The Weekly Play

A weekly classic TV play. Used to be every Wednesdays, but now could be any time, any place and anywhere

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: The Incredible Robert Baldick – Never Come Night (1972)

9 January 2013 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

As we learnt last year in ‘The Wednesday Play’, the various play and anthology series that the BBC and other broadcasters used to make sometimes led to TV series being commissioned, based on individual plays. Usually, this wasn’t the intention behind making the play in the first place but something that emerged from the play’s popularity. But sometimes broadcasters have gone out of their way to create plays with the potential to become series.

Drama Playhouse was a BBC series launched in 1969 explicitly designed to showcase plays that had the potential to become series: indeed, each play uniquely had both a series title and an episode title when broadcast, despite ostensibly being one-offs. Between 1969 and 1972, over its three seasons each of three episodes, the series did quite well in achieving its aims: season one resulted in the 13-episode spy show Codename, starring The Champions‘ Alexandra Bastedo and Callan‘s Anthony Valentine; season two did even better giving us not only The Regiment and The Befrienders but also the mighty The Onedin Line; and had it not been for a little problem with the Munich Olympics, the final third season might have gone three for three as well. Unfortunately, although the first two plays, Sutherland’s Law and The Venturers, got picked up to series, the final installment, The Incredible Robert Baldick, never made it to a full run.

Given its pedigree, this was a little surprising. The play was written by Terry Nation, the creator of Doctor Who‘s Daleks and frequent contributor to ITC shows including The Avengers and The Persuaders!. When The Persuaders!, for which he was also script editor, didn’t get a second series, Nation returned after a six-year gap to the BBC and pitched his idea for a series: The Incredible Robert Baldick.

Despite being Nation’s work, The Incredible Robert Baldick – Never Come Night is for all intents and purposes a Nigel Kneale play, with its period setting that will turn out to contain future shocks (cf Kneale’s The Road), a brilliant scientist investigating a mysterious buried object that’s causing a haunting (Quatermass and the Pit) and the idea of a house retaining ‘memories’ of incidents and emotions that can be replayed (The Stone Tape, which amazingly wasn’t set to air for another few months). There are also elements of Doctor Who, with Robert Hardy’s polymath know-it-all zooming around the country in his specially built train, The Tsar, solving mysteries with the help of his entourage, including gamekeeper John Rhys Davies. He’s even called ‘Doctor’ by his friends. And the ending? Fascinating, but straight out of Doctor Who.

Indeed, as well as the Munich incident, it’s this ending that may have stopped a series being commissioned. Despite being an obvious attempt to lay down a series arc, its science fiction qualities were so out of keeping with the rest of the play’s more down-to-earth and supernatural tones that many of the audience felt cheated.

All the same, it’s an interesting and sometimes scary piece, and Robert Hardy is mesmerising as the eponymous Baldick – you can imagine what Doctor Who would have been like with him as the Doctor using just this as a template. Enjoy!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xstp9n

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Nuts In May (1976)

19 December 2012 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Nuts in May, featuring Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman. Also pictured is Mike Leigh

To end this year and my current season of Wednesday Plays, I’m going to leave you with what is arguably the best of all the plays that have ever aired on British TV (discuss): Mike Leigh’s 1976 Play For Today Nuts in May. Starring Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman as the eccentric married couple Candice Marie and Keith, it sees the nature-loving duo going on a camping holiday and putting vast amounts of work into ensuring that they have the perfect vacation. But when less high-minded campers arrive, things get a little… strained.

Voted the 49th greatest British TV programme by the BFI, the play has influenced everyone from Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer through to Ben Wheatley, the director of the recent Sightseers*. So put your feet up and enjoy the hilarious and near to the bone Nuts In May. As always, if you like it, buy it to support those nice people who made it in the first place.

* Although he hadn’t seen it before he was about to make the movie, so ended up removing bits to make Sightseers less like Nuts In May

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: K9 and Company (1981)

12 December 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

K9 and Company

Okay, a little bit of a cheat since it wasn’t broadcast as part of a play ‘strand’, such as Play for Today or Armchair Theatre, but here, for your delectation, is K9 and Company, the first ever Doctor Who spin-off and arguably the best of them all.

First broadcast on 28 December 1981, this pilot for a TV show that would never materialise saw Elisabeth Sladen return to her most famous role, Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith, now safely returned to Earth and living a life for herself once again as a journalist. But when she goes to visit her Aunt Lavinia in the country, she finds her aunt is missing – but Lavinia has left behind a present from her friend the Doctor… Can you guess from the title what it is?

The show was an attempt by then Doctor Who producer John Nathan Turner to solve two ‘problems’ – the first was that he wanted to get Lis Sladen back into Doctor Who, but she was unwilling to be just a companion again; the second was what to do about Doctor Who companion K9, who was logistically problematic. As a result, JNT wanted to write out the robot dog but he/it was incredibly popular. K9 and Company, in which Lis Sladen would be the Doctor figure and K9 a helper, was his solution.

And, actually, it’s pretty good. Written by former BBC producer Terence Dudley (Doomwatch, Survivors), beyond K9, it doesn’t touch on science fiction at all, instead being a spooky Christmas mystery involving what appears to be the supernatural. Sarah Jane gets some character development and family background – and gets to beat up a baddie (in Dudley’s novelisation of the story, it’s suggested she’s now a karate black belt). And it’s an enjoyable 50 minutes or so.

The show got above average ratings – 8.4m, which was more than the average episode of Doctor Who was getting at the time. But unfortunately it was a victim of BBC politics: commissioned by Bill Cotton, it was disliked by his replacement as BBC1 controller, Alan Hart, who chose not to commission a series.

But in many ways, the show lived on and was not forgotten. In the Doctor Who story The Five Doctors, both Sarah Jane and K9, now living together in a suburban house, make an appearance. School Reunion reintroduced Sarah Jane to the new series of Doctor Who and she had K9 with her – by now, broken down and in need of repair by the Doctor. And, of course, Sarah Jane got another spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, in which a new and improved K9 made at first occasional appearances before becoming a regular in the third series.

But here, for your delectation, is the full thing, which is also available from Amazon: buy it if you like it! One word of advice: even if your eyes can withstand the title sequence, your ears probably won’t be able to take the theme tune, so probably best to mute it.

The Wednesday Play: The New Twilight Zone – A Small Talent For War (1985)

28 November 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Plays can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be several hours, sometimes even days, or in the case of the new Twilight Zone episode A Small Talent For War, they can be as short as eight minutes.

As remarked previously, Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone turned in some of the finest works of short drama ever to grace US TV screens. With a revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents proving popular in the 1980s and a Twilight Zone movie doing reasonably well at the cinema, too, so The Twilight Zone was resurrected for three seasons of largely original scripts between 1985 and 1989. These included contributions from Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Stephen King, George RR Martin, David Gerrold, J Michael Straczynski, Rockne S O’Bannon and others, with directors Wes Craven, William Friedkin and Joe Dante all getting a turn behind the camea, too.

One of the revival’s most novel features – for the first two seasons, at least – was to forego the mandatory half-hour or hour-long episode length, with many episodes airing in tandem or triplets with others to make up the full run-time. While it never quite reached the heights of the original, one of the new series’ very finest short pieces was A Small Talent For War, starring John Glover (Brimstone and Smallville) as an alien who delivers an ultimatum to the world. It’s a lean piece of brilliance, entertaining, funny, chilling and in its own way profound. Enjoy!

The Weekly Play

Play for Today: Armchair Theatre – The Hothouse (1964)

22 November 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

In an exciting mirror of the real world and to cover up the fact that I was too busy yesterday to do The Wednesday Play (sorry), for this week at least, The Wednesday Play has become Play For Today. 

This week’s play comes from ITV’s flagship play strand, Armchair Theatre. Most people interested in UK TV plays tend to focus on the BBC’s Play for Today, The Wednesday Play, et al, but ITV did produce a really superb range of plays itself. Making its first appearance in 1956, Armchair Theatre was the most notable of ITV’s play strands, attracting writers such as Fay Weldon, Jack Rosenthal, John Hopkins, John Mortimer and Allan Prior, and giving us A Night Out from Harold Pinter, Robert Muller’s Hitler ‘what if’ The Night Conspirators and Alun Owen’s Lena, O My Lena.

Various plays were even popular enough to launch spin-off series, including Callan (A Magnum for Schneider), Out of This World (Dumb Martian), Armchair Mystery Theatre, Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width and The Sweeney (Regan).

However, today’s play is the 1964 production The Hothouse, starring Harry H Corbett from Steptoe and Son, and Diana Rigg, a year before she became Emma Peel in The Avengers. Written by and co-starring Donald Churchill, this light-hearted play pulled in an all-time audience record of 8.3m homes. In it, Churchill plays Gordon Parsley, the assistant manager of a supermarket, part of a chain owned by self-made millionaire Harry Fender (Corbett). Hoping to be promoted, Gordon’s prospects look bright when, at the annual staff dance, Harry takes a shine to the ambitious employee’s vivacious wife, Charlotte (Miranda Connell).

On the other hand, the boss’s interest in Charlotte could spell trouble – especially when Harry’s wife Anita (Rigg) decides to meddle and invites the young couple to spend a weekend at the Fenders’ country cottage, where Harry tends his precious mangoes and melons in a hothouse.

Here it is, remastered in all its glory. If you like it, get buy it on DVD (it’s a special feature on The Avengers series 4 DVDs). Enjoy!