wed play season five

The Wednesday Play Season Five
Season five was produced by Peter Luke except for Photo Finish which was produced by Bernard Hepton and A Peice Of Resistance which was produced by Cedric Messina.

Photo Finish

Transmitted : 21st September 1966
Script : Peter Ustinov
Director : Naomi Capon

Synopsis : Paul Rogers appears as an eighty-year-old man who is able to see his former self at the ages of twenty, forty and sixty.

Cast : Paul Rogers (Sam), Robert Brown (Sam Sixty), James Maxwell (Sam Forty), Simon Prebble (Sam Twenty), Peter Ashmore (Reginald Kinsale), Barbara Couper (Stella Eighty / Agnes Kinsale), Daphne Slater (Stella Forty), Meg Wynn Owen (Stella Twenty / Alice Montego), Priscilla Morgan (Clarice / Ada) and Michael Bates (Tommy).

Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy-five minutes and was transmitted from 9:05pm to 10:20pm.

Music for this episode was composed by Norman Kay.

This episode was a repeat transmission of a play previously transmitted on BBC-2.

A Hero Of Our Time

Transmitted : 28th September 1966
Script : Ian Dallas based on the novel by Mihail Lermontov
Director : Henric Hirsch

Publicity : A Hero Of Our Time - Alan Bates stars as a young Russian officer in tonight's play: An obscure watering-place somewhere in the Caucasian mountains whose patrons form a snobbish clique which talks, back-bites, achieves nothing. A smell of futility over all.

A young officer who says of himself: "My role in life is to be the last act in other people's tragedy". A bumptious cadet and two women, one a young princess and the other a tuberculosis victim. These ingredients make up the recipe for pointless disaster in tonight's play, adapted from the only major novel of Mihail Yurevich Lermontov (1814-1841). Lermontov, the "Russian Byron", observed like so many of his contemporaries the aristocracy of his country quarrelling and gossiping its way towards destruction, and the story is largely autobiographical. It also visualises weirdly his own end; Lermontov died at twenty-six, the loser in a ridiculous duel.

Pechorin, the tragic hero who brings on his own doom by starting an affair purely as a relief from boredom, is played tonight by Alan Bates, whom filmgoers will remember from Zorba The Greek. The two women in his life are Natasya Pyne as the susceptible Princess Mary and Mary Miller as Vera, Pechorin's old flame who turns up at the spa and proves to be dying of consumption. The novel has been adapted by Ian Dallas, who besides several original plays has contributed versions of novels like Vanity Fair to television. The director is Henric Hirsch who, as a refugee from Hungary, has a special knowledge of and feeling for Eastern European attitudes and is thus well qualified to interpret a writer as regionally "atmospheric" as Lermontov. (Radio Times, September 22, 1966).

Cast : Alan Bates (Grigor Pechorin), Mary Miller (Vera), Terence De Marney (Doctor Werner), Ronald Bridges (Grushnizki), Natasha Pyne (Princess Mary), Grizelda Hervey (Princess Ligovskoy), Jeremy Young (The Captain Of The Dragoons), David Belcher and Donald Sumpter (The Officers), Teresa Buckingham, Brigit Forsyth, Sydney Gatcum and Michael Mulcaster.

Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of eighty-five minutes and was transmitted from 9:40pm to 11:05pm.

The Frighteners

Transmitted : 12th October 1966
Script : Daniel Farson
Director : Gilchrist Calder

Publicity : Ben Howard, Tom Adams and Griffith Davies appear in tonight's play by television personality Dan Farson - The Frighteners: Only a few miles of London streets separate Chelsea and Limehouse, but socially and culturally they are worlds apart.

Tonight's play tells of one man who tries to cross from one side to the other. James Henderson from Chelsea sets up house in the East End. He converts an old warehouse into a rather posh home. But his first night out among the natives ends in disaster. He hears a cry for help and rushes to assist a man who is being beaten up by a gang. James ends up with a black eye and minus a wallet. The gang of petty criminals - "The Frighteners" - now have his money, his home and office address, and a photograph of Jill, the girlfriend who hates her fiance's romantic excursion into the East End. They also find an invitation to a "Bring-who-you-like" party in Chelsea.

Tonight's play - first shown in July 1965 - was the first writing effort by television personality Daniel Farson. Farson himself flirted with the East End and in fact bought a pub there. He has lived in Limehouse for some years. He says that unintentional caricature is one of the commonest pitfalls when outsides write about the East End. To guard against this his friend Alan King, born and bred in Limehouse, acted as adviser and the dialogue was carefully vetted for authenticity. (Radio Times, October 6, 1966).

Cast : Tom Adams (Al), Griffith Davies (Brian), Ben Howard (Rod), George Sewell (The Barman), Frank Jarvis (Dennis), Michael Johnson (James), Norma West (Jill), Kevin Bennett (Teddy), Jezebel (Wodehouse The Dog), Mark Kingston (Morrie), Helen Cotterill (Rene), Richard Klee (The Landlord), Andrea Lawrence (The Barmaid), Katy Greenwood (Doreen), June Murphy (Mary), Elisabeth Murray (Pamela), Danvers Walker (Christopher), Peter Ducrow (The Detective), Perin Lewis (Borden), James Prescott (Harry), Perin Lewis (Miss Hill), Hilda Fenemore (Mrs Mollins), Irish Johnson and Dennis Smith (The Singers), Pete Patrick (The Drummer), Harry Groombridge (The Double-Bass Player) and Norton York (The Pianist).

Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy minutes and was transmitted from 9:05pm to 10:15pm.

This episode was first transmitted on July 8th, 1965, as part of the Londoners series of plays first presented on BBC-2. This play was the third and final extract from this series to be re-screened as part of The Wednesday Play.

A Piece Of Resistance

Transmitted : 19th October 1966
Script : Terence Dudley
Director : Geoffrey Nethercote

Publicity : James Villiers, William Kendall, Frederick Jaeger, Lally Bowers, and Jacqueline Ellis are in tonight's play, A Piece Of Resistance: How the British would have stood up to a German occupation during the last war is an intriguing question to which a number of answers have been attempted. In fact one small portion of the United Kingdom was occupied - the Channel Islands - and it is on one of them that Terence Dudley has set A Piece Of Resistance.

As the title indicates, this is not another cloak-and-dagger epic, but a look at the sillier aspects of war in a situation where you are close enough to your enemies to discover that some of them are quite nice. Colonel Barraclough, Indian Army, Retired, is enduring German occupation of the island more or less passively along with his wife and daughter. Their household is disrupted, however, by the arrival of a German officer who is both pleasantly civilised and susceptible to the daughter's charms. Farcical complications soon develop. (Radio Times, October 13, 1966).

Cast : Lally Bowers (Mrs Barraclough), William Kendall (Lieutenant-Colonel Barraclough), Frederick Jaeger (Ober-Lieutenant von Chemnitz), James Villiers (Lieutenant-Commander Paul Williams), William Holmes (Sergeant Sydney Hubbard), Gerald Cross (Carl), Michael Craze (Ernst), Jacqueline Ellis (Anne Barraclough), Gabor Barakbe (Unter Offizier Frederick Fishcer), Patricia Healby (Jane Deane), Endre Muller (Hans Koperwas), Bernard Kelly (Philip Pichon), Stuart Hibberd and Frank Phillips (The Newsreaders).

Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy-eight minutes and was transmitted from 9:40pm to 10:58pm.

Please note synopsis are taken from the original Radio Times listings for the day of transmission.

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