The Weekly Play

Last week, ‘Charley Says’ reminded us all just how scared sh*tless Britain was by the threat of nuclear war during the 1960s and 1970s – understandably perhaps, given the risk of destruction of the entire human race. Nevertheless, despite the release of Protect and Survive, not many people were optimistic about their chances come Armageddon.

In part, that’s thanks to the likes of this week’s Wednesday Play, The War Game, which was a genuine Wednesday Play from 1965. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins, this documentary-style production imagined what would happen if there was a limited nuclear strike against Britain. And it’s not pretty, with the instant blinding of those who see the explosion, a firestorm caused by the heat wave, radiation sickness, the British Army burning corpses and the police shooting looters during food riots.

Interspersed throughout the play are interviews with a series of establishment figures in favour of nuclear weapons and even nuclear war that were based on genuine quotations, as well as interviews with a doctor, a psychiatrist and others, giving details of the effects of nuclear weapons on the human body and mind.

Cheery, huh?

Well, no. In fact, following its transmission on 6 August 1965 (the 20th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), the BBC said that “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” and withdrew it, never to air it in full until 1985. But, hey, lucky people, you can watch it now! Remember – if you like it, buy it.

As you’ve probably noticed from previous weeks’ entries in this strand, such as Scum, Contact and Penda’s Fen, director Alan Clarke was responsible for many of British TV’s finest – and toughest – plays. BBC2 Playhouse‘s Diane, starring the then 20-year-old Janine Duvitski (Waiting For God, Abigail’s Party) whom Clarke more or less plucked straight out of drama school to play the 13-year-old protagonist, is one of Clarke’s toughest, dealing with incest on a council estate. 

Written by ‘David Agnew’ (actually Clarke using a BBC pseudonym after re-rewriting Anthony Read’s initial script), it’s harrowing, subtle but still humane, and still packs a punch. 

With The Wednesday Plays, I have tried as much as possible to steer clear of sci-fi, since – and let’s face facts here – there’s plenty enough of that on this ‘ere blog already. However, doing so has meant steering clear of possibly the most famous ‘double bill’ in Play For Today history: The Flipside of Dominick Hide and Another Flip For Dominick.

Set in both the 1980s and 2130, the first play sees time-travelling researcher Dominick Hide (Peter Firth) return to his own past to investigate an ancestor. There he meets a woman, Jane (Caroline Langrishe). And that’s all I can say without spoiling it for you.

So popular was the first play that writer Alan Gibson bowed to popular demand and brought all the characters back for a sequel two years later, about which I can tell you even less because I’ll spoil the first play if I do. Let’s just say it involves another time-traveller and leave it at that.

While being quite slight things that probably won’t impress the hard-core SF fan, they are, as with most BBC sci-fi plays, more about relationships and people than concepts. Both plays contrast the society of the future with the conventions of English society as it was then, as well as the differences between relationships. They also largely rely on Peter Firth’s endearing performance to draw in the viewer, particularly since he seems to know remarkably little about how to survive in the present day for a man whose job it is to know all about the past.

Since their original airings, both plays have been repeated several times and are available on DVD as well (for a mere £6, too). But you can watch them both below. Enjoy! Don’t forget, if you like them, buy them so that the creators are rewarded.

All good things must come to an end, and the various play strands on UK television were eventually replaced with TV movie strands instead. However, that didn’t mean an end to quality. Quite the contrary: Screen Two, BBC2’s film strand, produced some of the best movies/plays that British television has ever produced.

Fittingly, the first ever Screen Two production in 1984 was Alan Clarke’s Contact, based on AFN Clarke’s book of the same name. Hard though it is to believe in retrospect, but Northern Ireland was once a hotspot for terrorism in the western world, with the provisional IRA engaged in decades-long guerrilla warfare with the British army in Northern Ireland, while carrying out bombing campaigns there and on the mainland, too.

It’s a historical situation that was examined in many works, including ITV’s Shoot To Kill, almost all of which were controversial at the time. Contact, which was followed by a sequel from Clarke called Elephant, were the decade’s best attempts at capturing the nature of ‘The Troubles’ on film.

It follows a platoon of paratroopers patrolling ‘bandit country’ in South Armagh, a hotbed of IRA activity running along the unmarked border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It explores the trauma of soldiers living under the constant shadow of terror. With little in the way of plot, Contact is an examination of the dynamics of fear as much as it is a comment on the specifics of the Irish situation. Nevertheless, it re-opened the debate as to how television drama should address the Troubles.

Clarke took the stripped-down narrative approach of Contact even further in 1989 with Elephant. Without story or character, Elephant features 18 reconstructed and completely unrelated murders on the streets of Belfast. Clarke’s intention was to strip away any sectarian justification for killing by showing the harsh realities of murder.