Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 02.01: ‘A Tap on the Shoulder’ (BBC1, 6 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), I feel 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 full textual analysis.

02.01: A Tap on the Shoulder (BBC One, Wednesday 6 January 1965) 9:30 – 10:40pm

Directed by Kenneth Loach*; Written by James O’Connor; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Eileen Diss; Music by Stanley Myers

*Misspelled ‘Kenneth Leach’ in the BBC’s audience research report!

This play opened a new, perhaps even the first, series of The Wednesday Play. It concerns a group of criminals who conduct a gold bullion robbery from the Queen’s bond at a South Coast airport. It was written not just by a writer not just new to TV, but who possessed inside knowledge…

Indeed, the Daily Mail featured the BBC’s decision to employ Jimmy ‘Ginger’ O’Connor as a playwright as a front page story (2 December 1964, p. 1), including an interview with ‘the former barrow boy, thief and convicted murderer’ who had been given the death penalty in 1942 at the Old Bailey for the murder of rag merchant George Ambridge. O’Connor was reprieved from his execution by the Home Secretary and released from Dartmoor prison after spending ten years inside. O’Connor credits his wife Nemone Lethbridge, who gave up practicing at the bar for their marriage, as giving crucial encouragement to his writing career (ibid.).ven that initial preamble, feel free to watch the play here now:

Following this preamble, feel free to watch the play here now:

PlayForEver YouTube video posting of A Tap on the Shoulder (accessed: 5 January 2025)

L. Marsland Gander disapproved of this new series’ title of ‘Wednesday Playbeat’, feeling it too offbeat and fashionable, and a misnomer as he had been reassured by Newman, Michael Bakewell and new producer James MacTaggart that there would be little background music – presumably this strand title was quietly dropped… (Daily Telegraph, 14 December 1964, p. 15). The Belfast Telegraph also used this title on 26 December, for this new play series where ‘almost all will be about life to-day and the people in a society in the move’; with writers being given ‘freedom of action’ (p. 7). ‘Special theme music’ for The Wednesday Play called ‘Playbeat’ was heard for the first time in A Tap on the Shoulder, written by Mike Vickers and played by his group, Manfred Mann (Belfast Telegraph, 9 January 1965, p. 7). Sadly, the available copy is shorn of these titles.

Gander indicated some continuation of the casting policy of the autumn-winter 1964 Wednesday Plays, which he associated with ABC’s practice of casting star names in TV plays: he lists Lee Montague, Michael Hordern, George Baker, Andre Morell [misspelled ‘Melly’] and Richard Pearson (Telegraph op.cit.).

The play itself was trailed as part of Sydney Newman’s announcement that the BBC were avoiding ‘dustbin drama’ – ‘kitchen-sink plays, obsessed with sex and domestic problems’ – instead now favouring ‘plays with strong stories, having a “beginning, middle and ending.”‘ (Daily Mail, 11 December 1964, p. 3). Notably, Newman says that sordid or sexual material can’t be entirely excluded, but he empirically pins this down to be likely no more than 3% of the Plays department’s output (ibid.). Philip Purser saw this as ‘another try at a play series by the B.B.C.’, emphasising a break with the eight 1964 plays we assessed before Christmas (Sunday Telegraph, 3 January 1965, p. 11).

Rehearsals began on 18 December 1964 at the TV Centre, White City and O’Connor was pictured, holding his script, alongside scantily-clad actors Carmen Dene and Christine Rogers, in the Daily Mail (19 December 1964, p. 3). There’s an interesting comment in Fred Bellamy’s interview with Sydney Newman which sheds light on his populism:

Personally I don’t like too much talk in drama and I look forward very much for action, physical as well as psychological (Belfast Telegraph, op. cit.)

Series producer MacTaggart expressed his aims for the season:

It should make the viewer laugh, sit up and think, sit back and be entertained (quoted in The Express and Star, 6 January 1965, p. 13).

This was in the context of the BBC having ‘taken a frightful beating’ from ITV in terms of audience viewing figures in 1964 (Liverpool Echo, 6 January 1965, p. 2). MacTaggart and Newman’s strategy is interpreted as unabashedly populist by James Green: ‘Out are those arty-crafty plays with the non-story and indefinite endings.’ (ibid.) The BBC’s Hugh Greene era populist fightback was evident more widely in BBC TV drama; the same week, Maureen O’Brien debuted as Vicki in Doctor Who ‘The Rescue’, which I’ve written about for Stacey Smith?’s edited book Outside In Regenerates (2023). This was among Doctor Who’s most popular stories in its history.

Previews included much focus on O’Connor using his ‘knowledge of criminals’ (Sunday Mail, 3 January 1965, p. 17) and an article on the day of its broadcast headlined ‘Reprieved murderer turns playwright’ (Daily Mirror, 6 January 1965, p. 12). A Tap on the Shoulder was described as a ‘boisterous comedy-thriller’ focusing on criminals as ‘professionals”, not ‘unshaven villains on the dark fringes of society’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 6 January 1965, p. 2).

As you’ll have seen if you’ve watched the drama, they are so professional as to successfully make off with £2 million (in 1965 dosh) of gold bullion bars, ending up on the Riviera.

Rating: ** 3/4 / ****

(Aye, fair cop, Guv. It’s a nailed-on 7/10!)

His first Wednesday Play is the closest Ken Loach has got to making a heist film, if mainly shot on video in the studio. I don’t usually like the heist sub-genre, but this is a notably blunt play which juxtaposes legal and illegal criminality. It exposes the venal Archie’s underhanded acts to gain his advancement, with splenetic irony, but there is also a glee in how these working-class ‘professionals’ get away with it. There are, of course, echoes of the Great Train Robbery of 8 August 1963. It also feels like a left-wing inversion of Basil Dearden and Bryan Forbes’s The League of Gentlemen (1960).

It’s a play about class and this is regularly expressed in its language. Have a butcher’s. Taking a liberty. Nicker. Crumpet. Straightened. Yer nut. Yer loaf. You lemon. Caper. Chummy. Get out of it. A little natter. Not speaking The Queen’s English. You’re getting in a right Harry Tate [state]. Let’s get up there and have a go. This last example expresses the spirit of a play where a ragtag group transgresses. It’s rather like Loach’s much later feature-film The Angels’ Share (2012), though this group feels rather less identifiably underdog in nature, and are making illicit gains in an “affluent” society.

O’Connor’s play is notable for its carnivalesque, forceful working-class attitude, and it is clearly on the side of outright criminality. You feel you’re getting gritty voices from the streets, which are counter to “respectable” society and that, surely, much of the organised Labour Movement would disapprove of. This seems very much part of Ken Loach and Roger Smith’s instinctive alignment with outlaws and O’Connor significantly gives a few of the characters outspoken Revolutionary views.

The group wants to grab ‘the good life’ and raise themselves through illicit means; they have the cunning and guile to easily pull this off in a society where the establishment is clearly coded as out of touch in its Conservatism. These criminals are also aided by the emergent “enlightened” liberal mood of the 1960s, which enables and infuses this drama itself. While experiences of the Second World War hang over several of the characters, you feel they’re enjoying being able to move on. Some may move into property, others into hire purchase, when this is over, they reflect… The man whose house they’ve unwittingly used as a base, Sir Archibald Cooper (Lee Montague), ends up knighted and the prospective Conservative candidate for South Hampshire. He clearly benefits from a cosy relationship with the police and has Masonic connections.

This play centres on masculine worlds and attitudes in a way prevalent also in Play for Today’s first half (1970-77), typified by Peter Terson’s Art, Abe and Ern trilogy of 1972-74. Everyday homophobia is expressed neutrally, without any narrative coding to undermine it (it certainly figures less complexly than in O’Connor’s later Her Majesty’s Pleasure, 1973). The gang regard homosexuality as an upper-class establishment activity, associated with news stories like the Cambridge Spies, and it’s all part of the nation being in a right state, according to these underdog crooks: needs setting to rights with a Revolution. We are clearly meant to feel the group are committing more honest crimes than the Tory in the Hampshire country estate who advances hypocritical law-and-order discourses while railing against “these so-called enlightened times”.

Just as notably, we get barely any dialogue or character development for the few credited women actors here. Judith Smith does her best, and is sparky and worldly, but it’s a limited role to put it mildly. Lee Montague’s character’s wife is simply a dull, vulgar harridan, who we see once give a mouthful and then later hear her volleying abuse down the telephone line. Rose Hill gives it (im)proper welly and it’s a memorable turn, but the character is meagre. Bathing beauties stand silent at the end, flanking the men; implied to be part of the “good life” prize these rogues have won. Tony Garnett and Nell Dunn were much needed!

While it’s evidently not going to compete with Jonathan Glazer’s gangster film Sexy Beast (2000) in a million years, this seems a fairly ambitious and occasionally visually striking drama for its time. There’s good exterior filmed material in the fishing scenes and then quiet, deftly subdued – if not especially tense – scenes where the heist is enacted via boats carrying away the gold bullion from Southampton. These sequences would be better served by a restored print. Come on, BFI!

At the end, Stanley Myers’s stringed music feels oddly harried and ominous. They’ve all got away with the crime and it’s an upbeat ending from the group’s perspective, but this seems a very BBC move to have a questioning musical steer by Myers at this point. While we head light and jocular moments, wind instruments tootling away, perhaps they might be apprehended after all, due to their hubris in this scene?

Best Performance: GEORGE TOVEY

You might expect it to be Tony Selby, in the year of Saved on stage and Up the Junction. Lee Montague would really be the obvious choice. However, I’m actually going with George Tovey, who is wonderfully grizzled here as Patsy, to my ears at least, the furthest from the Queen’s lingo of them all! He later gave a fantastic performance as a lonely haunted man in the second Sapphire and Steel adventure in 1979. It’s genuinely tough to separate and single out anyone from this tight ensemble, so I just want to give Tovey a deserved shout-out.

Best line: “Do you realise that one of his sons could end up Prime Minister?” (Tim)

This line has an uncanny prescience, delivered by Tony Selby, about the nouveau riche Archie’s sons who he wants to put through Eton College.

Audience size: 8.91 million

The TAM ratings indicate 3.4 million homes for A Tap on the Shoulder, while Millie in Jamaica reached 6.66 million homes (Daily Telegraph, 16 January 1965, p. 13). This amounts to a somewhat lower figure of 7.48 million for O’Connor’s play against an estimated 14.52 million for the Millie Small programme.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 46.1% (ITV 53.9%)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Hollywood Palace/The Likely Lads: ‘The Other Side of the Fence’), ITV (It’s Tarbuck/Millie in Jamaica/Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 72%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: [to be calculated!]

Reception: Considerable…! A mixed but largely positive reaction from the press, while a significant majority of viewers found this a refreshing and entertaining burst of vigorous real life.

Have a gander at the *Telegraph*‘s review heading

The anonymous Times reviewer admired a ‘cleverly timed story, told with documentary precision about rather dreary people’, feeling the thieves’ ‘technique’ kept it interesting and especially admired Lee Montague’s ‘colourful performance’ in enacting O’Connor’s comic characterisation (7 January 1965, p. 7).

In contrast, Philip Purser saw this as a ‘lamentable’ series opener, in the Graham Greene or Michael Frayn vein he clearly disapproves of, whose point about capitalism being crime he saw as being made far more ‘succinctly’ made in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) (Sunday Telegraph, 10 January 1965, p. 13). Purser saw the theft scene as lacking in tension and was bemused that MacTaggart and Smith felt this was ‘the best original script that had ever reached them’ (ibid.).

The crusty-sounding L. Marsland Gander was unhappy to see a play where crime paid, and interestingly assessed it as a depressing part of the television flow:

The regular evening news bulletin which immediately preceded it happened to be full of references to violent crime and thus came as a curtain-raiser. (Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1965, p. 18)

Despite his moralistic reservations, Gander felt the play had real ‘dramatic quality’, while admiring Montague’s performance and ‘subtly effective’ direction by ‘Philip Dudley’ [sic] (ibid.) He did find there was ‘overmuch thieves’ slang’ which he professed to not understand (ibid.). Gander later reported receiving ‘sharply critical’ reaction from his readers about the play’s ‘crudity’ (11 January 1965, p. 15). Gander seemed to have warmed to the play, however, seeing it as evidence of the new series’ ‘vitality’ with it’s smooth melding of filmed and studio videoed sequences – ’25 minutes of the 70 consisted of film shot partly at Byfleet and partly at Ealing’ – capturing the best of both worlds – cinema and theatre (ibid.).

Similarly mixed-towards-positive, Maurice Wiggin saw it as sometimes hilarious, at other times very awkward and clumsy in its social satire, with a ‘general effect […] of extreme cynicism’ created by O’Connor, who proved he ‘can obviously write very well’ (Sunday Times, 10 January 1965, p. 36).

Maurice Richardson found the Hunt Ball sequence a bit ‘preposterous’, but the play had ‘plenty of amateurish pristine zest’ and he liked how the crooks had a ‘curious veneer of slum sophistication’ which made them made more deeply real than ‘the average TV stock types’ (Observer, 10 January 1965, p. 24). He also rather approvingly expected the BBC Board of Governors to receive ‘a pained protest’ from Scotland Yard (ibid.).

New Listener reviewer Frederick Laws mused that O’Connor’s writing about the ‘county set’ revealed him as out of his depth, but enjoyed this play’s ‘cheerful nonsense’, professing it as better than ‘worthy dullness’ (21 January 1965, p. 117). Kari Anderson felt it was authentic and funny, and fulfilled the Wednesday Play’s ‘planners” aim for the strand to be ‘exciting, interesting and up to date’ (Television Today, 14 January 1965, p. 12). Anderson also made a more favourable cinematic comparison than Purser, to the blacklisted Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955) (ibid.).

Anderson expressed understandable reservations about the ending scene set in the Mediterranean Riviera with the crooks lapping up their victory, seeing it as ‘false’ (ibid.). There is a shrewd observation of how the observant Black waiter (Harry Tracey) will likely report them and this underlining the play’s point about Archie as being the real crook (ibid.) – not something I’d picked up on first viewing. Montague again received praise, with Anderson wanting colour TV in order to see his ‘gorgeous country gentleman clothes’; as did Eileen Diss’s ‘exceptionally appropriate’ set designs (ibid.).

Tellingly indicating this play’s generally wide appeal, this is the first Wednesday Play where I’ve come across more reviews from outside London than in. Peggie Phillips in the Scotsman was disappointed in the ‘gifted’, formerly BBC Scotland-based James MacTaggart for presiding over a ‘routine’ production whose countryside scenes fell flat, and was bored by its cynicism:

It would be a pity if the MacTaggart touch were lost for the sake of beating up mass audiences for Wednesday night (11 January 1965, p. 4).

An avowedly Christian ‘Andrew’ in Esher News felt censorship needed considering that it ‘was hardly the play to put out at a time when concern was being expressed over the increase in violence in many of our cities’ (15 January 1965, p. 9).

Reviewers actually based in England’s varied cities and large towns felt differently. T.J.D. in the Leicester Mercury felt it a welcome ‘light relief after the stark realism of Z-Cars‘ and ‘relaxing’, in contrast to the police drama’s chilling and brutal scenes of ‘Bus Thuggery’, which they nevertheless praised as gripping (7 January 1965, p. 9). W.D.A. in the Liverpool Echo noted pointedly how ‘nobody was hurt’ in this play and, while finding the County set’s embrace of Archie unconvincing, they were entertained by its freshness; far more than the strand’s new title sequence:

Rather puzzling, however, was the pretentious long-winded visual introduction to the new Wednesday night series.

From the combination of missiles, riot troops, police dealing with sit-downers and racing car crashes I could only conclude that this was meant to indicate that – like a certain newspaper – the series is supposed to be born of the age we live in (7 January 1965, p. 2).

Jim Webber in the Bristol Evening Post was delighted at the lack of typical moralising, admiring Montague and Richard Shaw for his ‘menace’ (9 January 1965, p. 5). Webber also compared it to Rififi, which the BBC showed the next night in superlative scheduling! (ibid.) Laurence Shelley in the Crewe Chronicle used this play’s ‘disturbing’ theme of crime paying to have a dig at the Welfare State, admiring an instance of the BBC being ‘daring’ and ‘carefree’, producing its best satire since T.W.3 (16 January 1965, p. 9).

Capping off a largely very positive non-metroplitan reaction, Bill Smith in the Wolverhampton Express and Star revealed he would far rather have watched a second instalment of the ‘boisterous’ A Tap on the Shoulder than ITV’s ‘very unfunny’ comedy Tank of Fish, which even Milo O’Shea couldn’t save (19 January 1965, p. 13).

In terms of viewer reaction, rather more than usual appeared in the London press and they proportionately matched the BBC audience sample’s response. There were two very positive letters from viewers in the Scottish Sunday Mail (10 January 1965, p. 16), with T. Taylor from Falkirk finding it ‘terrific’, for throwing in ‘Everything but the kitchen sink’ and Mrs M. O. Smith from Leigh praising the acting and staging: ‘Crime, without violence, of course, has seldom been made to appear more attractive.’

In The Birmingham Post, a letter from Mrs. Lilian Jones of West Hagley, Worcestershire gave an archetypal NVLA style rallying cry – naming James Dance MP rather than Whitehouse (12. January 1965, p. 6). This was accompanied by a pompous attack on comfortable prisons, liberalism and ‘lethargy’ penned by someone calling themselves ‘Justice’ from Birmingham 33, which ends in a call, yes, to bring back the birch (ibid.).

The audience response was 9% above that of the 1964 plays we’ve covered. While 25-33% of the sample expressed an indignant, moralistic reaction, the vast majority found it entertaining and valued its topicality. For instance, a G.P.O. Engineer claimed it was a ‘dreadful comment on our way of life, but fair for all that’ (BBC ARR, 1 February 1965, VR/65/11).

There was praise of the ‘spicy, racy, natural and amusing’ action and ‘delightful characterisation’ with a teacher admiring their sauce and saying they ‘deserved to get away’ (ibid.). Viewers were also highly adept at spotting occasional flaws in the production like out-of-sync sound and visuals, but generally liked a slick and pacy production (ibid.).

— With massive thanks as ever to John Williams for facilitating access to much of the press coverage.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.08: ‘First Love’ (BBC1, 16 December 1964)

01.08: First Love (BBC One, 16 December 1964) 9:25 – 10:50pm

Directed by Mario Prizek; Written by Ivan Turgenev (novella – 1860), adapted by George Salverson; Produced by Mario Prizek; Designed by Nikolai Solovyov; Music by John Coulson.

This second CBC production in the first Wednesday Play run adapted a novella by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), classed in some press coverage as a ‘short story’. Ontario, Canada-born George Salverson (1916-2005) adapted Turgenev’s narrative, and would later write a CBC Play for Today, The Write-Off (1970).

It’s a second Wednesday Play to be set in 1800s Russia. It concerns a chance encounter in Moscow between Princess Zinaida (Heather Sears) and the younger Vladimir Rostov (Richard Monette); Rostov discovers the difference between infatuation and love.

Heather Sears and Richard Monette in *First Love* (1964)

There have been at least 5-10 different screen versions of First Love, including Paul Joyce and Derek Mahon’s Summer Lightning (1985) for Channel 4 and RTÉ. Turgenev had moderate liberal reformist politics, opposing more radical right or left currents, and was a Westerniser rather than a Slavophile, wanting modernisation of Russia, influenced by his ties to French writer Gustave Flaubert.

Several of the previews emphasised British actor Heather Sears (1935-1994) as the ‘star’ with mention of her appearance in ‘notable’ films like Room at the Top (1959) and Sons and Lovers (1960) (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 16 December 1964, p. 2). A fascinating link with cinema history goes unmentioned: set designer Nikolai Solovyov (1910-1976) had been art director on Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) decades earlier.

The day before, Peter Watkins’s Culloden was broadcast on BBC1, reaching 7.84 million viewers: who were impressed by its trenchant, immersive docudrama, gaining a 67 RI. Watkins and Culloden are crucial to analyse as part of 1960s cultural radicalism, alongside Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and Ken Loach in particular.

Like the previous CBC production and also their two plays shown in the Play for Today slot (1970-71), this could well exist in Canadian archives, but isn’t accessible to me to see, so I am only able to report on the reception.

Audience size: 5.88 million

The TAM rating of 3.12 million households equates to a probable 6.86 million (Television Today, 7 January 1965, p. 19), which is more in line with my expectation of higher TAM figures per se.

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48% (ITV 52%)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Likely Lads: ‘Entente Cordiale’/Newsroom; Weather/Rostropovich & Richter Play Beethoven), ITV (It’s Tarbuck/Great Temples of the World 1 – San Marco/Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 55%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: [To be calculated later; lower than average!]

Reception: Fairly scant and mixed reaction from critics; audience very similarly mixed, for once!

Gerald Larner was bumptiously patriotic in decrying this ‘bad’ Canadian production, feeling cheated not to see a BBC-made play: ‘We see enough old films without switching on the Wednesday play’ (Guardian, 17 December 1964, p. 7). This was ‘an old-fashioned cinema-style film’ with cliched flashbacks, echoed whispers of youthful memory, ‘cigarette “ad” background music’ and double exposure of a moonlit garden (ibid.). Larner did appreciate Sears’s performance which captured Zinaida’s underlying ‘nastiness’ and sadism (ibid.)

Lyn Lockwood rather agreed, feeling the short story too slender for a 90 minute play, and a sub-passable production lacked atmosphere (Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1964, p. 15). She concluded that Sears and Monette ‘did their best with the sinful characters [but] it was unrewarding, uphill going all the way’ (ibid.).

Contrarily, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer admitted a ‘lyrical’ play, which kept its symbolism under control unlike Pale Horse, Pale Rider (17 December 1964, p. 14). They praised Monette’s ‘truthful and touching’ performance of the 16 year old boy within an ensemble which ‘maintained the proper elegant grace’ (ibid.). There’s an interesting point that so much “realist” writing from 19th century Russia conveys ‘a society destroying itself through the pursuit of personal satisfactions’, with ‘useless’ people ‘because they have no function’ (ibid.).

Conveying a definite 50/50 split in opinion, John Russell Taylor saw it as ‘a pleasant surprise, managing to evoke the atmosphere of Turgenev’s delicate story with great skill and style’ and appreciated how Sears was given scope to break away from the ‘pure English-rose characterisation’ she’d been stuck with since Room at the Top (The Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In the sole review I’ve located* from outside London, F.G. simply called it ‘an exceptional production’ with Sears being ‘admirably backed by the Canadian cast’ (Belfast Telegraph, 17 December 1964, p. 11).

The audience was somewhat lukewarm, as shown in a RI of 55, seven below the average for all TV dramas in the first half of 1964 and below most Wednesday Plays so far (BBC WAC, VR/64/673). About a third of viewers admired its sensitivity and poignancy, but rather more agreed with the British Council Officer for whom, ‘there was not quite enough meat in this one for my taste’ (ibid.).

While the acting and production were admired, with ‘period authenticity’ achieved, it was too slow paced for some, and

Several viewers indicated that plays of this kind (in their opinion, wordy, dreary and introspective, ‘typically Russian’ in fact) were decidedly less welcome on their screens than contemporary drama.

Reaching the end of our first run of Wednesday Plays, John Russell Taylor’s reflections on the single play itself are striking, in this his final column before handing over to Frederick Laws. Taylor, one of the more perceptive critics of a largely appreciative bunch, asks for more 50 minute and 120-150 minute plays, feeling the Wednesday Play’s 75 minute ‘average’ is ‘an awkward compromise (op. cit.). He argues there is ‘no substitute’ for individual plays, so is dismayed by their reduction in number since BBC2 started:

the fact remains that individual drama spits are the real growing-point of television, the goal for writers, directors, and across without which they are likely to be (and feel) deadeningly confined to routine and hack-work (ibid.)

Interestingly, Sydney Newman admitted to Allan Prior that there had been a shortage of plays due to studio space being used in summer 1964 for pre-recordings to stockpile series like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Finlay’s Casebook (Television Today, 10 December 1964, p. 11). When Prior presses Newman about losing the ‘top prestige drama hour’ Sunday play slot, he says it doesn’t matter, as Wednesday Plays will follow Z Cars and the news (ibid.). He claims he’s on the side and the writer and assures Prior that:

There’ll be no shortage of plays on BBC from now on. (ibid.)

He’d earlier promised 26 75-minute plays on every Wednesday night in the new year. Prior, of the Screen Writers’ Guild, ends with shrewd reflections:

I also believe that Sydney Newman is a better politician than most people give him credit for. He is not new to the Organisation ploy. He may get his way, yet.

We can only wait and see. (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. 🙂

*Many thanks go to John Williams for locating a good proportion of the press coverage for all nine plays discussed so far.

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.07: ‘The July Plot’ (BBC1, 9 December 1964)

01.07: The July Plot (BBC One, Wednesday 9 December 1964) 9:25 – 11:00pm

Directed by Rudolph Cartier; Written by Roger Manvell, adapted from Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (book – 1964); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Richard Henry; Music uncredited.

Following Mr Douglas, we have another play concerning a curio, a notable footnote in history.

This biographical drama concerns the events of 20-21 July 1944 wherein Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg (John Carson) leads, in league with several Wehrmacht generals, an attempted military coup in Nazi Germany: to be spearheaded by an assassination of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler himself in Rastenburg, via a bomb planted in a briefcase by von Stauffenberg.

There have been many screen versions of the real life story of Operation Valkyrie – a rebellion sardonically named after Hitler’s favourite opera: the tally perhaps even reaches double figures. This feels like the most expansive Wednesday Play yet in terms of cast size and technical aesthetics: being, I assume, all shot on 16mm film. The main setting is the German War Office in Berlin.

There is a triumphant moment when von Stauffenberg appears in the War Office, and claims that Hitler is dead. Gradually, it becomes unclear whether this is actually so, and eventually the abortive coup is easily quelled. Crucially, the Generals seem to have greater support in Nazi outposts Prague and Paris than in Berlin itself. Several of the ringleaders are summarily executed by the Army, led by the human weathervane General Fromm (Joseph Furst).

The July Plot is adapted from Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel’s non-fiction book of the same title published by Bodley Head on the plot’s 20th anniversary: 20 July 1964 (Bookseller, 5 December 1964, p. 2218). Fraenkel (1897-1986), a Polish Jew, emigrated from Nazi Germany to live in England, and collaborated with Roger Manvell (1909-1987) on many books about Nazi war criminals. Manvell did Ministry of Information work in the Second World War and became a grandee in the overlapping worlds of the media industries and film and communications academia.

Austrian director Rudolph Cartier (1904-1994) also left Nazi Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, arriving in the UK in 1935 after a brief spell in the USA. Cartier’s mother was murdered in the Holocaust. He is best known for directing The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and its sequels and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), but Firebrand (1967) about the 1933 Reichstag fire, Fall of Eagles (1974) and Loyalties (1976), are also highly significant works.

Notably, this play is said to have been introduced by left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg, but, as with The Big Breaker‘s intro, this is not part of the copy I’ve been able to watch.

Rating *** / ****

This wasn’t one I was especially excited to rewatch – after seeing it back in Middlesbrough’s North East Film Archive in 2019 via a copy the BFI posted up North. However, its skilled dramatic pacing and direction meant its merits shone through and it held my attention. Rudolph Cartier keeps us close in on the action and on the faces and reactions of the conspirators as the time passes and the highs of a potential coup are gradually surpassed by the lows of what becomes a washout.

Cartier’s direction ensures this has the tautness and compulsion of a thriller, while also being insightful about the politics, history and human personalities involved. Film cameraman Ken Westbury stays close in on individual faces or perhaps three faces in a room. Notably, it feels just as confined to enclosed rooms as a video-taped studio drama tends to be: this was surely the only way to shoot this narrative and keep it tense, claustrophobic and focus on the human personalities.

Again, I’m gratified at the lack of manipulative musical underscoring here. After a bombastic opening piece of stock music (?) as von Stauffenberg approaches the Fuhrer, we are mercifully spared any telegraphing of our emotions.

We witness this half-baked paper revolution as it dissolves into failure, while also being somewhat ambivalent about their motives. There has been much debate by historians about whether von Stauffenberg was genuinely motivated by Catholic ideals or not. It seems likely that these Generals would never have been able to unseat Himmler, Goring and Goebbels and their varied power bases, even had they succeeded in eliminating Hitler. Their motives seem to be patriotic disgust at military defeats to the Soviet Union rather than necessarily any altruism – however much this drama tries to paint their action as a laudable attempt to save lives which were subsequently lost during the War’s final year.

This play especially conveys the importance of controlling the media: the Nazis, led by propagandist Goebbels consolidated their hold over the media in order to wield total power. The rebellious Generals here have a good plan on paper, but don’t have the organisation or the steadfast allies who will seize the airwaves. It all reminds me of an inverse scenario of scenes in the British-Canadian film Power Play (1978), based on geopolitical ‘realist’ Edward N. Luttwak’s 1968 strategy book Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook.

Emphasising the drama’s biographical nature, there’s a coup-de-documentary at the end when three surviving officers involved in the Operation Valkyrie rebellion are interviewed on camera in Munich by Heinrich Fraenkel in 1964. They each explain how they escaped being killed by the Nazi regime and there’s a concise explanation that the former Captain Fritsche is now a government official in Bonn, Lt. von Kleist is a publisher in Munich and Lt. von Hammerstein is Controller of Radio and Television Programmes in Hamburg. The rebels are now power brokers.

We also see a plaque commemorating the Generals’ rebellion: clearly, part of the West German state’s post-1945 attempt to distance itself from Nazism. Given the scale of the quiet acquiescence of the German people en masse, it is inevitable this fascinating instance of doomed heroism would be used to validate a patriotism for the West German state that is distant from Nazism.

This epilogue, alongside Cartier and Fraenkel’s personal investment in the story, gives this production perhaps more of a complex, thoughtful edge than certain other fictional feature films of this story. History is never over.

Best Performance: JOHN CARSON

Within a very solid ensemble, where character actors like Peter Copley and Cyril Luckham distinguish themselves as the conspirators and John Abineri is a textbook evil Nazi Colonel, it has to be John Carson, as von Stauffenberg.

He conveys the bravery of a man willing to put himself on the line, though not one brave enough to ensure the assassination definitely works through suicide bomb tactics. With his richly honeyed voice – James Mason in an aristocratic finishing school – Carson is ideal as the eye patch-wearing maverick.

Otto John, who was involved in the Generals’ conspiracy, praised Joseph Furst as the vacillating Fromm and attested to Carson’s ‘curious smile round the corner of [his] mouth – it was authentic Stauffenberg’ (Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 1964, p. 11)

Best line: “Hitler was dead, the sky was blue, the sea was warm, like the hand of God in our hair!” (von Stauffenberg)

A line from a raging, burly leather-jacketed conspirator who tries to distance himself from them, saying “All your conspiracy’s on paper” is perhaps the key line. But I do like von Stauffenberg’s boyish grandiosity and buoyant hubris here!

Audience size: 9.31 million

Television Today reports the TAM ‘homes viewing’ figures for this and other recent Wednesday Plays, which differ in their mode of calculation from the BBC’s viewing barometers. Mr Douglas reached 2.17 million homes, Malatesta 1.9 million, while this gripped 4.06 million homes (7 January 1965, p. 19). I was once advised that this should be roughly multiplied by 2.2 for any 1960s-70s broadcasts to come up with an estimated actual viewership number, i.e. an average of 2.2 people per home.

So, Mr Douglas and Malatesta‘s implied TAM audience sizes are 4.77 million and 4.18 million (130,000 and 720,000 lower than the BBC estimates), respectively. The July Plot’s TAM figure is 8.93 million people, 380,000 lower than the BBC number; mildly surprising, as I’ve been given to expect TAM figures to be higher in general. Maybe this applies more to ITV programmes?

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 54.3%

The audience size appears to be the highest so far, but this shade is slightly lower than that for A Crack in the Ice.

The opposition: BBC2 (Top Beat/Amateur Boxing/Soccer: Holland v. England), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Sharon – An account of a “divine healing campaign”/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 75%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 70%

Reception: This play was widely discussed by critics but they were, surprisingly to me at least, mixed-towards-negative, though this is much down to their previous nitpicking over ‘mixing fact and fiction’ and all that silliness. Viewers actually liked this more than any other Wednesday Play thus far…

L. Marsland Gander found it an uncomfortable hybrid ‘haunted by an air of unreality’ and was bemused by Driberg’s introduction (Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 19). Alan Stewart felt the dialogue more fitting to the British officers’ mess than the German High Command (Sunday Post, 13 December 1964, p. 12). T. C. Worsley simply felt it ‘dull’, ‘a sad shambles’ lacking in ‘any atmosphere of place or occasion’ (Financial Times, 16 December 1964, p. 20).

Contrastingly, Peter Black was engrossed in the historical what-ifs summoned by this tense play, which he called ‘stupendous’, inspiring ‘pity and awe’, and identified it as part of Festival, not The Wednesday Play (Daily Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3). He singled out Peter Copley’s performance as conveying ‘the heart of this event’ (ibid.). The Times‘ anonymous reviewer admired how its ‘honest recreation of events’ transcended its dramatic qualities, indeed making it a ‘historical dramatized documentary’, directed by Cartier in his ‘usual, and admirable, sweeping romantic style’ (10 December 1964, p. 15). While I agree almost entirely with anon’s verdict here, they seem somewhat naive about the Generals, calling them ‘a group of humane and honourable men’ (ibid.).

Philip Purser was critical of clunky exposition, and also how ‘theatrical experience’ undermined what was sometimes very ‘affecting’ material (Sunday Telegraph, 13 December 1964, p. 13). Maurice Richardson bemoaned a ‘stiff’ start, but felt it improved and was ‘satisfyingly compulsive’, especially liking Joseph Furst’s and Barry Keegan’s performances, though feeling Carson was too ‘naively boyish’ as Stauffenberg (Observer, 13 December 1964, p. 25). Also among the more positive responses was John Russell Taylor’s, who was engrossed in the facts and admired its ‘ring of authenticity’, noting how the incompetence of the conspirators’ incompetence at key moments is supported ‘by the documents’ (The Listener, 31 December 1964, p. 1065).

In Belfast, E. McI. felt the year of research resulted in a successful play, though their review’s sign-off is deeply perplexing: ‘Even two decades after, the horrific magic of the name Hitler and the attempts to erase it are still newsworthy’ (Belfast Telegraph, 10 December 1964, p. 13). R.S. was more critical, feeling ‘few of the characters carried conviction or conveyed the tension inseparable from such an enterprise’, though felt the ending was stronger (Birmingham Evening Mail, 10 December 1964, p. 3).

Peter Quince echoed Gander, and anticipated some later criticisms of docudrama, feeling fiction provides more dramatic license and a ‘dramatised documentary’ would also have worked better (Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 12 December 1964, p. 5). This is rather stupid, as the play offers just this, as the Times review noted! (op. cit.). Laurence Shelley felt it lacked the ‘conviction of a straight forward documentary treatment’, and he liked the epilogue better than the rest (Chester Chronicle, 19 December 1964, p. 11).

The BBC audience research findings must have greatly cheered producer Peter Luke and Head of Drama Sydney Newman. A RI of 75 exceeded even the previous three weeks’ strong figures, with viewers generally finding it enthralling entertainment and deeply educational (BBC WAC, VR/64/659).

A cliched national stereotype is aired through a viewer’s claim that the plotters’ ‘indecision did not seem to tally with the accepted idea of German efficiency’ (ibid.). While a few found Driberg’s introduction ‘dull’ and not adding anything, ‘more’ welcomed it for ‘putting one in the mood’ for the subsequent drama (ibid.).

A few in the viewing sample were tired of war plays ‘in any shape or form’, but clearly most couldn’t get enough of this one, especially due to its masterly realism:

‘Rudolph Cartier reigns supreme in this Field’, summed up a housewife (ibid.)

Interestingly, The People newspaper’s own reception study saw those within a panel of 500 TV viewers who watched The July Plot award it an average of 8/10, outscoring that week’s Coronation Street (6/10) (20 December 1964, p. 4). A glowing letter from Mrs I. Hall of Northampton praised its ‘magnificent’ acting and her final comment, well: it’s safe to say that TV commissioners have been acting on it since, for series anyway: ‘True life stories always make the best plays, so let’s have more of them’ (Sunday Mirror, 13 December 1964, p. 22).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 4.90 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 35.7%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 62.5%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claire Nielson, interview with author, 10 March 2021

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

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

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

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

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

Rating ** 3/4 / ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expressive finger-pointing gesture from Goodliffe!

Best Performance: JEAN ANDERSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 4.90 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 34.5%

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

Audience Reaction Index: 67%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 75%

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Observer, 29 November 1964, p. 25)

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

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

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

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

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

— With many thanks to Claire Nielson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.04: ‘The Big Breaker’ (BBC1, 18 November 1964)

01.04: The Big Breaker (BBC One, Wednesday 18 November 1964) 9:25 – 10:55pm

Directed by Charles Jarrott; Written by Alun Richards (adapted from radio play – 1963); Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Eileen Diss

We must make our private nightmares public.

Well, there are too many lies. Too many jokes. Too much cosiness. Too many cowards wanting to forget and fools to encourage them in high places.

Elvet (Nigel Stock)

This play concerns corrupt Councillor Wally Cross (Rupert Davies) in a South Wales valleys town, who is the self-styled character that gives the play its title. He makes romantic advances on his nephew Elvet’s (Nigel Stock) wife, Sybil (Daphne Slater). These older generations of the family are juxtaposed with young couple Josie (Meg Wynn Owen) and Nigel (Leonard Cracknell).

The play’s opening is textbook British New Wave. Industry indicated through a pit wheel. A young couple looking out over an entrenched townscape full of largely uniform housing stock. Chapel, steam trains… A sense of possibility and hope in the future, which may involve social mobility through moving out of places like this. “Unlike the Southern counties, we’ve got very long memories down here” concisely summarises the non-metropolitan attachment to history and traditions.

Mrs Cross (Daphne Slater) is a crisp RP combatant. She’s on the ball with noting how marshalling statistics was the new form of UK politics – clearly, referring to the ascendant Harold Wilson here. Dreams and ideals going to routine day to day administration. Changing the social order and making a new world and new people – he regrets that this was not achieved. Or it became too bureaucratic and utilitarian? “We’d got we wanted, but I was nowhere…” is a tellingly individualistic slice of dialogue.

Selfishness, he was never a peasant, but a rough background, easily becomes the capitalist, to paraphrase Lenin’s dictum about peasants becoming capitalists when given land.
Wally as the grabbing grasping man who has come up from the “rough” interacting with a refined woman Sybil who can get on her “high horse”. It is clearly Lawrentian but also resembles a less histrionic antecedent of Bernard Hill and Frances de la Tour’s characters in Roy Kendall’s PfT Housewives’ Choice (1976). This feels less contrived than the confrontation in that play and does not involve its violence against property. Kendall’s more agitational approach fits the post-1973 oil crisis times, like John Osborne’s play for the National Theatre, Watch It Come Down (1975-76).

The vast, complex and clear two-handed scenes are deftly, unobtrusively directed by Charles Jarrott so that the words and performances are central. You feel like you know Wally and Sybil deeply after an extraordinarily well written and played near-15-minute scene (15:04-29:53).

Jarrott directed 34 plays for Armchair Theatre (1959-69) and then moved into feature-films, and eventually to US TV movies by the 1990s.
It’s telling how Elvet, whose knowing cruelty is dissected by Sybil, suggests she takes a sedative. He had just suggested that they get married to help his political ambitions.

This is a great example of a play where you cannot compartmentalise the personal and political, or the private and public. Elvet sees his personal advancement in the public world as more important than domestic routines, love and security. That he’s played by Nigel Stock brings to mind the volatile masculine refusal at the heart of The Prisoner, but this is a Number Six still besotted with power systems, and manoeuvring for advancement within them, yet to challenge them.

Elvet outlines how corrupt the local Councillor Wally is, having taken a bribe for a building contract, so very much anticipating the Poulson Scandal. Elvet has “got him on toast!” due to possessing Wally’s fraudulent gains, leading to Sybil insightfully identifying how Elvet is only happy when he is hurting somebody.

We hear a Edith Piaf English recording of her 1956 song ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, which Wally puts on the record player in a somewhat self-satisfied and calculated manner. We hear the Searchers’ ‘Don’t Throw Your Love Away’ twice, near the start and end.

Cuckolded Elvet is riled by his uncle’s claim that he is adrift from life, which elicits his monologue to Willie Willis (Edward Evans) about how he throttled a bald-headed Japanese soldier during his Second World War service, which has haunted him ever since. He gives the aforementioned private nightmares public speech.

The final act is ‘One Year On’, with Wally having died three months after he’d gone off with Sybil, and perhaps given her some happiness, but this phase seems to figure as more of an interlude in her marriage to Elvet. At the end, the felled Breaker’s nephew is oddly revitalised by joining a discussion group and taking up carpentry, so that he potentially has lethal tools nearby at all times!

We end with the graver half of the young couple Nigel bemoaning the unusual turn of events, but Josie urges him simply to find humour in everything and not be too hard on the elders. Nigel has switched on a Mantovani orchestral light music tune on the vinyl record player. Pointedly, Josie replaces this with the Hollies’ version of Berry Gordy’s Motown song, ‘Do You Love Me’ (1964). In a fine, upbeat ending, Nige is wise enough to be won over and the couple start an impromptu dancefloor in their suburban home.

The play’s writer Alun Richards, born in Caerphilly in 1929 and raised in Pontypridd, was a naval officer turned probation officer, before becoming a Cardiff schoolteacher. Richards was known for depicting what he saw as unattractive masculine worlds; according to obituarist Dai Smith, ‘In Richards’ work, women are the pre-eminent truthtellers’ (Guardian, 2004). He stands as the first of many Wednesday Play and Play for Today dramatists to have been a teacher, and, like Raymond Williams, an adult education tutor at university.

In an interview, Richards outlined his approach with The Big Breaker. A writer must acquire ‘street empathy’ and be localised and accessible:

I hate most of what I see in the London theatre. I’m against the public being taken in. I’m against cruelty and obscurity. What cruelty there is in my play is placed in a pattern. […] I’m for writing plays on a contemporary theme in a conventional manner.’ (Observer, 25 July 1965, p. 18)

Dai Smith notes how Richards was far from a parochial writer, his focus on Wales containing universal insights. He could

see upwards into a social elite, as well as down. This duality, and its then uncovered existence in the literature of Wales, enormously excited Richards, and was the key to the power with which he flailed the social drift, the cultural illusions and the career hypocrisies of postwar Wales in his two finest pieces of work, the short-story collections Dai Country (1973) and The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil (1979). (Guardian, 2004 op cit.)

In his excellent biographical entry for Richards, Daryl Leeworthy refers to his novel Home to an Empty House (1973) as a ‘chorus-like masterpiece’.

The Big Breaker was, originally, a radio play broadcast on BBC Home Service on Saturday 30 September 1963 at 8:30pm, lasting 90 minutes, pretty much the same as the later TV version.

The TV play was recorded in May 1964, and mainly appears to have been multi camera studio, but does have a fair few bookending filmed inserts. Like most other plays I’ve discussed so far, there are is a central star figure who may have drawn the average viewer: following Williams, Fraser and Pinter here is Rupert Davies, part of Davies’s conscious desire to avoid typecasting as Maigret (Daily Mail, 6 January 1965, p.5). He had even appeared on Harry Worth’s comedy programme on 17 November.

Interviewed in the Daily Mirror, Davies extols the qualities of his Wednesday Play part as Wally Cross:

This is a potent play and Wally is very much a character of which Maigret would disapprove. Yet some people, like me, will admire the man’s honesty and frankness, even though they hate what he does.

(18 November 1964, p. 18)

There was a subsequent stage version at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry which opened on 27 July 1965. Benedict Anderson largely liked it. Joseph O’Conor was Wally, Gwen Cherrell was Sybil and Clive Swift ‘makes a good deal of the nephew [Elvet]. He has a way of pronouncing consonants as if he was plucking suction pads off the wall, and the sound adds to the general picture of tortured fanaticism.’ (Guardian, 28 July 1965, p. 7)

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

I really enjoyed this. It bursts with the recognisable sort of life people would expect of the Wednesday Play-PfT banner, and represents South Wales in a more complex, full manner than any PfT I can think of, barring perhaps Dennis Potter’s Joe’s Ark (1974). The Big Breaker inaugurates this strand’s preoccupation with raw life, vigour, vitality: life as lived in contemporary Britain.

On first viewing early in my PhD, I picked up on its fatalistic view of society and politics, with Josie’s scorn for political parties and call to laugh at everything very much chiming with the New Left CND ethos (whose more serious side Nigel seems to embody). On this second viewing on Sunday 17 November, I discerned more its skilful, solid dramatic structure, vivid dialogue and wonderful acting.

I appreciated how Elvet is deepened as the play goes on, and the deft realism of the final act, a year on. It’s ultimately about Britain’s long-term emotional unbuttoning: opening up and loosening up. It also takes a mature, nuanced view of Wally, making me think of how T. Dan Smith wasn’t simply corrupt, but also significantly improved housing conditions, modernised Newcastle-upon-Tyne – with the majestic Civic Centre the beacon of this – and improved its Arts sector.

Back to the craft: well, this play reminds me in certain respects of Colin Welland’s Kisses At Fifty (1973) and Arthur Hopcraft’s Wednesday Love (1975) in focusing on characters feeling the ageing process who want to break from their routines, or unfulfilling marriages.

Watching this fascinating, assured mainstream-occupying play from sixty years ago, you feel the ways in which life was clearly far worse than it is now, but also certain ways in which it was better. A sense of life getting better for each generation is palpably present in the deftly drawn Nigel and Josie characters, who, for me, resemble the young couple in Julia Jones’s sublimely understated Still Waters (1972).

We’ve already got the sense of the Wednesday Play’s capacious ethos. This play’s worldly intelligence in a contemporary setting is precisely what Play for Today would reliably provide – in a large variety of gradations.

I’d say this play is quite often beautifully written, and it is always played for all its worth, and it makes me want to seek out more of Alun Richards’s writing, prose and TV alike.

Best Performance: Meg Wynn Owen

Now, this was a tough call.

Daphne Slater is tremendously brittle and steely, reminding me of Celia Johnson. Rupert Davies is a formidable windbag, who does some great barefoot dance moves to an exotic, overseas holiday-signifying piece of music, a sequence rightly extolled by Television Today‘s reviewer. Nigel Stock is layered as Elvet. He appears a contemptible schemer initially but then fully conveys how he is “damaged by the world”, and he isn’t exactly… wrong in exposing Wally’s corruption, even if his own motives aren’t unimpeachable.

However, Meg Wynn Owen just about wins out for me; as Josie, hers is a fiery common sense which comprehensibly demolishes the veneration of ideas above all else. I recalled her playing a largely antithetical role in Upstairs, Downstairs as one of the poshest of the upstairs lot. A character brilliantly written about by Helen Wheatley in Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock’s edited book, ITV Cultures (2005). Here Owen plays Josie, young adult in a solidly middle-class household, in an upwardly mobile home, but her vivacious Welsh tones bring out Josie’s essential youthfulness.

Best line: “But the gap between what you know and what you don’t do… Amounts to a terrifying amount of cruelty.” (Sybil to Elvet)

Audience size: 7.35 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 48.4%

The opposition: BBC2 (Hollywood: The Fabulous Era/Curtain of Fear serial – part 4/Newsroom & Weather), ITV (News/The Grafters/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 68%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 43%

No reviews in The Times or The Spectator of any TV at all directly following this broadcast.

Reception: Fairly meagre, edging towards positive reaction from the critics. Audiences liked it more!

Lyn Lockwood found it ‘meaty stuff’, with strong plot and counterplot (Daily Telegraph, 19 November 1964, p. 19) Marjorie Norris is more reserved about the play, quite liking it but feeling too much is spelled out, and there are too many changes of emphases, but she loves the performances of Slater and Stock (Television Today, 26 November 1964, p. 12). Norris admires designer Eileen Diss giving the house a ‘weighty ugliness’ (ibid.). John Russell Taylor notably saw it as the most interesting play of November, highlighting Jarrott’s skill as director and Nigel Stock, but also felt its final act unnecessary and not entirely successful (The Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915).

Outside London, Leicester Mercury reviewer A.B. interestingly notes a Goronwy Rees introduction to the play, emphasising the play’s avoidance of Stage Welshness, but found it ‘hard to believe’ characters and dialogue (19 November 1964, p. 9). In the Scotsman, Peggie Phillips was rather more positive, liking the acting and a ‘robust’ play, though saw it as ‘a far cry from the exotic standard set by Sartre and the Russian’ (23 November 1964, p. 4)

I don’t have time to fully dissect details from the audience research report yet, but it gained a high RI of 68% Exceeding any for The Wednesday Play so far. A testament to Alun Richards’s conventional and astute craft here, which has a kinship with Alun Owen’s work for Armchair Theatre.

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.03: ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ (BBC1, 11 November 1964)

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 full textual analysis.

01.03: Pale Horse, Pale Rider (BBC One, Wednesday 11 November 1964)

Directed by Eric Till; Written by Fletcher Markle, adapted from Katherine Anne Porter (short novel – 1939); Produced by Eric Till; Script Editor: Doris Mosdell; Music by Harry Freedman

Again, due to personal circumstances, I haven’t had much time to research this one. However, the relative lack of material out there on it means I’ve been able to cover it quite fully…

Suffice to say, it’s another literary adaptation, and like The Write Off (1970) and Reddick (1971) in the Play for Today era, it was included in the Wednesday Play time slot and billed as such in the Radio Times. Like those two plays, the main difference from usual was that this was a Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) production, not made by the BBC.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider was adapted from a short novel by Katherine Anne Porter, published alongside Old Mortality and Noon Wine in 1939, after originally being in the Southern Review in Winter 1938. which Malcolm Bradbury saw as dealing with ‘the break-up of the old order of life in the American South’ (Guardian, 10 January 1964, p. 7). Bradbury sees the American Porter (1890-1980) as a strong writer on individuals in history, with keen perceptions of psychology and sociology. He sees ‘The Old Order’ as the best in the collection he was reviewing. Porter remains probably best known for a popular novel about romance and war, Ship of Fools (1962), which became a Stanley Kramer film in 1965.

Keir Dullea and Joan Hackett in *Pale Horse, Pale Rider*

Again, this is a Wednesday Play which was rooted in history, its BBC audience research report indicating a First World War setting for a ‘story about a girl who catches influenza and is nursed in her delirium by a young army recruit’ (VR/64/600, BBC WAC). Miranda (Joan Hackett) is the ‘girl’ and Adam (Keir Dullea) the recuit. It lasted 85 minutes, starting at 9:40pm, much later than what would become the customary Wednesday Play slot, and 15 minutes later than most Plays for Today.

In terms of the context, it went out after a 10 minute ‘Budget Talk’ by a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, in Harold Wilson’s new Labour government. This followed a General Election where Labour got a vastly smaller majority than in 2024’s general election but a share of the vote that was over ten percent larger. The latter section of Pale Horse, Pale Rider went out against ITV’s Six Wonderful Girls, who apparently were Honor Blackman, Dora Bryan, Cleo Laine, Nadia Nerina, Adele Leigh and Millicent Martin. The previous programme was a Denis Mitchell documentary about how the variety show SWG was made… The Mirror records that Roy Knight, a Durham University lecturer appears in Mitchell’s documentary and ‘talks about the theory and practice of television’ (Ken Irwin, ‘Tonight’s View’, 11 December 1964, p. 18).

Adapter Fletcher Markle is highly notable as the creator of US single drama strand Studio One (CBS, 1948-58). English born director Eric Till became a veteran TV movie helmsman, also turning his hand to an Armchair Theatre play by Simon Raven in 1965 and British films like the James Heriot adaptation It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1976). These talents here combined to dramatise a story set in Denver, Colorado amid the influenza epidemic of 1918, whose title has roots in an African-American spiritual song.

There is some indication that, like the 1970-71 plays, this actually does exist in a Canadian archive, but is likely very expensive to see, and that’s before indeed you begin factoring in the travel and accommodation costs of such a voyage!

Rating: N/A.

Best Performance: N/A.

Best line: N/A.

Audience size: 4.41 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 40.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Top Beat/Curtain of Fear – serial/Newsroom & Weather/Late Night Line-up), ITV (The Dream Machine/Six Wonderful Girls)

Audience Reaction Index: 54%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 33%

The Times didn’t even have a TV column the morning after this was on.

Reception: Fairly meagre, but goodish, with typical divisions, but rather a lot of admiration for its ambition.

Among the few critics to write about it was Maurice Richardson, who admired its ‘sincere’ attempt ‘to compete with cinema on its own ground’ (Observer, 15 November 1964, p. 24) While he felt there were ‘longueurs’, he praised Hackett’s sensitive performance, the period flavour and how ‘Some of the more ambitious effects, like the death-ride, came off better than I would have believed possible.’ (ibid.) Richardson definitely liked it far more than ‘the contrast between Knight’s eggheaded dogmatism [my emphasis] and showbiz modesty’ that Denis Mitchell’s documentary had revealed (ibid.).

Comparably, John Russell Taylor appreciated its mix of period realism with elaborate dream-sequences:

A refreshing reminder that television can, when it wishes, take wings into fantasy, even on a fairly limited budget, and a considerable tribute to the taste and ingenuity of the director […] Eric Till.

(Listener, 3 December 1964, p. 915)

B.L. in the Belfast Telegraph found the play a reminder that it went out on Armistice Day and loved ‘one of the most poignant TV plays I have seen for some time’ (12 November 1964, p. 13). They admired the flashback sequences from Miranda’s perspective, conveying her delirium, while sagely noting that ‘Programmes of this calibre help to counteract the idea that all transatlantic television is limited to Westerns or crime-busting, like the Wednesday “Hong Kong” series on UTV.’ (ibid.)

While receiving a fairly minimal reaction, it clearly satisfied some critics deeply. When First Love was shown, the anonymous Times critic referred back to this play as ‘gentle, subtly refined and lyrical’, though saw it as letting its symbolism run out of control (17 December 1964, p. 14).

The audience size, while far below what the Wednesday Play would regularly attract in its heyday, is pretty good, I’d say, for a relatively late starting play at 9.40pm.

Audience reaction was slightly below In Camera overall, but less passionately polarised, I’d say. Feelings largely matched the sort of pejorative this-is-incomprehensible responses that many Plays for Today, especially in 1970-73, garnered. As usual, this sort of response saw the storytelling is weak or unclear, and the play’s theme is assailed by the phrase ‘morbid and dreary’.

Over an hour spent watching the most miserable events that anyone could imagine [my emphasis].

However, a reasonable number felt that it improved after a ‘dull, indeterminate opening sequence’ and some commended it for being different. Notably, 40% of the viewing sample were totally absorbed in the central relationship and there was praise of lead Joan Hackett for her ‘unusually sensitive and mobile face’. While some disliked the ambiguity of whether scenes were reality or dream, other viewers admired the play’s ‘Ingmar Bergman style’ fantasies and artistic camera-work.

Emphasising the play’s mixed yet hardly negligible impact, a reader wrote in to the Observer when the paper asked for the TV ‘item which they had best remembered over the years’:

I didn’t really like it but I can remember it in detail. It somehow managed to convey exactly the feelings one has in high fever.

(George Seddon (ed.), ,’That was gold, that was’, 14 March 1965, p. 23)

And there you have, well, a perennial summation of the Wednesday Play and Play for Today: not always to be enjoyed or ‘liked’, but invariably offering vivid realism.

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

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

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 full textual analysis.

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

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

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

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

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

Inez (Jane Arden) is a lesbian postal clerk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Performance: JANE ARDEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audience size: 5.88 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 41.6%

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

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

Audience Reaction Index: 57%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 100%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy At 60 – 01.01: ‘A Crack in the Ice’ (BBC1, 28 October 1964)

01.01: A Crack in the Ice (BBC One, Wednesday 28 October 1964, 9:25pm – 10:50pm)

Directed by Ronald Eyre; Written by Ronald Eyre, dramatising Nikolai Leskov (short story – ‘The Sentry’, 1889), translated by David Magarshack; Produced by Peter Luke; Designed by Susan Spence; Music by Norman Kay.

Near the start of the play’s very mobile opening shot.

This first entry in the Wednesday Play, or at least which some think is the first (!), is a dramatisation of a short story by Russian writer Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895).¹ And, unlike Catch As Catch Can, this one exists, so I can write about my thoughts and feelings from an informed, inevitably partial way. For all plays I can watch – or read an existing script of – I adopt a reductive Halliwell’s Film Guide-esque rating system, which may nevertheless be useful to capture my responses in relation to critics and audiences.

Leskov’s original short story, dating from 1889, was first published in the UK in the early 1920s. It concerns what is, on the surface, a good deed, but which opens up a can of worms in the heavily stratified Tsarist Russia of 1839 under Nicholas I. Private Polkinoff (Derek Newark here) is a sentry in the imperial Russian Army, guarding the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. One night, a drunken Peasant (Ray Mort) unwisely walks across an iced-over lake and falls through a crack in the ice.

Polkinoff saves the unnamed Peasant, but, in doing so, deserts his post and, amid the recriminations, is incarcerated in solitary confinement. Lt. Col. Svinin (Bill Fraser) fears that the social disgrace of what he perceives as Polnikoff’s temporary desertion and neglect of his duty will mean the end of his regiment, given the autocratic Tsar Nicholas’s volatility and current preoccupation with maintaining high levels of security.

Duplicitous Lt. Kirov (Jack May) pretends that he instead performed the deed and brazenly walks away with a medal, saving the Ismailovsky Regiment’s skin, while the unfortunate Polnikoff remains confined for four days. Svinin is smugly delighted with the providential way things have turned out, yet cruelly insists that Polnikoff receive the birch 200 times, and forces his underling in the officer class Captain Miller (Jack Maxwell) to oversee this process.

A coda, ambiguously affirming the worldly here-and-now over lofty ideals, features Polnikoff larking around with his comrades and uninterested in the liberal Miller’s desire that he receives a due reward for his heroic good deed.

Rating: *** / ****

While A Crack in the Ice felt slightly overextended, I enjoyed what was a pungent and intellectually absorbing brew. There’s a clear indictment of arbitrary power and hierarchy that seems especially absurd when dramatised. Lt. Col. Svinin sets out the importance of rank late on: Tsar, General, Lt. Colonel, Captain, Private…

Leskov’s politics feel elliptical and carefully submerged in a philosophical tale which allows viewers to take different interpretations. We end with Postnikov happily enjoying the material things of life, simply glad to be alive, whereas the one man with a liberal conscience, Captain Miller, wants a fairer outcome. The strange labyrinthine muddle of Russia’s various institutions (army, police, church, monarchy) produces an outcome which isn’t exactly good, but nor is it as bad as it could have been…

Therefore, while John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (theatre – Royal Court, 1959; TV – Granada for ITV Play of the Week, 1961), John McGrath’s The Bofors Gun (theatre – 1966; film – 1968) and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) all initially came to mind, it communicates more stoicism and ambiguity than those broadly anti-war pieces. Polkinoff, soundly played by Newark, ends up as either a paragon of grounded, materialistic common sense, or, a haplessly gullible and deferential pawn in powerful people’s game, depending on your perspective…

Director Ronald Eyre, one of many at the BBC in the 1960s-70s who moved seamlessly between theatre and television, opts for many facial close ups, filling the small screen. There are some deft filmed inserts, amid a mainly multicamera studio production on video-tape. We see an array of art works attributed to the enigmatic ‘Signum’² which brilliantly add an extra dimension, steering our emotional responses and directing us to imagine a larger canvas than the BBC studio could offer.

Richard Hurndall gives a clear RP voice over, 19 years before some expert pineapple munching when playing the First Doctor in Doctor Who. Hurndall’s authoritative narrative voice initially has the ring of a BBC newsreader or a sponsored documentary voice-over, while being an attempt to retain some of Leskov’s literary flavour.

There’s more music than a typical contemporary realist studio-based Play for Today, but less, say, than Doctor Who of this era, perhaps implying that the military sounding tunes are necessary to anchor the audience in familiar ground. However, the relative silence keeps the focus on the words and, in a significant moment, the sound of Church bells. Production design is by one of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today’s most prolific designers, Susan Spence, who does a solid job in creating spaces which reek of rank and privilege.

Eyre’s experimentalism in superimposing Signum’s art (left) alongside the moving images of Pte. Postnikov (right).

Significantly, all 18 performers in the cast are male. That means that precisely no women performers have appeared in the two plays in our story so far. It is realistic for this narrative to be performed by a hermetically sealed masculine group, given its portrayal of presumably male dominated institutions at this time in Russia. While I’d personally liked to have seen some women as part of this story, with its piercing of the bubble of “heroism”, we can admire how this drama exposes the closed world of men in power and the ridiculousness of hierarchy and delusions of grandeur.

Best performance: BILL FRASER

There’s some great ornery harrumphing from the inimitable Michael Hordern as General Kokoshkin, but the honours have to go to Bill Fraser, here, who plays a stolid, preening and cantankerously cunning man, obsessed with his Regiment’s standing in Russia’s social pecking order, but even more preoccupied with his own status. He regards a portrait of himself near the start and later delivers a stern speech rebuking the liberal Captain Miller (James Maxwell), waffling about “Providence” and “the greatest good for the greatest number”, enabling Miller to chide his inconsistency in citing an English liberal philosopher. Suffice to say, Fraser nails Svinin’s pompous rhetoric, entitled inhabitation of his military uniform and clodhopping political manoeuvring. Fraser would play even greater parts in Trevor Griffiths’s Plays for Today All Good Men (1974) & Comedians (1979).

Best line: “Whatever is best for the country is true, whatever weakens it is a lie.” (Lt. Col. Svinin, speaking for many in 2024 too, sadly)

Audience size: 7.35 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 55.6%

The opposition: BBC2 (Peter Nero – pianist-composer/Curtain of Fear – Victor Canning serial thriller/Newsroom), ITV (Dave’s Kingdom/Goldwater. Man of the West – report by John Freeman/Professional Wrestling)

Audience Reaction Index: 64%

Reviewed in publications consulted: 78%

Reception: This was heralded as a ‘Russian play for the intelligent’ (Liverpool Daily Press, 24 October 1964, p.6). Yet, in an interview for, significantly, the Mirror, Ronald Eyre drew links with Sid Colin’s sitcom The Army Game (Granada for ITV, 1957-61), which made Bill Fraser a household name through playing Sgt. Maj. Claude Snudge who marshalled a group of post-Second World War National Service recruits. Eyre is quoted: ‘Instead of just dealing with Bootsies and Snudges in a hut, this is the full Army Game from top to bottom – and it has a lot much punch’ (Jack Bell, Daily Mirror, 28 October 1964, p. 18). There’s also focus on how Fraser was cast after playing a sinister Nazi SS chief in a play at the Mermaid (ibid.).

After the play’s broadcast, Marjorie Norris admired its detail and techniques, the performances, Signum’s Picasso-like drawings and Spence’s designs of the Chief of Police’s quarters for their ‘Byzantine splendour’. However, she felt the actors were rarely ‘given a chance to act with each other’, and disliked the close ups and voice-overs of characters’ interior thoughts (Television Today, 5 November 1964, p. 14). More critical still was Lyn Lockwood, who thought it had several ‘excellent passages’ and strong performances, but found Eyre’s experimental approach ‘somewhat cumbersome’, leaving nothing to the viewer’s imagination (Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1964, p. 19).

Signum art as used during Postnikov’s imagining that he will end up in Siberia.

However, the London press response was broadly favourable. An anonymous Times reviewer felt Bill Fraser ‘combined richness with restraint’ and admired Ray Mort’s ‘genuinely touching little performance’, while admiring Eyre’s adventurous and kinetic style and, again, Signum’s ‘sometimes sensationally vigorous’ drawings (29 October 1964, p. 5). John Russell Taylor found the play initially slow to get going, but felt it became ‘the best, most intelligent and gripping piece of television drama we have had for a long time’ (The Listener, 5 November 1964, p. 735). Taylor loved its particularity and universality, and how the interview between the liberal Captain and the bishop (Peter Madden) was ‘a model of civilized irony’, with both of them ‘right but according to completely incompatible standards’ (ibid.).

Philip Purser thoroughly enjoyed a ‘funny, ironic, consistently entertaining’ play which was ‘universally true in its description of officer-man relationships and particularly true in its depiction of emergent liberal humanism.’ (Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 1964, p. 13). A briefer mention by Kenneth Baily in The People claims it started the new series ‘so splendidly’ (1 November 1964, p. 4).

Even more fulsome were Maurice Richardson and John Holmstrom. The former found it ‘electrifying’, being delighted to see Leskov’s ‘satirical masterpiece’ on TV, with the key action scene ‘a surprisingly successful piece of cinematic realism’ and the acting ‘magnificent’ (Observer, 1 November 1964, p. 24). The latter thought it ‘remarkable’, with Hordern giving one of ‘his finest shaggy-vulture impersonations, an insanely awesome mass of throat-clearings, back-humpings and bouncings on the balls of the feet’ (New Statesman, 6 November 1964, p. 711). Presciently, Holmstrom acclaims Fraser’s ‘steadily growing depth and finesse’ and predicts that Fraser ‘will be seen in five or ten years’ time not as a comic but as one of our great straight actors.’ (ibid.)

In the regional press, A.A.S. in the Birmingham Evening Mail enjoyed it, emphasising Fraser’s ‘rich, wise and amusing’ performance’ (29 October 1964, p. 3). However, further up North, John Tilley was bored, finding the dialogue ‘poor in its attempt to illustrate the profound banality of the military mind’ (Newcastle Journal, 31 October 1964, p. 9).

In the USA, reviewer ‘Rich.’ was in line with the general positive consensus, feeling it was ‘obviously intended for the more thoughtful viewer, though not the longhair type’, which augured ‘well for the skein’ (Variety, 11 November 1964, p. 38). ‘If this series of adaptations and new works by established writers can keep to this standard BBC drama will deserve nosegays’ (ibid). Notably, Philip Purser had felt this play brought to ‘full maturity’ the policy of the previous Festival strand, considering the BBC’s likely abandonment of Festival next year ‘typical BBC hara-kiri’ (op. cit.).

The audience generally liked it, with its 64 RI higher than the average of 62 for TV drama in the first half of 1964. While there was criticism of the still images and, typically for a play of non-British origin, ‘Quite a number found the theme unpleasant and depressing’, more of the large audience commended ‘something different at last’ and ‘an intellectual treat’ (BBC audience research report, VR/64/571). A teacher gave a perceptive extended paean:

The BBC is to be congratulated on the choice of this play. It is a courageous expose of the issues that torment men and bedevil their lives. Greed, ambition, corruption in high places, the pitilessness of officialdom and the ineffectualness of liberalism against closed minds, self interest, fear and helpless ignorance were laid bare without cant or sentimentalism or even more surprisingly, without undue cynicism.

The general length and depth of the responses in this 1960s report far exceeds what I have been used to analysing in many of the 1970s-80s ones. However, I can’t help but feel that more people today would agree with the viewer who said, ‘I would forfeit the whole series of Perry Mason for one play of this calibre’? than this equally positive response from a Dental Surgery Assistant: ‘A pleasant change. No women! No sex! No kitchen sink! No long-haired youth or pop music, therefore to me – marvellous!’ (ibid.).

Overall, A Crack in the Ice was clearly a successful opening to a run of plays intangibly poised between the Festival and Wednesday Play modes. While not quite the scale of ratings success of the adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector (BBC TV, 9 February 1958)³, featuring Tony Hancock as Hlestakov, it did easily defeat ITV opposition: emphasising, again, the democratic wisdom of using established radio or TV stars to make European plays more palatable to a wide audience.⁴

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. 🙂

This is the first billed in the Radio Times as a ‘Wednesday Play’, so is good enough for me. However, clearly the concept and identity of the strand would fully be established in 1965 when Sydney Newman assigned the producer James MacTaggart to it. Clearly, A Crack in the Ice is more akin to Peter Luke’s previous stage adaptations for Festival (BBC1, 1963-64) ↩︎
Can anyone help in identifying who this was? ↩︎
See this Alan Bromly-directed version of The Government Inspector on YouTube here ↩︎
See Billy Smart’s excellent journal article here for a full account of the BBC’s rhetoric in promoting Television World Theatre and Festival, and an account of critical and audience responses: ‘Drama for People ‘in the know’: Television World Theatre (BBC 1957-1959) and Festival (BBC 1963-1964)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 37:1, pp. 34-48. ↩︎