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

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.

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. ↩︎

Exploring The Wednesday Play’s Legacy at 60: unofficial 01 – Catch As Catch Can (BBC1, 30 September 1964)

The Wednesday Play (1964-70, or 1965-70) was a landmark BBC single drama strand, 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 an apt time to grapple with the legacy of its predecessor in greater depth.

Unofficial 01: Catch As Catch Can (BBC One, 30 September 1964)

Directed by David Benedictus; Written by Jean Anouilh (play: La Foire d’empoigne, 1962); Translated by Lucienne Hill

We start with a play of questionable status as a ‘Wednesday Play’, as such. The IMDb regards it as the first, but this enigmatic play wasn’t even scheduled in the Radio Times, let alone billed as a Wednesday Play. However, it was shown on Wednesday night at 9:45pm on BBC1, broadly speaking, in the slot that would become home.

This 80-minute TV play, set during the Hundred Days war (1815), was adapted from a French stage original by Jean Anouilh (1910-87), the major Bordeaux-born playwright, known for tragedies and comedies, and for being tangentially in touch with absurdist and existentialist currents. Under its French title, La Foire d’empoigne, it was first performed at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 20 October 1962, directed by the author and Roland Piétri. Anouilh famously adapted Sophocles’s Antigone (1944) and his plays Becket and The Waltz of the Torreadors were filmed in the 1960s.

It can tentatively be argued that Anouilh’s apparent earlier political ambiguity and non-alignment and later conservative disillusionment with post-War developments bears a strong relation to a loose grouping of far-from-committed Play for Today dramatists who exceeded the likes of Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths and John McGrath in number.

My main source of information about Catch As Catch Can are contemporary reviews in the Times, Sunday Times and the BBC’s magazine, the Listener. Notably, this play was a late replacement for Clive Exton’s The Bone Yard – which we’ll come to later. John Russell Taylor claimed that Exton’s play’s indefinite postponement was due to ‘some supposed similarity’ with a legal case concerning the police officer DS Harold Challenor (1922-2008) (‘Television of the Month: Drama’, The Listener, 8 October 1964, p. 561). Interestingly, the Times‘ anonymous reviewer’s comments indicate a clear expectation – already – that this time-slot would host the ‘sour’:

Those disappointed at the loss of Mr. Exton’s uproariously sour attention to our age were probably consoled by M. Anouilh’s no less sour, extremely polished theatricality

(Anon, ‘A NAPOLEONIC EMBROIDERY’, Times, 1 October 1964, p. 15)

This critic seems generally an Anouilh sceptic, disliking his ‘high-handed’ way in treating history as malleable putty, but admires this particular TV production. Typically for a TV critic, as Katie Crosson has shrewdly argued, they see sentimentality as a cardinal sin in plays: ‘this hides an enormous sentimentality behind a vigorously savage treatment of almost everybody except its noble hero, and salts the whole with wit.’ This suggests a courtly, cerebral rhetoric, matching Dickensian attitudes to the various characters.

Lucienne Hill’s translation is ‘stylish, epigrammatic’, helped also by ‘stylishly stagey acting’ (Times ibid.). In line with Richard Hewett’s (2017) historical findings about TV acting, actors’ stage training still remained a dominant influence on performances in 1964, despite the steady growth in scaled down playing. Notably, Kenneth Williams plays Napoleon here – ‘unlikely’ casting for the Times‘ critic – but he ‘gives a fine theatrical glitter’ to a ‘theatrical rascal’, while another major stage and cinema actor Robert Helpmann is a quieter and sardonic foil as Fouché. The Times critic also admires the performances of David Horne as King Louis XVIII and Simon Ward as ‘the young idealist in a corrupt world’.

This critic admires the ‘touching sincerity’ in Ward’s performance and his avoidance of the temptation to send-up the role: this earnestness effectively counterpointed the sharp treatment of the other characters. Maurice Wiggin, the Sunday Times‘ trustily crusty critic of early Play for Today, felt this play ‘thin’, with the characters lacking in life except Horne as Louis, who ‘spoke the lines as if he had just thought of them: a ripe performance.’ (”Luvvable cockney sparrers”, Sunday Times, 4 October 1964, p. 44).

John Russell Taylor disagreed about the play, admiring its ‘elegance and glitter’, and the performances, finding Horne’s performance ‘much straighter’ than the ‘unashamedly theatrical’ Helpmann and Williams – who worked ‘rather well in the context’ (Listener op. cit.). For Taylor, Horne’s restraint unbalanced the play somewhat.

However, JRT liked how even this weaker Anouilh play made history ‘homey’ by ‘cutting the great down to relatively domestic proportions’: chiefly, by presenting the Hundred Days conflict as ‘the flimsy but sometimes diverting charade it is’. For me, this indicates it might just have been a forerunner of the bathetic Sellar and Yeatman-esque satire in Keith Dewhurst’s Churchill’s People instalment The Great Alfred (1975) and Mike Stott’s Play for Today Soldiers Talking, Cleanly (1978), whose earthy humour demystifies British army life.

Compared to many Wednesday Plays that await us, Catch As Catch Can‘s audience was fairly low, according to BBC Daily Viewing Barometer: with a 6.3% share of the UK population. It was notably less popular in London (4%) and more watched in the Midlands and Wales (9%) and Scotland and Northern Ireland (8% each).

Director David Benedictus (1938-2023) had a novel adapted by Francis Ford Coppola – You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) – and wrote an interesting sounding short film The Beach (1966), a TV musical for the 1926 General Strike’s sixtieth anniversary, What a Way to Run a Revolution (1986) and adapted C.A. Jones’s novel Little Sir Nicholas (1990) for TV. I watched this last period drama myself when a child. He had previously directed three episodes for Cold War anthology thriller strand Moonstrike (1963) and would return to The Wednesday Play.

It’s fascinating that our Wednesday Play story begins with the unlikely figure of Kenneth Williams, three years before playing Citizen Camembert in Carry on Don’t Lose Your Head (1967). Williams had appeared in Peter Brook’s film of The Beggar’s Opera (1953), TV versions of H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and W. Somerset Maugham, and Orson Welles’s self-reflexive Moby Dick Rehearsed (1955), alongside Patrick McGoohan, based on the staged Moby Dick, so he was yet to be entirely pigeonholed. When I watched Carry on Nurse (1959), an affable film, Charles Hawtrey and Williams stood out as the most skilled comic performers, conveying great depths of idiosyncratic eccentricity.

Now, imagine Williams as Napoleon, no less; forgive me if I don’t quite trust the verdict of Mozza Wiggin… It’s our loss that we cannot watch this and judge for ourselves, sixty years to the day.

We *can* at least see Williams in role as Napoleon in this photo from the *Listener*, with Robert Helpmann (left).

Audience Size: 3.09 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: N/A. (Don’t have BBC2 or ITV figures)

The opposition: BBC2 (The Danny Kaye Show), ITV (A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On / Professional Wrestling)

BBC Audience Reaction Index (RI %): N/A.

Reviewed in publications consulted: 60%

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: Liz Smith (2006) OUR BETTY: SCENES FROM MY LIFE

As with many memoirs of famous people, this has greatest power in its reflections on childhood, growing up and life before fame. Smith’s fame has been as a skilled character actor, not any sort of star, but nevertheless the latter half of the book is rendered blander by the very human diplomacy and tact she adopts in discussing people she had worked with, and still might work with.

That said, this book is a resounding corrective to any idea of Liz Smith as a cuddly, mild eccentric. While ‘I love playing nutty creatures in eccentric outfits’ (p. 145), Our Betty establishes the reality of her as a perceptive observer and unconventional performer, able to move from sitcoms to social realism to Samuel Beckett absurdism, with these experiences blending into and informing each other.

Smith reflects on her love of cinema growing up in 1920s Scunthorpe, noting films like The Singing Fool, Rio Rita and Gold Diggers of Broadway alongside The Variety Theatre and strolling players doing Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a boxing ring below the railway lines. Her mother died when she was two, and her father deserted her when she was seven, after several prefiguring instances of his irresponsibility. Adopted by her Grandma, she got fascinated by performance when at school: ‘That was it. That was what I wanted to do with my life. Make people laugh, have lots of lights, no gloom and no oil lamps.’ (p. 50)

One of her most vivid childhood memories of playing in the street constitutes one of the most magnificently bleak ripostes imaginable to any ‘good old days’ nostalgic romanticising (pp. 21-2). There are also fascinating tales of her Grandad and the 1926 General Strike and how life working in the steel furnace was ‘pure theatre’ (p. 27). The segment about the Plough Jags reads like a condensed, five-paragraph J.G. Ballard short story rooted in Scunthorpe strangeness (pp. 27-9).

It’s fascinating to read about her time in Portobello from the late 1940s, at art and then drama school, moving in a milieu including Rita Webb, Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and even Diana Dors. She seems to have far preferred this life in a London ‘village’ than in the suburbs near Epping Forest that she subsequently moved to in the 1950s. Smith, who had worked at the impressively open and democratic sounding Gateway Theatre (pp. 82-3), joined the Unity Theatre and then Charles Marowitz’s experimental group which rehearsed at Fitzroy Square. They all needed day jobs to manage this, as Marowitz paid them no money for their evening work. She had some great creative experiences with Marowitz, but the economic side of it seems exploitative and he dropped them abruptly to go to the RSC with Peter Brook.

The creative heart of the book is Smith’s association with Mike Leigh, who cast her in his feature film, Bleak Moments (1971) and then Smith’s first of seven Play for Today roles: in Leigh’s Hard Labour (1973). The section on the latter (pp. 131-7) is riveting. It provides insight concerning Smith’s creative input into her role as Mrs Thornley, ‘a woman who worked for others. Like a slave’ (p. 133). At a time when Chantal Akerman has now supplanted male auteurs in Sight and Sound’s greatest films ever poll, Hard Labour stands as Play for Today’s most prescient and subtle feminist drama of 1973, alongside Nemone Lethbridge’s more baroque Baby Blues. Smith’s enactment of Mrs Thornley’s painful life was meticulously researched but clearly also has some roots in her own experience of dull and exploitative labour (p. 54, 120-1). Smith relished Leigh’s rigorous and challenging ethos; working with Leigh continued her learning process with Marowitz, but was more fairly rewarded and lasting. Hard Labour enjoyed the vast luxury of eight weeks of improvisations followed by a month of shooting, all enabled by a BBC steered in a radical direction by producer Tony Garnett.

Call me a doyen of Play for Today’s ‘deep cuts’ if you will, but I do just wish she had reflected on playing Miss Pritchett in Elaine Feinstein’s Breath (1975); she is unnerving in that, channelling elements of Whitehouse and Thatcher, and showing her vast acting range.

The latter section has some fine vignettes on the more unusual side of British TV and film. We hear about Smith working on the likes of Peter Tinniswood’s offbeat I Didn’t Know You Cared (pp. 147-9), with its variety of settings, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), by Viv Stanshall whom she rightly calls ‘wonderful’, Peter Greenaway’s tremendously original The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and a series for children called Pirates. We learn how Smith features in a student film production involving Timothy Spall, Sanscape. While she absolutely adored the experience of being in LA for various projects, film productions often fell through or parts got cut.

Apt given her lifelong love of the cinema medium, Smith also provides a welcome roster of now neglected films of the 1980s-90s: A Private Function (1984), Apartment Zero (1988), High Spirits (1988), We Think the World of You (1988), The Revengers’ Comedies (1998) and La Nona (1991) for BBC2’s erformance play strand, alongside drag artiste extraordinaire Les Dawson.

Smith makes the crucial point that The Royle Family, which she calls a career ‘highlight’, felt deeply naturalistic due to the lack of an audience, which naturally leads to larger, communicative performances, but it was also performed as scripted and totally without improvisation (p. 209-10).

Smith comes across as a perceptive and caring person: a long time vegetarian who loves animals, commits to charitable activities, including Water Aid, and reflects on childhood memories of encountering one Black man locally (pp. 30-1) and her cosmopolitan experiences as a WREN in the Second World War (pp. 58-67). On the final page, she recounts sitting in a favourite armchair and how she listens to Al Bowlly every day and takes joy in her family life, which was clearly far more stable for the younger generations than hers was.

Book review: Andrew Roberts (2020) IDOLS OF THE ODEONS: POST-WAR BRITISH FILM STARDOM

This is a fine book. It’s not a gadfly’s project undertaken detachedly for a short time; it’s the result of a lifelong passion for British cinema and screen acting. An especially notable moment is Roberts’s closing comment in the chapter on James Robertson Justice where he asserts the value of the affection we may feel for actors. This deeply analytical and emotive book treats a distinct group of British screen performers as if they are a fascinating, varied but oddly cohesive extended family. Roberts analyses a range of careers and performances, drawing on a vast web of idiosyncratic contextual knowledge.

You could quibble with how relatively few women are featured in comparison to men, but that in itself is a reflection of who we got to see on screen in British films of the 1950s, by and large. Plus, the chapters on Diana Dors, Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques are equally tremendous as the rest on Sellers, Finch, Justice, Wisdom, Terry-Thomas et al.

There are occasional copy editing errors, but not so many to detract from what is an absolutely delightful book. I’ve been making a list of key films mentioned in this book, woeful or fascinating sounding, and indeed some of Roberts’s clear personal favourites which cut so deeply: Genevieve (1953), The Fast Lady (1962), Heavens Above (1963), The Pumpkin Eater (1964) and Smokescreen (1964), among others. His chapters have a tendency towards pithy asides in footnote form, and they often end with what he sees as the most immortal, telling and deeply characterful performance from each actor.

This is a book which reminds me of the delights of The Pleasure Garden (1953) and Simon and Laura (1955), wonderful sui generis films, and I didn’t need much reminding of The Smallest Show on Earth (1957). There’s also an often righteous pleasure in his setting the record straight about how certain films or actors’ images have been traduced and simplified. Roberts has watched, and watches, closely, which hopefully makes us all want to do the same.

The conclusion does a fine job of summarising the book’s spirit and what a spirit: crucially, there is both humour and unabashed – sincere and caustic – value judgements concerning many films. But I do feel that such a rich kaleidoscope of actors and films needed somewhat more drawing together: i.e. with more identification of historical trends and patterns. Much of this is embedded implicitly within all chapters, but making a few key findings explicit would have helped seal the book’s achievement even more.

Reading it, I got the sense that Roberts felt there was a particular configuration of people, places, voices and vehicles – vintage cars are a further special interest of his – in British Cinema circa 1953-64 which made that a special era and that there was then a gradual decline, becoming steeper into the 1970s. Evidently, there are exceptions, and he can be scrupulously nuanced. But he makes a persuasive cumulative case that many performers became marooned in changing times, which sadly involved a decline in the quality of screenwriting and the social vision behind the British films being made, alongside increasingly tatty, bathetic production values. This is a far more rigorous and deeply felt way of making the argument about the paucity of British Cinema in the 1970s than the various 1980s tomes by men called Walker.

There is a moving account of the sad career trajectories of Terry-Thomas, Justice and Jacques, being hemmed in and diminished by changing trends in British cinema and culture. I recall just how painful The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) is to watch, only very briefly alluded to here in the Leslie Phillips and Terry-Thomas chapter. Roberts also rightly asserts that the same year’s Carry On Emmanuelle is a vile film.

Such incontestable judgements are supplemented by use of a plethora of fine scholarly work on stardom and acting by academics like Melanie Williams, Peter Kramer, Alan Lovell, Geoffrey Macnab, Tom Ryall, Richard Dyer and a brace of Sight and Sound articles by Raymond Durgnat and Lawrence Shaffer. There is an attentiveness to how recurring, persona-based star acting differs from shifting, impersonation-based character acting. But also a sense of how certain actors, in their careers, oscillated between these poles.

This book is deeply scholarly, yet humanly opinionated: it lovingly investigates the past, while avoiding roseate nostalgia. Roberts is a fine neurodivergent writer, who knows this patch of cultural history incredibly well. This has a narrower spatial and temporal remit than Molly Haskell’s assessment of women in cinema or David Thomson’s biographical dictionaries, but it has much the same compendious heft, grasp of complexity, and makes compelling subjective judgements.

It makes a more digressive, personal companion piece to Richard Hewett’s book – also for MUP – on British television acting from the 1950s-2010s.
While I can’t really stand the things in real life, I’d love to see his historical analysis of cars in cinema, including Jacques Tati’s remarkable Trafic (1971) and so many others. Also, hopefully, we will get his BFI Film Classics book on Smokescreen or The Pumpkin Eater before too long. Roberts cites Roger Lewis and Jonathan Meades a few times, which is apt: this work is unapologetically knowledgeable and bursts out of the pages with lively wit and cantankerous invective.

If this sort of thing is out of fashion, then it’s a duller world for it. Never conform.

Book review: Colin Chambers (ed.) (2018) PEGGY TO HER PLAYWRIGHTS: THE LETTERS OF MARGARET RAMSAY, PLAY AGENT

This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.

I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.

While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.

Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.

This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’

Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.

As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.

Book review: David Stubbs (2023) DIFFERENT TIMES: A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY

Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.

The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)

He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)

Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.

Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).

Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.

While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).

Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.

I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.

These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).

There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).

There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.

The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.

The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and This Country (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).

The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?

There’s an astute reference to how much The Office (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).

The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.

Book review: Robert Chapman (2023) EMPIRE OF NORMALITY: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Exposing the Empire of the “Normal” Mind

Robert Chapman’s book, published by Pluto Press, is a trenchant, clear and maddening read which exposes and challenges the taken for granted assumptions about “normality”. This is expressed by the pathology paradigm through which autism and other neurological differences have been perceived for nearly two centuries.

Movingly, there’s a sense that things weren’t always thus… Before the “clock time” of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Chapman notes that most societies before the 1800s were sometimes able to accommodate difference rather than judging it against a metrical yardstick, which became the norm due to the great, but also obsessive and decidedly creepy, scientist Francis Galton. Before then – while Chapman does not ignore real discriminations that existed – the focus was on seeing health as ‘a matter of harmony or equilibrium [either] within the individual, or between individual and either the environment or their community.’ Ancient Chinese medicine, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and the Ayurvedic tradition in India, while evidently having the limitations of their times, were ‘nothing like the systemic disability segregation’ that came later in the 1800s.

Chapman is measured and critical – if not especially detailed – about the actual record of Communist regimes, chiefly those of Lenin and Stalin, but nevertheless forwards a committed Marxist analysis of how our sense of “normality” and enforced conformism is dictated by capitalism. I am convinced, as clearly, Marxism was not a template or rulebook that the Soviet dictators actually utilised, but rather distorted it and used it for promotional value.

This book builds on Mark Fisher’s crucial insights about people internalising and blaming themselves too much for problems which are actually externally imposed by capitalist realism. Chapman rightly calls it a ‘fascistic fantasy’ to wish away neurodivergent disablement and illness and that we need to accept that they will always exist. Chapman is strong on defining the industrial and human impacts of Fordism, which was a major workplace enforcement of conformism and neurotypicality, as well as creating burnout and boredom. The manipulation of workers and their moulding into ‘man machines’ saw corporations utilising the PR techniques of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Mentions of B.F. Skinner echo the piecemeal behaviourist educational moulding that Laura Tisdall reveals in her excellent book about the 1940s-70s British education system.

There’s a fascinating section where Chapman develops a nuanced critique of the increasing use of prescription drugs from the 1950s and related debates concerning over-medication (pp. 95-96, 105-106), culminating in references to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the ‘Commercialization of Human Feeling’ and C. Wright Mills on the ‘personality market’ (111-112). This reflects on how workplace exploitation in itself created problems that led to alienation and increased reliance on drugs.

Chapman critiques the 1960s Laingian anti-psychiatry movement, which was so easily coopted by right-wing libertarian Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (article 1960, book 1961), giving him ammunition to claim that mental illness itself was a ‘myth’. A section on eugenics builds on Adam Pearson and Angela Saini’s BBC documentary Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal and Adam Rutherford’s recent work in exposing this appallingly extant movement that Galton founded. If anyone’s in any doubt about the sway of the ‘autism as damaging’ pathology paradigm, learn how Deborah Barnbaum argued, as recently as 2008, in The Ethics of Autism, ‘that, once prenatal diagnostic technology is capable, there will be a moral obligation to abort autistic foetuses on the grounds that being autistic is inherently incompatible with living a good human life’.

While Chapman follows the typical Marxist pattern of offering rigorous diagnosis of the malady, but not proposing detailed remedies, he does see the major path forward in the work of Peter Sedgwick’s PsychoPolitics (1982), a socialist attempt to recognise mental health illnesses, but seek alternative community organisation beyond the state apparatus. This approach is shared by Franco Basaglia in Italy, Hel Spandler and Mark Cresswell and the West German Socialist Patients Collective. In parallel is a sound account of the Neurodiversity movement which emerged in the 1990s, led by Jim Sinclair, Judy Singer and Harvey Blume; their politics of Neurodiversity has been furthered by Nick Walker and others who’ve contributed to the paradigm shift in the 2010s towards neurodivergence being respected.

Chapman notes significant earlier progress in the late 1970s with the Black Panthers recognising ‘disabled liberation as bound up with collective liberation’. This is a prelude to his necessary and ambitious focus on intersectionality at the end, with many alliances with other groups needed for his proposed neurodivergent Marxism to work. He does not entirely ignore our planetary environment, which has been ransacked and made to fit the needs of capitalist development, whether American, Chinese or European. However, that this really only emerges in the conclusion suggests a fuller book is needed to explore how neurotypical thinking hinders any serious long term ecological action.

This impressive book, with its far-reaching and impressively constructed argument, persuades you that some form of reformed Marxist thinking, combined with other lenses, is vital to begin making the world a better place. Chapman grounds the book with a notably personal introduction which reflects on his own life experiences. There are promising signs in how neurodivergence is being more accepted, but we can’t be complacent: as Chapman argues, we need fewer ‘diversity consultants teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers’ and more ‘neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace.’ (p.161)

Film review: Tish (2023)

Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.

It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.

Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.

As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, Daniel Blake: none of this fitted to the individual.

Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.

It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”

Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.

Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.

The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.

Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.

To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.

This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.

Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to a Knave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.

Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.

Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.

Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?

There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.

The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.

Book review: Laura Tisdall (2020) A PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION? How childhood changed in mid-twentieth-century English and Welsh schools

Laura Tisdall’s book, published by Manchester University Press, is an aptly comprehensive and deeply thought provoking study of postwar British education. Her work is vastly well read and adopts a probing and careful approach to this unwieldy, mammoth field of study.

The book’s conclusion perhaps undersells its final Chapter’s compelling cumulative argument about the exclusion of people whose identities and behaviours were different from the “normal”. But, this is ultimately a very well researched and argued reflection that the so-called “progressive” era of education in the 1960s and 1970s was a longer term 1945-79 cycle. The overall tendency was to valorise the group over the individual, with utilitarian one size fits all approaches, or expedient “what works well enough” teaching. Tisdall reveals that pupils fitting in and conforming with the crowd was fundamentally encouraged in a preparation for the workplace and to produce people for welfare state Britain. It’s surprising in a way that the historiography here doesn’t include Paul Willis on “the lads” and Philip W. Jackson on the “hidden curriculum” as these ideas very much support Tisdall’s argument.

This non-Utopian progressivism, as defined by Tisdall, is persuasively indicated to be a complex mix of social democratic and conservative ideologies. This may have done some good in some places and been responsive to some local needs, but it clearly discriminated against minorities. This followed a 1920s-30s Utopian progressivism which was more radical, but which didn’t get implemented anywhere near as much. Even this non-Utopian progressivism, largely derived from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was piecemeal and only partially believed in and implemented itself by teaches, so was always fused with more traditional chalk and talk methods. But then the promotion of group work and the bias towards producing sociable children did clearly mark a change from the 1940s on, compared to what was there before.

Tisdall grasps complexity: the uneven, varying progressions across time rather than discerning simplistic patterns like some Fleet Street hack would. There’s no definitive indication that progressivism failed, as it was only partially tried. Few, if any, deschooling theories were ever implemented in the 1970s. There’s a sense of a conformist middle ground, where mixed classroom teaching methods were used, with enthusiastic or reluctant incorporation of group work, discovery learning and “child-centred learning”, depending on the school. Tisdall pertinently questions of the related moral panic over teenage delinquency, manifested in “blackboard jungle” fictions and also the later 1960s ‘Black Papers’ claims – or myths – linking radical teaching methods with permissiveness. With no evidence, Cyril Burt et al linked what was basically their dislike of student radical longhairs at University, to earlier 1950s “softer” teaching methods in primary school.

There was more a constructive critique offered by those in the mainstream of teaching, which defended some new methods, but also did pave the way for the mixed blessing of the Thatcher era National Curriculum (1988). Tisdall shows the 1970s as the era when teaching unions got much more militant, understandable given the declining status of a very difficult job. She documents the deeper picture: it’s not simply all a reactionary Black Papers juggernaut conquering all before it, though I feel that key figure Cyril Burt’s role over time needs a bit more ideological analysis and unpicking…

The book’s greatest strength is how Tisdall marshals a vast range of evidence of teachers’ experiences and opinions through oral history interviews and a copious range of education related press publications from the times she is analysing.

Now, there could be more on popular culture’s representations. Such as in pop music, TV (e.g. Scene, Grange Hill), literature and film, or how the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s abstract records were used in classes. The vast area of literature is partially included concerning the Blackboard Jungle myth, and there’s an apt, if brief, citing of Lucy Pearson’s findings about realism. This does get me thinking about the large cohort of Play for Today dramatists who had experienced teaching… Overall, though, this seems an unfair ask, given Tisdall’s focus is squarely on educational history and ethnography, rather than cultural representations.

There could have been more direct evidence of varied people’s memories of teaching styles and approaches in their schooldays, i.e. some interviews and surveys, but also an attention to first-hand diaries, material instances of schoolwork itself and more analysis of documents like individuals’ termly (parents’ evening) reports. The use of HMI reports and other school records is absolutely brilliant, so this would have enabled an even more rounded perspective. this would have assisted the book’s argument, as we do get some crucial findings on people who didn’t fit in, cited via published academic work or reports.

Anyway, this is a fine book, a labour of intensive thought, infused with historical nuance. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if anyone came away from reading this feeling that getting rid of the HMI and replacing them with OFSTED has been a good thing. It also leaves you certain that large class sizes, teachers being overworked and thus relying so often on utilitarian, non-differentiated methods have let the majority of people down who rely on the state system.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.