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The
Wednesday Play Has Arrived
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Convicted
murderers are not usually the first choice for writing talent chosen
by the producers of television, and MacTaggart and Smith's
commissioning of A Tap On The Shoulder from former prisoner
James O'Connor (as the first edition of The Wednesday
Play's second season) attracted controversy virtually from the
outset. Distancing itself from polite, restrained television presenting
characters far removed from contemporary life, the play concerned
the rise of a gangland villain to baronet and, along the way, cynically
explored the hypocritical state of Britain's class structure.
The play was a showcase for the talents of O'Connor, director
Kenneth Loach, and actor Lee Montague, who appeared
as central character Archibald Cooper. Over the course of
seventy-five minutes, audiences were introduced to drama with a
decidedly expressionist air, thanks chiefly to the fact that O'Connor
was not an established scriptwriter and as such did not write within
the norm, as it were.
Left:
Sir Jocelyn, The Minister Would Like A Word... |
The tempo, tone and language featured in the play differed starkly from
the first season, and firmly impressed upon audiences that The Wednesday
Play was drama with intent; quality produce with the capacity to grip,
surprise, entertain and occasionally shock would now become a permanent
mid-week fixture. Simon Raven's Sir Jocelyn, The Minister Would Like
A Word…, a delightfully acerbic comedic offering, found pride
of place as the second of twenty-five planned episodes, offering a change
of pace but a commitment to Newman's ideals nonetheless. The bittersweet
tale of romance between two working-class navvies was the essential core
of Julia Jones' The Navigators, which proved to be a hasty last-minute
replacement for the widely-publicised John Hopkins play Fable,
which was unceremoniously postponed for a week as the BBC hierarchy
considered that such a controversial play should not be transmitted on
an evening in which the broadcaster had earlier concerned itself with
a United States presidential inauguration.
Fable |
The
pomp and ceremony of the ruling white class in the land of the free
would have jarred distinctly with the content on Hopkins'
script, which struck at the heart of The Wednesday Play's
intentions to produce thought-provoking and near-the-knucle drama.
A fable which took as its premise the stark role reversal of a United
Kingdom in which the ethnic minority became the majority, and
the white majority became swept up in an apartheid similar to that
which plagued South Africa and, in turn, became the minority,
proved to be palpably controversial drama which exemplified the
free licence afforded to writers of this series.
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Johnny
Clive and Neville Smith in Wear A Very Big Hat |
Exploring
the class system, social inequities and the power of one subversive
voice against the system, Fable was a critical assessment
of contemporary racism which bore all the customary hallmarks of
Hopkins' high-calibre productions. Hugh Whitemore's Dan,
Dan, The Charity Man and the incomparable Ashes To Ashes
by Marc Brandel followed, along with Eric Coltart's Wear
A Very Big Hat. Whilst these three plays, combining comedy with
humanity, drama with malice and all with a permanent question mark
over what it means to be a member of contemporary society, were
highly worthy fare, the eighth play in the second season would mark
a turning point in The Wednesday Play and introduce one of
the more notable literary powers the Twentieth Century would
ever produce. |
Lez Cooke most appropriately set the scene when, in his book British
Television Drama: A History, he observed that "Smith
guided the early development of The Wednesday Play, bringing in Tony Garnett
and Ken Trodd as assistant story editors (Garnett deciding to forsake
the acting career which he had been pursuing for five years and move behind
the scenes) and commissioning the first plays from Dennis Potter and other
new writers. This group formed the nucleus of a loose collection of people
who pioneered a new form of television drama for The Wednesday Play, building
on the foundations laid by Troy Kennedy Martin and John McGrath in the
early 1960s, which set the standard for innovative and challenging television
drama for the next two decades".
The Confidence Course introduced audiences to the wonderous works
of Dennis Potter, though his first contribution was a somewhat
ordinary and lacklustre affair submerged in the shadow of the second play
he scripted for the series which, for a combination of reasons (the majority
of which concerned difficulties arising between Potter and MacTaggart),
was eventually withdrawn from the second series and, under the stewardship
of incumbent story editor Tony Garnett, found a home in the third
season of The Wednesday Play alongside an especially-commissioned
prequel to the tale. Of the plays which followed, James O'Connor's
return to the series with Three Clear Sundays (which justified
MacTaggart and Smith's faith in a writer of considerable
talent), David Mercer's And Did Those Feet and Troy Kennedy
Martin's The Pistol (an enormously successful portrait of the impact
of Pearl Harbour upon the American psyche, whereupon a weapon becomes
the ultimate prize in the face of an act of aggression) proved to be the
most outstanding and memorable contributions to a season of plays which
saw audience figures accelerate from a modest million to eight million
over the course of six months.
Sydney Newman's dream had at last become a reality, thanks to the
capabilities of James MacTaggart and the strength of a rich and
previously untapped stream of creative licence which returned the power
of mould-breaking story-telling to the writers. The Wednesday Play
had without doubt arrived. Such was BBC Television's commitment
to ensure a steady continuity of high-calibre mid-week productions that
a series of repeat transmissions was almost immediately set into motion
at the conclusion of the second series, cut short only by the introduction
of The Wednesday Thriller, a series of eight diverting plays which
were heralded by the wonderful sub-title of "Not For The Nervous".
This smaller cluster of productions enabled writers to inject an air of
menace and a touch of the macabre into tautly-scripted tales set to disturb
the late-night brigade.
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