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

This series of posts commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of The Wednesday Play while exploring its diverse output beyond justly celebrated works like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). I plan to watch and reflect on all Wednesday Plays up to the end of 1965, supported by research. Missing plays will still be covered, but without textual analysis. A selected number of plays from 1966-1970 will be covered.

03.02: The Girl Who Loved Robots (BBC One, Wednesday 20 October 1965) 9:00 – 10:30pm
Directed by Brian Parker; Written by Peter Everett; Produced by James MacTaggart; Designed by Douglas Smith; Music by Cornelius Cardew

A policeman’s hunt for a murderer leads him into a strange and threatening world. (Daily Mail, 20 October 1965, p. 20)

This next Wednesday Play first figured in the press in a vein of mild levity. In September, the Daily Mirror had a jokey short article ‘Isobel – the robot lover’, discussing how actress ‘Isobel Black, 22’, was left with one robot to love, after eight of the nine which were built for the production vanished in dress rehearsals on 9 September: “I think they walked out on us”, Black is quoted (10 September 1965, p. 7).

In the Daily Express, Black claimed: “I’ve lost my little monsters”, with the BBC quoted as claiming seven of the eight robots were missing – which Black termed “darling little things – they wander all over the place” (10 September 1965, p. 11). The piece ended with a similarly lighthearted call to ‘Ring the BBC’ if you see any wandering robots (ibid.).

The Observer previewed The Girl Who Loved Robots as a ‘thriller’ ‘set among the glittering world of space-men and rockets’ by 34 year-old writer Peter Everett, noting his ‘prize-winning’ novel, Negatives (1964). Like other papers, the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel carried a photo of Isobel Black (20 October 1965, p. 6). Coventry Evening Telegraph trailed a ‘space-age thriller’ set in 1970, wherein ‘human machines coolly’ await ‘the countdown’: during ‘these tense moments’, the ‘mystery is solved’ (20 October 1965, p. 2). Adrian R. Purslow had not been impressed by the previous week’s Alice, failing to spot its ‘motive’, and feeling the series ‘continues on Trial’ with Everett’s play (Rochdale Observer, 20 October 1965, p. 9).

This contrasted with story editor Tony Garnett’s account of Peter Everett as a ‘young, very hip’ writer, with ‘wild, brilliant’ and coveted prize-winning novels which he and fellow story editor Kenith Trodd knew (Radio Times, 14 October 1965, p. 49). Trodd ‘tracked him down to Camden Town’, just as Everett was off to Spain ‘to make a film with the eminent director Claude Chabrol’, and he persuaded Garnett and Trodd of an exciting idea for a TV play (ibid.).

19 year old Victory du Cann (Isobel Black) is a nightclub hostess: ‘She is beautiful. She is dead. Cause of death: murder. […] Assassin: unknown’ (ibid.) Somewhat wryly, Garnett noted that ‘Another casebook opens for Inspector Antrobus [Dudley Foster], and yet another sordid crime. It is all very unpleasant.’ (ibid.) Out of the window, Antrobus sees a futuristic world – five years hence – ‘a fabulous alloy empire’, with a rocket to be manned by three supermen-machines who ‘coolly await the final count-down’ (ibid.) Antrobus’s investigations were to lead him into ‘secret and threatening territory’, exploring why the girl was killed (ibid.).

Writer Peter Everett (1931-1999) was born in Hull and another of the many grammar school educated dramatists who worked on The Wednesday Play/Play for Today, and was apparently linked to varying degrees with Richard Hoggart – who taught at the local WEA – and Philip Larkin, according to Dan Franklin’s obituary. In the 1950s, he ‘evaded National Service by feigning insanity’ and hitchhiked to London and Soho for the ‘bohemian life’ (ibid.). He soon began writing poems that were published and radio plays broadcast on The Third Programme. His novel Negatives won the 1965 Somerset Maugham Award, and later became a 1968 feature-film directed by Peter Medak.

After three more novels and The Girl Who Loved Robots, he wrote and directed his own low-budget feature-film, Last of the Long-haired Boys (1968), wherein a Second World War pilot struggles to adapt to civilian life. This film was not released theatrically. Everett managed a run of four half-hour plays/films for the Thirty-Minute Theatre, Centre Play and Premiere strands from 1973-78, none of which I’ve yet seen.

When 50, Everett discovered Marx, being delighted now to have an all-purpose analytical tool to construct and deconstruct not just politics but paintings, books, architecture, religions’ (ibid.). He moved to Sheffield in 1984, the ideal place to ‘witness the last stand of the working class’, while a late resurgence was evident in several novels that Dan Franklin helped publish, including Matisse’s War (1995).

Franklin and writer Eric Coltart’s accounts of Everett indicate a cantankerous, skint bohemian, raging at the literary business and maintaining his grit and integrity; in his meeting with Hollywood film producer Sam Spiegel (1901-1985), he would not lie and compromise when asked his favourite recent movie, naming a Godard film – and thus being ‘given the bum’s rush’, in Coltart’s words (ibid.).

The Claude Chabrol project clearly does not seem to have come about.

None of the press coverage highlights the involvement of musician Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), who worked with Stockhausen, then followed a Godardian path towards politically revolutionary ideas, indeed becoming in 1979 a co-founder of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist–Leninist), rejecting Maoism and endorsing Hoxhaism, after the Albanian dictator. Cardew wanted his music to communicate widely to the people, hence rejecting the more elite tendencies of modernist musique concrete. His music for this play might have been more in the Forbidden Planet vein, who knows?

I cannot assess this production as no copy exists in the archives, though it’s another to follow the early Wednesday Play’s customary pattern of being androcentric: a cast of 15 is 80% male, including varied, powerful presences like Kevin Stoney, Norman Rodway and Geoffrey Hinsliff. The ‘girl’ in the title is dead, seemingly from the off.

Audience size: 7.08 million

Share of overall TV viewing audience: 42.9%

The opposition: BBC2 (Teach-in on Rhodesia from Edinburgh University), ITV (News / Frank Ifield Sings / A Question of Loyalty: Klaus Fuchs)

Admirable scheduling there on BBC Two: three hours of a Teach-in concerning Ian Smith’s racist regime in Rhodesia, from 8-11pm.

Audience Reaction Index: 47%

Reviewed in London press publications consulted: 21.4%

Reception: Everett’s Wednesday Play received scant, and mixed, responses from London critics, while pleasing non-metropolitan journalists rather more, by and large. A large audience reacted in a typically mixed fashion, if somewhat more negative than average.

Maurice Richardson liked an ‘ambitious production’ and ‘an ingenious plot: arrogant astronaut […] had coshed a tart – motivation obscure; dedicated detective was forcibly prevented from arresting him by order of the space project boss’ (The Observer, 24 October 1965, p. 25). However, ‘a lot of the embroidery was so corny and illogical’ and he felt the dialogue was rich in ‘that new advertising copywriter’s style which is becoming the rage among TV playwrights’, with ‘prize’ lines like “She liked the smell of outer space on her men” (ibid.).

Philip Purser worried that his taste was incompatible with Wednesday Play producer James MacTaggart’s, criticising ‘a nervous itchy to be swinging and with-it’, exemplified by new opening titles with ‘a model in Ungaro gear unloading a portable television set from a helicopter, like a fashion magazine saluting the Age of Technology’ (Sunday Telegraph, 24 October 1965, p. 15). Purser enjoyed how this was ‘the first TV. play I’ve seen to try to capture some of the romance, the prodigious adventurousness, of space exploration’ and unusually questioned ‘the role of the astronaut as a superman’ and mocked ‘the circus atmosphere of a launching’ (ibid.).

Purser loved the particularity of this and an Ancient Mariner-like veteran astronaut character, but quickly became irritated by its low-budget and old, recycled newsreel footage: ‘there was the usual attempt to pass off Southall gasworks (I think) as a corner of a multi-million pounds rocket site. Furthermore, he questioned ‘the ponderous formality’ of much dialogue and felt a ‘basic disinterest (or even disbelief) in the characters themselves’ (ibid.). Anticipating Norman Rodway in the Play for Today Baby Blues (1973), his character here was a ‘callous ranter’, while the murdered girl ‘was no more than a pretty face and figure’, and he was unconvinced by the detective and another ‘whore”s attempts to ‘drum up pity for her’ (ibid.). Purser felt overall that it lacked drama.

Patrick Skene Catling found it one of the year’s most interesting plays, with universal symbolism (Punch, 27 October 1965, p. 620). Catling liked how Thelonius Monk’s ‘richly neurotic’ rendition of ‘Just A Gigolo’ established ‘the mood of insanely selfish sexuality that dominated the story’, feeling Norman Rodway as the astronaut, Isobel Black ‘as the prostitute murderee’ and Dudley Foster as the police detective were all ‘excellent’. While David Dodimead as a failed astronaut ran a brothel and gambling hell near the launching side and ‘made vividly nasty speeches of Genet disillusionment (ibid.). Catling felt in tune with the play’s invective:

There were some poetic excesses in the dialogue, but the level of outrage was admirably even, and powerful language was needed to express the author’s powerful ideas about mad, exultant technocrats with Messiah complexes, and a public conditioned to adore blast-offs as though they were the ecstatic climaxes of some sort of intergalactic Ready, Steady, Go! (ibid.)

Argus in the Glasgow Daily Record liked an intriguing twist, but felt the play was ‘spoiled by a dialogue too technical and obscure’, with the murder aspect downgraded compared to the drama of the rocket shoot (21 October 1965, p. 10). Usefully given the play’s archival absence, they outline an early ‘prolonged’ shot of ‘girl’s battered body followed by the horrific close-up of a man’s badly burned face’ (ibid.).

John Tilley was heartened by a good detective story, with fresh writer Everett producing a ‘winner’ (The [Newcastle upon Tyne] Journal, 21 October 1965, p. 5). Tilley perceived a theme of the astronauts’ detached arrogance, feeling themselves ‘demi-gods’ and the sadly hapless position of Foster’s detective: ‘What chance does a policeman have when he wants to halt a moonshot which all the nation is watching?’ (ibid.). Tilley calls Foster one of his favourite TV ‘character actors’, and he liked the morally ambiguous ending, with the suspect getting away in the rocket (ibid.).

Peter Forth felt it a ‘strange story’, with Foster ‘effective’ as ‘an ordinary, decent man faced by an extraordinary set of suspects – seven astronauts, three of whom were about to be launched at the moon’ (Western Daily Press, 21 October 1965, p. 7). Rodway was ‘splendid’ as the ‘monomaniac with an overwhelming power complex’, aiding ‘a grand, weird, out-of-this-world play’ (ibid.).

The audience response was below par. A Dairyman was ‘perplexed’, with others’ antipathy summarised by the words ‘pretentious’ and ‘mumbo-jumbo’, despite being an initially welcomed ‘space age ‘who-dun-it” (VR/65/587). An anti-climactic ending, ‘unreal’ situations and characters and a generally boring approach, with more talk than plot or action, were all indicted; while a Chemical Engineer felt trained astronauts would not be ‘so stupid as the characters in this play’ (ibid.).

However, a substantial minority found it an interesting, thought-provoking and ‘refreshingly different’ play, with tension and an ‘adult style’:

The danger of elevating men to Superman status was very apparent as was the necessity to maintain acceptable moral values (ibid.).

Others mused on the ‘disturbing but absorbing’ scenario of science being raised above human law (ibid.). A fair few other viewers were in the middle, between the play’s advocates and detractors, being intrigued but also disliking its ‘moralistic arguments’ (ibid.). The report edged toward negative, with castigation of ‘boring monologues, especially from irrelevant characters like Carfritz, padded out the whole tedious affair’ (ibid.).

Among actors, Dudley Foster was often praised, with some exacting critique of the production, with the rocket site resembling more an oil refinery, while too much cross-cutting between scenes and to newsreel was also disliked, though some felt newsreel and, especially, cuts to crowd reactions, lent authenticity (ibid.). Most critiqued in the production was Cornelius Cardew’s incidental music – ‘loud, discordant and, at times, most distracting’ – with a comment veering into philistine Matthew Parris territory: ‘sounded like a five year old tinkering with the piano’ (ibid.).

There was one letter to the press. J. Rolland, of 5 Pembroke Street, Glasgow, C.3, wrote in to acclaim a ‘classic thriller’: ‘I’ve never been more intrigued or horrified by a play’, which possessed ‘blood and thunder, horror and a terrifying ending’ (Glasgow Sunday Mail, 24 October 1965, p. 16). Gripped, Rolland felt sure it would get an “X” certificate in the cinema (ibid.).

While this is clearly one of the least remembered or garlanded Wednesday Plays, it would as always be a fascinating historical window into 1965, and it’s annoying that we can’t access its potential insights or longueurs!

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.🙂