, p. 4). Judy Kirby’s interview with Jones includes her reflection that, “I wanted to show the narrowness that people impose on themselves. Even when they have a chance to get away they don’t take it” (ibid.).

Julia Jones (1923-2015) came from a modest Liverpool background, growing up in Everton, and had worked as an actor in the Theatre Workshop company, and after this – her first screenwriting credit – enjoyed a varied writing career, taking in several more Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today and even children’s dramas, adapted from literary sources into the 1990s. Michael Coveney’s obituary notes Jones’s sense of social injustice and how she wrote stories for the Daily Worker (op. cit.). Director Vivian Matalon (1929-2018) had a Jewish Manchester background and was involved in much acting and directing for stage and screen.

The Liverpool Echo included a picture of Jones (see above), listing her as a former Liverpool Playhouse actress and former pupil of Queen Mary High School who won a scholarship to RADA, while – in an age clearly before data protection – also identifying her parents as currently living at 16 Sefton Drive, Aintree Village (21 January 1965, p. 9).

The play was broadcast earlier than planned due to the postponement of the planned screening of John Hopkins’s Fable due to the Leyton by-election being the next day, Thursday 21 January 1965, and Fable‘s ‘explosive colour theme’ was seen as potentially influencing the by-election due to Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker being the Labour candidate (he had lost out to Tory Peter Griffiths’s racist campaign in Smethwick in the 1964 general election). Gordon Walker also lost in Leyton, a previously Labour seat, by 205 votes and finally resigned as a Minister, though he won Leyton comfortably in 1966 and 1970.

The lack of detail I’ve been able to glean regarding behind the scenes credits is mainly due to there being no Radio Times listing for The Navigators, with that week’s details being for the originally planned Fable…

I’d be interested to see how good The Navigators is… Jones’s Still Waters (1972) and Back of Beyond (1974) comprise an elemental yang and yin of PfT, though I felt the camera script of The Stretch (1973) was banal and underwhelmingly so at that, and her Miss Marple adaptation for BBC1 (1985) the least gripping of the opening trio. Interestingly, Richard Pearson figures in Jones’s Marple; he makes the most impression of the guest cast, giving a typically abrasive camp turn.

However, The Navigators is another play that does not exist in the archives, one of 14 in the 24 plays from January – June 1965 that we can’t now watch. (Incidentally, two of these 14 ‘lost’ plays do have clips that exist from them) It sounds in some ways like an anticipation of the domestic scenes from Arthur Hopcraft’s PfT The Reporters (1972).

Audience size: 8.91 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 56.3%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / The Likely Lads: ‘The Suitor’ / Newsroom, Weather), ITV (Call in on Valentine / Circus, from Kelvin Hall, Glasgow / Soccer: Manchester United v. Everton)

Audience Reaction Index: 56%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 67%

There was no New Statesman TV column this particular week, nor a Guardian TV review the following day.

Reception: By and large, a mixed, edging towards mildly positive, reaction, with critics and viewers in rare accord, with verdicts split within both camps.

In a punning, dismissive missive, Lyn Lockwood called it ‘homely fare [which] lay somewhat heavily on the stomach’, mocking dialogue that was too reliant on pauses and repetitions for her taste: ‘Somewhat indigestible, you must agree’ (Daily Telegraph, 21 January 1965, p. 17). However, Peter Black saluted Jones’s first attempt as good: ‘a comedy about sex that was genuinely funny and sexual’ (Daily Mail, 21 January 1965, p. 3).

Maurice Wiggin was slightly more circumspect, liking Jones’s ‘terribly credible characters’, and her ‘acute feeling for […] The terror and nightmare, that may lurk behind the discreet suburban curtain’, though also discerned a ‘constructional naivety’ (Sunday Times, 24 January 1965, p. 42). While also writes pompously about a little of ‘the common speech’ going a long way, Wiggin distinguishes Jones’s writing from a certain new Midlands-set drama series:

Her people had the slight psychical distortion, the recognisable quiddity, which distinguish a real writer’s people from the mass-produced plastic figures of soap opera (the latest of which is that teatime mums’ marathon, Crossroads. Tripe on toast.

Bill Edmund felt it was acted and directed in a leaden way which made it come across like ‘a heavy, almost sinister drama’, when it should have been played like Walter Greenwood’s recent Thursday Theatre play The Cure for Love, to make him laugh (Television Today, 28 January 1965, p. 12). He noted how Fatty was ‘an unpleasant arrogant man’, who he felt could end up killing the trembling Enid; noting slow, portentous playing and Matalon’s emphasising of ‘Fatty’s sinister qualities by showing us closeups of his hands whenever he touched Enid’ (ibid.).

A Northerner himself, Edmund never wanted to hear Richard Pearson’s attempt at a Northern accent again (!), and disliked all the characters as they went back to their deservedly stodgy daily round’ (ibid.). He did praise Terence Woodfield and Tim Wylton for offering very brief lighter relief as George and Stewart (ibid.).

The Times‘ usual anonymous reviewer largely begged to differ, liking an ‘amusing, ill-natured play’ exploring the ‘bitter dependence’ between mother and daughter, ‘that is one of the most frightening of human relationships’ (21 January 1965, p. 17). They like Jones’s ‘sourly amused attitude to people’, and ‘the endless, mindless bickering’ between Enid and Alicia ‘had the ring of unpleasant truth’, though felt the production was overly literal (ibid.). Again, acting was admired with Pearson’s ‘fat, slow, lazy pirate [proving] a rich, comic study (ibid.).

Perfectly completing a definitive mixed reaction from London critics, Frederick Laws found it ‘beautifully managed’, with the navvies’ performances ‘excellent’ and admired the breakdown of romance and the ‘tragi-comic ending by which the daughter takes to over-eating as a cure for love’ (The Listener, 11 February 1965, p. 239).

Outside the capital, Michael Beale approved of a play that initially appeared ‘an artless little comedy’, but whose idea was original, ‘if not quite believable’, though its underlying construction was sound (Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 21 January 1965, p. 2). Beale appreciated ‘beautifully drawn’ performances by Andree Melly and Patience Collier, though ended with a weary broadside against The Wednesday Play’s title sequence! :

But must we have the build-up to the Wednesday play? It looks and sounds like a certain newsreel. Why not go straight into the play, after introducing it by way of title? (ibid.)

Peter Quince noted how in contrast to Fable, Jones’s play ‘could not be held to frighten anyone’, though its excessive length bored him – ‘tediously slow and repetitive’ (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 23 January 1965, p. 5). Quince felt this a particular shame, as at 50 minutes it would have been ‘pleasant’ and he liked the acting very much – including Richard Pearson, ‘not normally one of my idols’ (ibid.).

Norman Phelps felt Jones’s ‘outstanding’ play was part of a fine upturn in the quality of TV plays which were increasingly ‘well worth settling down for’ (Liverpool Daily Post, 30 January 1965, p. 10). Enforcing the more positive reaction outside of London, Peter Forth in Bristol praised ‘natural’ dialogue in a kitchen sink drama which wasn’t aiming to be strictly ‘true-to-life’, and hoped to see more work from Jones (Western Daily Press, 21 January 1965, p. 7).

The audience was large, but fairly mixed, nudging towards positive. Many were disappointed by a play characterised by ‘glorified grossness’, a slow pace and a ‘tame’ ending (BBC Audience Research, VR/65/37). Nerves were touched, by bad language; some felt it was unpleasant and unrealistic:

‘how anyone could put up with such a show of bad table manners and rudeness from such as “Fatty” in their own house is unbelievable!’ (ibid.)

Others admired a ‘frank and homely’ play for its comedic truth (ibid.). There was widespread admiration for the acting, with some feeling Richard Pearson veered into caricature, but a Sales Manager’s comment indicated Pearson’s was a ‘telling’ performance: ‘we all could have cheerfully thrown him out’ (ibid.). Garden scenes were felt to be overly artificial, but detail and atmosphere were commended (ibid.).

Oddly, no mention is made anywhere of Kathleen Byron playing Miss Stewart; this was what I think is the first key Powell and Pressburger-Wednesday Play link in our story.

Overall, it seems to have established a pattern of contemporary Wednesday Plays which reached beyond the ITV competition: even if getting a mixed reaction compared with A Tap on the Shoulder, it was a fixture and on people’s radar now.

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 – 02.02: ‘Sir Jocelyn, the Minister Would Like A Word…’ (BBC1, 13 January 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.

02.02: Sir Jocelyn, the Minister Would Like A Word… (BBC One, Wednesday 13 January 1965) 9:25 – 10:40pm

Directed by Stuart Burge; Written by Simon Raven; Produced by James MacTaggart; Story Editor: Roger Smith; Designed by Moira Tait; Music by Dudley Moore

Radio Times cover image

This play appeared just three days after writer Simon Raven had another play on TV, The Gaming Book for ABC’s Armchair Theatre (ITV, 10/01/1965), which concerned a grammar-school educated subaltern’s impact on an army regiment in Germany. This domination of a week’s schedules by one playwright was not entirely uncommon: in December 1970, Colin Welland had two remarkable plays on the BBC and ITV in the same week, after his fine Armchair Theatre Say Goodnight to Grandma in late October. Raven was rather a diametrically opposed figure to Welland, and his employment was evidence of the BBC’s pluralism and that it would engage more conservative voices in drama, however endangered a species they have understandably tended to be within the humanistic Arts!

Raven’s BBC Wednesday Play concerned the ‘petty intrigues of university life’, with dons vying with politicians over what the priority should be when building a new college, with funds being low: a lecture hall or a chapel? (Leicester Mercury, January 1965, p. 16). Coverage indicates there was a typical generation gap theme of youth vs age.

The Leicester Mercury made much of Raven’s roots in the city, being the grandson of the late Mr. William Raven of Portland House, Leicester (ibid.). In a fascinating vignette, Charles Greville interviewed the 37-year-old writer in his bedsitter in a Deal boarding house: ‘An odd environment for a self-confessed Right-Wing reactionary with a taste for the high life’ (Daily Mail, 15 January 1965, p. 4). Raven, possessed of a ‘George Sanders drawl’, is exiled to Deal in Kent as his publisher Anthony Blond agreed to pay his debts if he lived at least 50 miles outside of London! (ibid.). Greville recounts that this Charterhouse-educated writer, also ex-military, earned about £6,000 in 1964 – equivalent to £155,000 today – and is working on the second novel in his Alms for Oblivion series and ‘nurtures a nostalgia’ for Edwardian England:

A self-possessed, but oddly melancholy man – chronicling a world before it disappears (ibid.).

The play generally received far less pre-broadcast publicity than A Tap on the Shoulder, perhaps indicating that its somewhat more rarified milieu was less likely to entice a large audience. Uncanny foreshadowing here of how Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby’s Play for Today about academics in a redbrick University The After Dinner Game (1975) followed a week after Philip Martin’s populist urban crime PfT Gangsters. (Both those plays are excellent with very different strengths and limitations)

Notably, the BBC gave this play more of a promotional push than O’Connor’s heist comedy, allocating not just a substantial Radio Times article to it, but featured in on the magazine’s cover, the first Wednesday Play to receive this accolade.

Raven’s play was billed in the Scotsman as a ‘comedy’ (13 January 1965, p. 16) and the Daily Mirror as a ‘COMEDY OF CUNNING’ (13 January 1965, p. 14). A Baroness Cleethorpe (Agnes Laughlan) is apparently a ‘Leftish life-peeress’ on the committee who is strongly anti-chapel and pro-electronic lecture theatre (Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1966, p. 13). Laughlan is one of very few women in a masculine ‘ivory tower’ environment; the cast also includes Michael Hordern and Alec McCowen, featured on the Radio Times cover, alongside James Maxwell, Colin Jeavons, Leonard Maguire, Gerald Cross, Christopher Benjamin, Derek Francis and Steven Berkoff, among others.

George Howe as Torquil Flute and Agnes Laughlan as Baroness Cleethorpe. Image from the Daily Telegraph (11 January 1965)

While I can’t truly assess it, with no copy in the archives and as I’ve yet to locate a script, but I wouldn’t quite say I feel that this play would match The After Dinner Game for ‘polished wit and sophisticated dialogue’, which Tony Aspler in the Radio Times claims for it (9 January 1965, p. 39). Aspler praises its ‘outspoken rakish style’, and ends with a direct quote from an unnamed character to demonstrate the ‘punch [Raven] packs here’:

The trouble with modern life, Sir Jocelyn, is that one’s sense of values is perverted. This is because in a democracy the people must be given what they want, and what the people want, for the most part, is nauseating rubbish (ibid.).

Perhaps in a sign that Not Only But Also… had not quite taken off just yet, little is made anywhere of Dudley Moore performing music for the play. Indeed, when I spoke to designer Moira Tait, she could not recall anything about this aspect, but recalls this black and white production as being recorded live at Riverside Studios and that Michael Hordern was very good in it (interviewed by the author, 11 December 2021).

Audience size: 3.96 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 24.2%

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace / The Likely Lads: ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ / Newsroom), ITV (It’s Tarbuck! / Professional Wrestling / The Entertainers)

Audience Reaction Index: 55%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 78%

Reception: So, did critics and/or public prefer a play from a melancholy bounder of a Tory to the previous week’s diamond geezer socialist murderer? Not really. The critical reaction was mixed, though there was a fair amount of praise, especially from outside London. A notable fraction of the viewing public took to it, but rather more didn’t, in a classic mixed reaction demonstrating this play found niche rather than widespread support.

One of the most positive critics, Peter Black in the Daily Mail, appreciated a Shavian comedy which exposed ‘ready-made’ attitudes and ‘left you more alert and interested than it found you’, having GBS’s ‘faculty for presenting different points of view with equal eloquence’ (14 January 1965, p. 3). However, Lyn Lockwood in the Daily Telegraph disliked a ‘loosely executed’ play with one of TV’s ‘ubiquitous commentator[s]’ – played by Alec McCowen – though she did admire the performances and how the outcome was uncertain ‘until the very last moment’ (14 January 1965, p. 18).

Mary Crozier in the Guardian found it ‘very amusing’ and invariably ‘fully armoured against every contemporary fallacy’, when satirizing a struggle between progressives and traditionalists (14 January 1965, p. 9). Unlike some reviewers, Crozier welcomed its larger than life cynicism and how a brilliant cast made it ‘as though Lord Snow’s solemn Corridors of Power were heard echoing with laughter and were cut down to size’ (ibid.). Contrarily, an anonymous reviewer in the Times perceived a merely ‘pleasant little comedy’, finding pleasure in Hordern’s performance, but felt the play lacked sufficient ‘intellectual toughness’ and passion, and ‘the sense of a real battle over real issues did not arise’ (14 January 1965, p.5).

Maurice Richardson in the Observer regarded neither of the week’s Raven plays as particularly successful, but felt both were more ‘interesting and entertaining than TV drama average’ (17 January 1965, p. 24). While liking Sir Jocelyn‘s characterisation, Richardson felt the plot and situation lacking, feeling too much like an absurd ‘skit on a C. P. Snow novel’, which would have benefited from ‘a faster, more stylised production’ (ibid.). Maurice Wiggin in the Sunday Times preferred Raven’s ITV play, finding Sir Jocelyn… a silly title, but a splendid idea, but poorly structured and ‘choppy’ with an ‘obtrusive’ omniscient narrator (17 January 1965, p. 44). He felt the satire went ‘way over the border of farce: a sort of Swizzlewick, M. A.’ and bemoaned how ‘Television is rapidly creating the most cynical electorate in history’ (ibid.). Wiggin had earlier mused, with unintentionally amusing portentousness:

Mr Raven’s line of thought is more sobering than most. If one may judge by these entertainments, he does not indiscriminately love the race that bore him; least of all the leading class of which he is by fortune and endowment a member. True, having not been born to it, he cannot but offer leadership [my emphasis], even if he can only offer to lead us out of complacency into perplexity, and perhaps despair. (ibid.)

Frederick Laws in the Listener found much to enjoy in a ‘reactionary’ comedy, and sensed Michael Hordern ‘enjoyed playing Sir Jocelyn thoroughly’ (21 January 1965, p. 117). However Laws felt it was too insubstantial fare: ‘An amusement of an hour and a quarter, but not a play.’ (ibid.). Laws pointedly did not discuss Raven’s other play, presumably as it was on ITV.

E. McI. in the Belfast Telegraph was more positive than most in London, finding its satire ‘penetrating’ and saw this play, ‘which shocked and entertained’, as constituting a ‘rarity’ in TV drama (14 January 1965, p. 9). C.V. in the Leicester Mercury regarded Raven’s comedy as ‘a feast of sophisticated wit’, which made three recent plays about Blackpool’s Golden Mile ‘seem like the mental meandering of a school Boy’ (14 January 1965, p. 9). A week later C.V. countered religious critics of Sir Jocelyn – who criticised its ‘heavy sarcasm’ about religion – by arguing religions are strong enough to withstand freedom of speech (21 January 1965, p. 13)

Peggie Philips in the Scotsman saw it as a ‘delightful urbane and sardonic play’, which nevertheless exposed the ‘selfish’ motives of the dons (14 January 1965, p. 14). It was ‘far superior to the general run’ and Philips praised Dudley Moore’s music as in ‘harmony’ with Raven’s writing and Agnes Lauchlan ‘as a Baroness in delicious baronial hats’ (ibid.). Similarly, N.G.P. in the Liverpool Daily Post praised ‘a fine and spirited flamboyance both in words and characters’ (14 January 1965, p. 3). While they do also go on to praise Stan Barstow’s far grittier Z Cars episode from the same night, they salute Raven in hallowed terms as ‘a television playwright who is not afraid of using the English language in an elegant, eloquent and witty manner.’ (ibid.).

Geoffrey Lane in the Wolverhampton Express and Star called it ‘smart, intelligent if superficial’, imagining Raven, like Moliere, having to explain ‘that he was attacking hypocrisy, not the true religion’ (14 January 1965, p. 13). Peter Quince in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner gave a mixed review which synthesised the whole press reaction: finding it amusing, but veering into ‘gross caricature’; he especially admired Michael Hordern’s ‘superb performance as the chairman who wanted (a) to do right; and (b) the O.M. [Order of Merit]’ (16 January 1965, p. 5).

There was a somewhat lukewarm reaction from an audience sample from what was projected as a fairly small audience compared with others we’ve analysed (BBC WAC, VR/65/24). Over a quarter were strongly critical, finding it excessively talk-driven and ‘a big yawn’ with a ‘thin and unconvincing’ theme (ibid.). Another third of the viewers liked getting a behind-the-scenes look at such University wranglings, but even these didn’t see it as amusing or realistic enough, and bemoaned ‘ludicrous’ characterisation’, or saw it as ‘a pale imitation’ of C. P. Snow’s The Masters (ibid.).

A few stuck up for the narration device as a successful update of the Greek Chorus (ibid.). A group comprising 40% of the sample thoroughly enjoyed an amusing, thought-provoking and ‘telling comment on the contemporary social scene’, with much truth ‘underlying the light-hearted, nonsensical badinage’ (ibid.). Acting was, as usual, largely praised, though Colin Jeavons’s architect’s illiteracy was felt to be unconvincing, and some ‘overplaying’ was censured (ibid.). While the production was seen as ‘competent’, an initial slowness, Moore’s ‘superfluous’ music and the (deliberate) artificiality of Moira Tait’s sets didn’t find favour, which it may be surmised was due to the setting being aesthetically unfamiliar to viewers (ibid.).

Letters to the press that reached print veered more to the positive. Patricia O’Mahony of Tunbridge Wells was delighted with a ‘humorous tilt at the windmills of the Establishment, wonderfully put over by Alec McCowen as the private secretary’ (Sunday Mirror, 17 January 1965, n.p.). Susan Ronnie of Bexhill-on-Sea agreed, finding it ‘brilliant’ and ‘scintiliating’, but A. L. Martin of Littlehampton decried a lot of ”jaw-jaw’, and not one character with a worth-while motive or thought!’ (Radio Times, 6 February 1965, n.p.).

As a coda, the theatre critic W. A. Darlington was critical of the published text of Sir Jocelyn…, finding it strained credulity, with the ‘full preposterousness’ of Mr Flute and his swaying of the Baroness (Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1966, p. 13). Notably, Darlington far preferred Ronald Millar’s recent staging of C. P. Snow’s superficially similar novel, The Masters (1950), acclaiming Snow as a ‘realist’ over Raven, a ‘satirist’ (ibid.).

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.🙂