Classic TV

A satirical musical full of fantasy, surrealism and formal experimentation? That can only mean one man: Ken Loach.

Hang on a sec. That doesn’t seem quite right, does it? Yet 1965’s The End of Arthur’s Marriage is just that.

Written by poet and Private Eye contributor Christopher Logue and composer Stanley Myers (who wrote the theme to The Deerhunter, fact fans), The End of Arthur’s Marriage was broadcast as part of the BBC’s Wednesday Play series and sees working class man Arthur (Ken Jones) tasked with putting down a deposit on his house, using his in-laws’ savings. However, he soon discovers he’d rather spend everything in a few scant hours with his daughter (Maureen Ampleford) instead.

The play was one of Loach’s earliest works, so came at a time when he was still finding his voice. While it incorporates a number of his future trademarks, including his first use of 16mm film, as well as the use of documentary techniques and the untrained Ampleford, there’s a lot that’s uncharacteristic of Loach: as well as conventional songs by Long John Baldry and others, there are in-character songs, including a sales pitch by shop assistant John Fortune, and narrators attacking middle-class conformity. There are also hints of Brecht in Arthur’s purchase of an elephant and the episodic narrative structure, and Loach intercuts between scenes of people dancing and disgruntled viewers, even appearing as himself at one point, arguing with a documentary crew filming at his planned location.

While Loach says he was the wrong person for the job, it’s certainly worth watching The End of Arthur’s Marriage to see what he could do before he decided what job he was the best person for. And you have your chance below – enjoy!

Continuing our season of Ken Loach-directed plays for the BBC, this week we’ve got not one but two Loach plays, both of them written by Marxist playwright Jim Allen: The Big Flame and Rank and File. The two are similar, conveying both writer and director’s socialist concerns regarding workers and strikes in light of the events at the time. However, the two have different approaches to the problem.

The Big Flame came first, offering a more general vision than Rank and File. The second of Allen’s plays (his 1967 play The Lump was about the exploitation of casual labour in the building trade), The Big Flame gives us striking Liverpool dockers enacting a Communist-style system of workers’ control of the docks.

Filmed in Loach’s now-standard, quasi-documentary style, sometimes with real dockers, it’s an obvious bit of agitprop, with the workers’ communism shown as entirely successful until broken up by the police. As a result, Mary Whitehouse herself complained to both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the then leader of the opposition Edward Heath, demanding a review of the BBC Charter because of its advocacy of a “communist takeover of the docks”; it also became the name of a revolutionary Liverpool socialist organisation.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to pay to watch it below. So much for communism.

Rank and File was a far less notorious play written by Allen once he’d observed at close hand a strike at Pilkington Glass Works in St Helens in 1970. It’s also a play that both he and Loach are less proud of, Allen saying that the play was written in three weeks and was ‘too didactic’, while Loach says it shows its ‘age badly’, having tried to catch the headlines and be topical.

Featuring many of the same cast members as The Big Flame, the play depicts the events of a wildcat strike at a family firm, caused by collaboration between a union executive and management. It is less of a mouthpiece for its author’s beliefs than The Big Flame (bar a quote from Trotsky at the end), instead flagging up as problematic the new Industrial Relations Act that made unofficial strikes illegal. Nevertheless, those who get Allen’s sympathies are convincingly written and portrayed, while those who don’t get far shorter shrift.

All the same, it’s a powerful piece and you definitely can watch it below. Enjoy! It’s free! Long live the revolution!

Ken Loach has always been attracted to controversial political subjects, frequently using the plays he directs to campaign. One of his most famous early works was 1965’s Three Clear Sundays, one of the BBC’s Wednesday Plays, which campaigned vigorously against the death penalty, which was still in effect at the time, albeit subject to a moratorium – the play takes its name from the ‘three clear Sundays’ that were mandated to elapse between the sentence of death and execution of a prisoner.

The play was written by former criminal James O’Connor, who had himself been sentenced to hang in 1942 and was only reprieved at the last month, so acquires an extra verisimilitude. It sees petty criminal Tony Selby commit murder after being misled by gangsters including George Sewell while in prison for a minor offence. It then follows Selby through every stage of the process, arguing against it at each turn.

While reaction to the play was strong, with writers to newspapers largely saying they were now against the death penalty as a result of having watched it, it didn’t have quite the success that some proponents argue – it wasn’t until 1969 that hanging was finally abolished for virtually all crimes, including murder, with some strange exemptions holding on until 1971 (arson in Royal Dockyards), 1992 (crimes committed on the Isle of Man) and 1998 (crimes committed under military jurisdiction, and High Treason and piracy with violence).

All the same, it’s a powerful piece of work and it’s this week’s Wednesday Play. If you like it, you can buy it on DVD.

Continue reading “The Wednesday Play: James O’Connor’s Three Clear Sundays (1965)”