Classic TV

We’ve had a couple of weeks of fun plays, courtesy of Noël Coward, so it’s about time we had a bit of misery. And when we want to turn to misery, naturally we turn to Ken Loach. Angry, realism-loving Ken Loach.

A frequent contributor to the BBC The Wednesday Play series, Loach offers us many choices, so since we’re feeling indecisive, let’s go with In Two Minds, written by David Mercer, who won the Writers’ Guild Award for the best television play of 1967 for this.

The first of Loach’s television plays to be shot entirely on location, bar five brief sequence shot electronically, the play owes a lot to the ideas of RD Laing, which are set out in Laing’s Sanity and Madness in the Family. Laing argued that schizophrenia* lacks an organic basis and therefore it was the family that had the potential to make people mentally ill. Oddly enough, it was famed theatre critic Kenneth Tynan who introduced Mercer and producer Tony Garnett to Laing, who was eventually retained as a consultant for the play.

Kate Winter (Anna Cropper), a young girl under psychiatric examination and receiving electroconvulsive theory, suffers from a lack of confidence, self-esteem and self-control – telling of the “bad Kate” who commits immoral acts. Could the hypocrisy, selfishness and weakness of those around her have led to this state of mind or can Kate simply be diagnosed and dismissed as a schizophrenic*?

As well as the award garnered by the play, In Two Minds would go on to be remade as the feature film, Family Life, which Loach also directed. But you can watch the original below. Enjoy**!

* Kate more properly would have had something called dissociate identity disorder, rather than schizophrenia, assuming she had what would then have been classified as schizophrenia anyway. But even at the time, psychiatrists argued that Kate would be more properly diagnosed as depressed and ‘hysterical’. But, you know, the 60s.

** If that’s the right word.

It’s strange how history – even TV history – remembers some names and not others. Take Mike Leigh. You’ll almost certainly have heard of Mike Leigh, in part because of his film work, but largely because of his work on the BBC’s Play For Today, with the likes of Abigail’s Party and Nuts In May still famous to this day. In particular, Leigh is known for the improvisational nature of his plays, working with the actors to create the scripts from which the final product is created.

Mike Leigh went to Salford Grammar School where he studied acting. He later moved to Birmingham and worked at the Midlands Art Centre, where he started to develop that famous style of his. He then enrolled on a course at the London Film School. In 1971, he worked on a feature film, Bleak Moments, and was recruited in 1973 by the famed Tony Garnett to make dramas for Play for Today.

The strange thing is that if you replace “Mike Leigh” with “Les Blair” in that previous paragraph, it’s still a completely true statement. Blair acted with Leigh in Salford, they shared a flat together in Birmingham, went to the Film School together, and Blair edited and produced Bleak Moments, which Leigh directed.

The big difference between Leigh and Blair, however, is that while Leigh began to edge more into comedy, albeit with a satirical edge, and film, Blair stayed firmly in the realm of TV drama, eventually going on to direct the socio-realistic likes of Law and Order and The Nation’s Health with his future long-time collaborator GF Newman. As a result, while Leigh is practically a household name, Les Blair is almost unknown except to TV historians.

Blair’s first effort for Play For Today came just three months after Leigh’s Hard Labour. Blooming Youth was an improvised drama about a group of polytechnic students sharing a house together, including a world weary cynic, a nervous studious virgin, and a couple in a relationship. Not a lot happens in it, but what marks it out is its realistic depiction of student life at the time, with dingy rooms, epic boredom and other aspects of study that would have been familiar to anyone who’d been to either university or polytechnic.

And it’s your Wednesday Play. Enjoy!

Peter McDougall is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s best modern playwrights. The BAFTA award-winning writer was born in Greenock and began work when he was 14 in the shipyards with one ‘Billy Connolly’. However, he moved to London to escape the harsh conditions and while working as a house painter, met Colin Welland, who encouraged him to write a play about his experiences. Just Another Saturday was the result, but although it impressed the BBC’s Play For Today team, the story about the annual Orange order march in Glasgow was deemed too sensitive for the time and had to wait another three years before it would made (with Billy Connolly).

However, the team encouraged him to write another, more intimate play, which he duly did, basing Just Your Luck on his sister’s wedding. It stars Lesley Mackie as Alison, a young protestant woman living in a Scottish tenement who gets the chance to escape her lot thanks to her relationship with footballer Joe (Joseph Greig). However, frustrated with the time he spends training, she takes up with the impoverished catholic Alec (David Hayman) and ends up getting pregnant.

Directed by Mike Newell, the play was widely proclaimed as the most promising debut by a playwright since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and is today’s Wednesday Play. If you like it, remember to support the makers by buying it on DVD, and to try out a previous Wednesday Play of McDougall’s, Just a Boy’s Game.