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Homes
Fit For Cathy
Where
The Buffalo Roam |
Dennis
Potter's Where The Buffalo Roam, a Swansea-based Western
of sorts which featured a memorable performance from Hywel Bennett,
opened the sixth season of The Wednesday Play, a season predominately
produced by Lionel Harris, but with contributions from Tony
Garnett, Jonathan Miller and Cedric Messina. John
Mortimer's The Head Waiter afforded a wonderous turn for Donald
Pleasance, but it would prove to be instantly forgettable in
the wake of the third edition of the season, which reunited Tony
Garnett and Kenneth Loach in one of the most highly-controversial
and memorable outings the programme would ever produce. |
If Up The Junction had served to blur the distinctive lines between
fact and fiction, their visual realisation of Jeremy Sandford's
tale of the inadequacy of the welfare system in contemporary Britain,
Cathy Come Home, brought into being an entirely novel approach
to television drama. Presented as a "drama-documentary", the
story primarily concerned itself with homelessness and the effect upon
the families of those concerned.
The visual presence of the piece as virtually a newsreel-style documentary
production which faced the audience with a "warts-and-all" presentation
of the harsh realities of contemporary life, the fact that the homeless
are a part of society which the complacent middle-class shied away from
and turned a blind eye to their problems and pitfalls, succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams, as the issues raised in the play lead to prolonged
public and political discussion on the issue and ultimately prompted the
formation of the "Shelter" charity. The story started
with the relatively simple premise of the marriage of a young woman to
a seemingly prosperous young man, and the product of their happiness being
two children. However, this cosy middle-class setting was soon shattered
when the husband suffered a serious accident which prevented him from
working and the family spiralled into poverty. Ejected from their home,
they find themselves moving from temporary accommodation to eventual homelessness,
and the melodramatic air of the piece was starkly fuelled when Cathy's
children were taken into custody by social services. The episodic stages
of Cathy's life were laced with unbridled happiness and the pits
of despair, and the fact that a large proportion of the play was staged
on location further enchanced the power of the piece as a contemporary,
gritty and realistic "product-of-our-time" as opposed to a studio-bound-play.
Carole
White and Ray Brooks in Cathy Come Home |
The
immediacy of hand-held camerawork further confirmed this position, and
the impact upon audiences was profound: "Tony
Garnett moved over from script-editing to producing, with the ground-breaking
Cathy Come Home (BBC-1, 16 November 1966), perhaps the most famous Wednesday
Play of all because of the public's response it elicited, both from viewers
and the authorities, as a result of the play's success in highlighting
one of the social problems of the day: homelessness and its attendant
side-effect of family breakdown. The impact of Cathy Come Home was reinforced
by the adoption of a drama documentary approach and the filming of ninety
percent of the drama on location, in real streets and houses, with ordinary
people appearing in the drama alongside professional actors. This gave
the play, which no longer looked like a "play" in the traditional
sense, an authenticity and a veracity which heightened its emotional effect,
undoubtedly contributing to its social impact. As Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh
has argued, this was `drama' turned into `news', a deliberate strategy
on behalf of Tony Garnett, director Ken Loach and writer Jeremy Sandford
to try to make an intervention that would influence social policy"
( Lez Cooke - British Television Drama: A History).
Sydney
Newman would have been justifiably proud of this production (which took
as many risks as it reaped in critical acclaim) as the play unashamedly
approached an issue at the heart of contemporary society without refraining
from highlighting the tragic waste of human life which arises from the
lack of a compassionate society.
John
Gielgud and Felicity Kendall in The Mayfly and the Frog. |
The
fact that the play itself enjoyed three repeat transmissions, two
in quick succession shortly after its original broadcast, confirmed
the pride its makers had in the production, which has since helped
to bolster Garnett's stock of trade at World Productions,
which would later produce the highly-controversial yet critically-acclaimed
series This Life and The Cops (which once again confronted
audiences with its graphic profanities, sex and drug use). Ian
McShane appeared in Christopher Williams' The Private Tutor,
a somewhat lighter comedy-drama to lift the tone after such a harrowing
experience the previous week, and concerned itself with the introduction
of a stranger on a dyed-in-the-wool household and the impact of
his presence on those residing therein.
Simon Raven's A Pyre For Private James and Marc Brandel's
A Tale Of Two Wives were further instalments, followed by Nemone
Lethbridge's second part of the trilogy featuring Planatagenet
King, Little Master Mind. A delicious tale of cross-generational
love between a fiery and determined young woman and a rich and lonely
millionaire was played out in The Mayfly And The Frog, presented
audiences with a truly wonderous turn from Felicity Kendall
and Sir John Gielgud. |
As a logical extension to Dennis Potter's previously broadcast
Alice, Jonathan Miller's internationally-successful Alice
In Wonderland was transmitted on December 28th 1966, released
as part of The Wednesday Play series though never transmitted under
its umbrella title.
Jonathan
Miller's Alice In Wonderland |
One
of the most delightful realisations of this well-known tale, Miller
elected to cast a wide range of personalities (from Michael Gough
to Peter Sellers, Alan Bennett to Wilfred Brambell, Peter
Cook to Sir John Gielgud, Leo McKern to Michael Redgrave)
in the leading roles, all of whom were accomplished character actors
of their time who positively shone throughout. The casting of Anne-Marie
Mallik as the wide-eyed innocent, Alice, was also inspired,
and the play itself has lived long in the memory of audiences. |
Person To Person, The Order (a wonderful play transmitted under the
banner title of The Largest Theatre In The World, broadcast simultaneously
in a wide range of European countries and hailed as a Wednesday
Play production) and Everybody's Rich Except Us followed, a
rich mixture of drama and comedy which sustained the high standard of
the programme throughout, and culminated in the mould-breaking Jim
Allen play The Lump; the central character a militant dock
worker who could readily adapt to the politics of the workplace and the
politics of the union movement, Yorky proved to be a powerhouse
of a performance for Leslie Sands, late of Z-Cars. Further
notable examples of the high-calibre of this particular season were exemplified
in Dennis Potter's Message For Postery (a delightful tale which
would enjoy renewed BBC Television appreciation during the series
Performance in the 1990's), David Mercer's unforgettable
and moving portrait of the shameful treatment of the mentally ill in In
Two Minds, Leon Griffith's deftly-scripted comedy-drama The
Voices In The Park and the series' climax, Drums Along The Avon,
a sharp and witty exploration of the racial divide in a fictional Bristol
city which provided a wonderous platform for the talents of the delightful
Leonard Rossiter.
The Wednesday Play had hit its heights, and as a result of the
strength of its controversial, mould-breaking productions, the demands
of producing even better mid-week entertainment was gradually starting
to take its toll on the programme. A victim of its own success, the series
would now start a gradual decline.
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