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: Cathy Come Home (1966)

27 June 2012 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Well, we’ve done a little dance around the decades to take in all manner of different genres for The Wednesday Play, but today it’s time to go hard-core for a play that’s been voted the best British drama ever: The Wednesday Play‘s Cathy Come Home, starring Ray Brooks and Carol White.

Written by Jeremy Sanford, produced by legendary producer Tony Garnett and directed by one of Britain’s finest, most important film directors, Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home is also possibly the most influential British TV play ever made, highlighting on TV for the first time the problems of the homeless in the Britain of 1966: the play was watched by 12.5m viewers, a quarter of the British population at the time, and eventually led to the formation of the charity Crisis as well as changes in the law to allow homeless fathers to stay with their wives and children in hostels.

As well as revolutionising attitudes to homelessness, the play also revolutionised British TV direction. At the time, most TV plays and dramas were shot in studios on video, with a somewhat theatrical direction. Loach instead used a documentary style, shooting everything on location on 16mm film, often with handheld cameras – although union regulations of the time forced Loach and cinematographer Tony Imi to shoot about 10 minutes of the play on video, which they telerecorded and spliced into the film as required.

So, yes, it’s important.

But without further ado, here’s the play, which you can watch in one of three ways: DVD, by giving Ken Loach films some money with the first YouTube clip after the jump, or by watching the regular YouTube version that follows it. Obviously, if you choose option three and like the play, go for options one or two afterwards to ensure that nice Mr Loach and the BBC get some money for their hard work.

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The Wednesday Play: Rumpole of the Bailey (1975)

20 June 2012 Rob Buckley 1 Comment
Few unscrupulous lawyers have been loved as much as Horace Rumpole. While the airwaves have been littered for years with lawyers fighting the good fight – whether in the US in the guise of Perry Mason or Ben Matlock or in the UK as Kavanagh QC or Peter Kingdom – lawyers who fundamentally don’t care whether their client is guilty or not and will defend villains as well as they defend the innocent have been fundamentally scarce.

Maybe it took a real lawyer, John Mortimore, to expose that truer side of the legal profession. Mortimer began his Rumpole journey by writing a Wednesday Play, Infidelity Took Place, for the BBC in 1968. This satirical play – a comment on newly enacted English divorce laws – told the story of a happily married couple who decide to get divorced to take advantage of the more beneficial tax situation they would enjoy were they legally separated. The play features a character, Leonard Hoskins (played by John Nettleton of Yes, Minister fame), a divorce lawyer with a domineering mother, who can be seen as an early prototype of Horace Rumpole

In the early 1970s, Mortimer was appearing for some football hooligans when James Burge, with whom he was sharing the defence, told him: “I’m really an anarchist at heart, but I don’t think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot.”

“And there,” Mortimer realised, “I had Rumpole.”

Mortimer approached Play for Today producer Irene Shubik, who had overseen Infidelity Took Place, with a new idea for a play entitled My Darling Prince, Peter Kropotkin that centred around a barrister called Horace Rumbold. Rumbold would have a particular interest in 19th-century anarchists, especially the Russian Peter Kropotkin from whom the title of the play was drawn. The character’s name was later changed to Horace Rumpole when it was discovered that there was a real barrister called Horace Rumbold. The title of the play was briefly changed to Jolly Old Jean Jacques Rousseau before settling on the less esoteric Rumpole of the Bailey.

Finding Rumpole

Mortimer was keen on Michael Hordern for the role of Rumpole. When Hordern proved unavailable, the part went to Australian-born actor Leo McKern. Mortimer was initially unenthusiastic about McKern’s casting but changed his opinion upon seeing him at rehearsal. Rumpole, a barrister with a strict code – if there’s any doubt whatsoever about whether someone committed a crime, they’re entitled to the presumption of innocence and as strong a defence as possible – is as cynical about the justice system (“Crime doesn’t pay, but it’s a living”) as he is passionate about defending his clients; in this case, a sullen black youth accused of stabbing a stranger at a bus stop. Though his wife (“she who must be obeyed”) needles him as “an old Bailey hack”, he rises to the occasion after determining that there is more to this “20-minute case” than simply “just another boy with a dagger”, and Rumpole spends the play getting the best of scowling judges and corrupt policemen in a perfect performance by McKern.

Aware of the potential for further stories centred on Rumpole, Irene Shubik approached the BBC’s Head of Plays, Christopher Morahan, and obtained permission from him to commission a further six Rumpole of the Bailey scripts from John Mortimer. However, Morahan left his post at the BBC a short time later and his successor was not interested in turning Rumpole of the Bailey into a series. At around this time, Shubik was contacted by Verity Lambert (one of this blog’s ‘blog goddesses‘, the then head of drama at Thames Television, who was looking for ideas for an up-market drama series. Impressed with Rumpole of the Bailey, Lambert offered Shubik the opportunity to bring the series to Thames. John Mortimer readily agreed, since it would mean more money, and Shubik (and Rumpole) duly left the BBC in late 1976.

Rumpole was to appear in seven series on ITV, as well as a TV movie, radio programmes and books. But thanks to the power of YouTube, you can watch that very first Rumpole Play for Today after the jump, since it’s this week’s Wednesday Play. If you like it, don’t forget to buy it from Amazon!

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The Wednesday Play: 1984 (1954)

13 June 2012 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

People elevated to God-like status logo

Time to induct a new member into the pantheon of blog gods: Nigel Kneale, the god of writing innovation and scary predictions.

Kneale was one of the first TV playwrights and drama writers, famously emptying the streets of Britain with The Quatermass Experiment, a six-part 1953 science-fiction serial that revolutionised television and brought intelligent science-fiction to the masses.

Kneale principally remains famous for the character of Professor Bernard Quatermass, who went on to appear in three further TV series on both the BBC and ITV as well as three Hammer Horror movies, a radio play and 2005 BBC4 remake.

But Kneale was one of television great trailblazers. As well as predicting reality TV in the play, The Year of the Sex Olympics, he also created the idea of the scientific supernatural play for TV with The Stone Tape, in which scientists investigate the supernatural and discover that houses and stone can act as a recording material for events, thus creating ghosts when they ‘play back’ the event – something still described in psychic investigations as the ‘stone tape’ phenomenon.

For this, his many other works and his influence on television and film, Nigel Kneale has been made a blog god. Here’s a lovely documentary to explain in greater detail why he’s so brilliant.

But back in 1954, Kneale managed to empty the streets of Britain a second time, as well as cause questions to be asked in Parliament about the BBC’s moral standards. How? With an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 starring Peter Cushing and future Quatermass André Morrell that was voted one of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century. It’s our Wednesday Play and you can watch it after the jump.

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The Wednesday Play: Gangsters (1975-1978)

6 June 2012 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Gangsters

We’re going to step away from the surreal and fantastic almost completely for this week’s Wednesday Play: Gangsters, an episode of Play for Today written by Philip Martin. Set in the multi-cultural criminal community of Birmingham, Gangsters was originally conceived by producer David Rose as a drama with sensibilities similar to those of The French Connection that would showcase England’s second city. It deals with various ethnic groups competing to run scams, exploit illegal immigrants and outwit the almost equally morally suspect law-enforcement officers.

The play caused outrage not just from Birmingham City Council, which resented the perceived slur against the city’s character, but also from the press, which argued it had featured racial stereotypes, such as servile Indians and clueless whites. However, the play achieved higher ratings than any previous episode so Martin was commissioned to write a full series – one of the few spin-offs the Play for Today had.

The play itself formed the template for most of the first series of the spin-off, with former SAS soldier and convict John Kline (Maurice Colbourne) acting as an undercover underworld agent to investigate crimes and pass intelligence back to ‘DI6’. But I said “almost completely” at the beginning because despite its subject matter and occasional ultraviolence, Gangsters became a very different beast in its second series, with the surreal intruding throughout – writer Martin is seen dictating the script to a typist during the season and there are references to film noir, gangster films, westerns, Bollywood and kung fu movies throughout. On top of the increasingly bizarre end-of-episode cliffhangers, the series ended with the characters breaking the fourth wall and walking off set.

But here, for your delectation is that first Play For Today – a sort of ‘Roy Rogers meets Get Carter in Birmingham”. If you like it, buy the whole thing on DVD.

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The Wednesday Play: Brimstone and Treacle (1976/1987)

30 May 2012 Rob Buckley 9 Comments

It’s Wednesday so guess what. Yes, that’s right. It’s time for The Wednesday Play, a chance to watch a classic British television play in its entirety. This week, the play we’re going to be watching is Play For Today‘s Brimstone and Treacle, written by one of Britain’s finest television playwrights Dennis Potter and starring Michael Kitchem Denholm Elliott, Patricia Lawrence and Michelle Newell.

Brimstone and Treacle caused something of a stir in its day because despite being made in 1976 and adapted into a movie starring Sting in 1982, it was never screened on television until 1987.

Why? Because of the subject matter. Brimstone and Treacle sees Kitchen, who is possibly the devil himself – certainly someone who can break the ‘fourth wall’ – come to visit an ordinary household in which the daughter has been severely injured in a hit-and-run accident and is apparently in a near vegetative state.

Let’s just say that after that, bad things happen. But then so do good things. It’s the combination of the two that caused offence. Alasdair Milne, then head of TV programmes at the BBC, decided to withdraw and ultimately ban it, on the grounds that the work was “brilliantly written and made, but nauseating”.

Potter later said:

I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated my view of the world and the people in it. I recall writing (and the words now make me shudder) that the only meaningful sacrament left to human beings was for them to gather in the streets in order to be sick together, splashing vomit on the paving stones as the final and most eloquent plea to an apparently deaf, dumb and blind God. […] I was engaged in an extremely severe struggle not so much against the dull grind of a painful and debilitating illness but with unresolved, almost unacknowledged, ‘spiritual’ questions.

So follow me after the break to one of British television’s most controversial works. Watch it to the very end or you’ll miss out on something important.

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