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The
Wednesday Play Special
Season nine was produced by Irene Shubik (episodes 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 15, 19 & 28), Pharic Maclaren (episodes 2 & 20), Graeme MacDonald (episodes 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 21, 27 & 30), Anne Head (episode 13), Ronald Tracers (episodes 14 & 22), Harry Moore (episode 23), Michael bakewell (episodes 29 & 32) and the combined effort of Gerald Savoury and David Koning (episode 18).
Script : David Mercer Director : Anthony Page Producer : Tony Garnett Publicity
: Parachutist For The Nazis - Director
Anthony Page writes about a play that looks at pre-war Germany through
one aristocrat's eyes: When I first read the script of The Parachute
I loved the ambition and richness of imagination David Mercer showed
in it. Sometimes the script had the quality of a sprawling family novel,
sometimes that of a tight, harsh Warner Brothers thriller, and sometimes
it would plunge into the romantic and sinister flow of the hero's dreams.
Script : Peter Terson Director : Alan Clarke Publicity
: Peter Terson has written a new
play for television: The Last Train Through The Harecastle Tunnel -
it is this week's Wednesday Play. Terson is an energetic, friendly,
laughing man of thirty-seven whose manner discourages serious questions
about his art; his attitude to his considerable success in the theatre,
with plays like Zigger Zagger and The Apprentices, is one of amusement
and disbelief. At the same time, you feel, he is himself intensely serious
about what he does.
Publicity : Where The Young Grow Up Quickly - Pharic Maclaren, who produced this week's Wednesday Play - a drama set in Glasgow - talks to Fred Jones: Patterson OK is about the problems of growing up in an unfriendly environment in a big city - in this case it's Glasgow. So inevitably there are some tough characters in it. Spooner is a good example. Still not much more than a lad - but a hard man. The play was written by an Oxford-born Welshman, Ray Jenkins. But in every other way it's very much a Scottish production. It has an all-Scottish cast and was filmed and recorded in Glasgow - some of it in the BBC's Glasgow studio, but much of it on location in the city. And it's the work of Pharic Maclaren, Scotland's best-known producer of television drama. He directed Scobie In September, The Lower Largo Sequence (also a Wednesday Play), The End Of The Game, and the six-part serial The Prior Commitment. "I think the play does try to look honestly at its central problem," says Maclaren. "It's a much more realistic subject than some I have handled, and we have tried to use more realistic settings. More than two-thirds of it was shot on locations all over Glasgow". For a man who has had to work from a wheel-chair since he had about a year off with polio in 1962-1963, Pharic Maclaren is extraordinarily mobile. "It's surprising what you can do with the help of a crew who accept it now completely," he says. "They take you with the gear. I've been up mountains, on trains and ships - everywhere. But sometimes they have to use rather devious means to get me there". When he looks back over his programmes, Maclaren remembers that he specially enjoyed making The Lower Largo Sequence and the thriller serials. "They were written with style; this offered opportunities to the director, and we tried to parallel the style. In television the word is still very important". Maclaren thinks hard when you ask about influences, but he doesn't come up with much. His own working life has taken him from films (educational and advertising), and from working as a stringer for newsreels and writing for radio - all this in Glasgow in the 1950s - to television studio management and the production and direction of children's drama for the BBC in London. Programmes to come? "We're doing a Scottish classic, Sunset Song, in five episodes and another six-part thriller serial, The Upper Cae Of Magna Flett. That's set in Scotland too". (Radio Times, October 2, 1969 - Article by Fred Jones). Synopsis : A story about growing up, settiling old scores, falling in love and the effect of surroundings on behaviour. Patterson O.K is set in Glasgow where producer Pharic Maclaren makes the same dramatic use of his surroundings as he did in Edinburgh for Scobie In September and on the Isle of Arran for The Prior Commitment. About the only non-Scottish element in the production is the author, Welshman Ray Jenkins. Cast : Andrew Robertson (Kenny Patterson), Roddy McMillan (Willie Patterson), Callum Mill (John Murdoch), Virginia Stark (Connie Murdoch), Bill Henderson (Baker), Paul Young (Laurie Kyle), Robin Lefevre (The Policeman), Eileen McCallum (Elizabeth Dowie), Douglas Murchie (Andy Gemmell), Stuart Mungall (Spooner), James Grant (Dye) and Arthur Boland (The Barman). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of fifty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:00pm. This episode was recorded in the studios of BBC Scotland.
Synopsis : A mysterious, uninvited guest at a fashionable party gradually involves the other guests in her personal tragedy. Novelist and short-story writer William Trevor has again written a play with a really strong leading role for an actress. His last Wednesday Play, A Night With Mrs Da Tanka, was specially praised for Jeant Kent's performance. Tonight it's Faith Brook's turn in the role of the mysterioius Anna. Cast : Faith Brook (Anna Mackintosh), Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (Mrs Ritchie), Lillias Walker (Mrs Badanski), Roland Cyrram (Toby Oath), Maggie McGrath (Mrs Engelfield), Henry Gilbert (Mr Engelfield), Philip Madoc (Badanski), David Hutcheson (General Ritchie), Alathea Charlton (Dolorea Sweeting), Roger Hammond (Brian Sweeting), David Toohey (The Japanese Waiter) and Joanna Lumley (Elsie Engelfield). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy minutes and was transmitted from 9:15pm to 10:25pm. Lighting for this episode was supervised by Jim Richards. This episode enjoyed a repeat broadcast on September 16th, 1970 and is one of only twelve episodes from the ninth and final season of The Wednesday Play which still exists.
Publicity : Writing With Serious Intent - Alan Plater used to want to be James Thurber really. But here he talks to Anne Chisholm about Durham miners, Softly, Softly, and Wide Sargasso Sea: The Wednesday Play thyis week is Close The Coalhouse Door, the musical documentary about Durham miners by Alan Plater. Commissioned jointly by the BBC and the Newcastle Playhouse, it played to pakced houses in the north before transferring to London in November 1968. The television version is almost exactly the same as the stage original. "I sat down to write a television adaptation," says Plater, "and found myself thinking - what the hell - why not do it as it is? It'll be interesting to find out if it works. It could open out all kinds of possibilities". The basis of the play is the golden wedding party of a Durham mining couple. The history of the community is looked at in flashbacks, which merge skillfully into the mainstream of ther action. Alan Plater was able to draw on his considerable experience as a writer for radio, television, and the theatre in order to do this; He is friendly, serious about his work without being ponderous, and interested in experiment. Afed thirty-four, he was born in Jarrow, but has lived in Hull since he was a child. He has a big Victorian redbrick house in a pleasant, leafy street near the centre of the city, where he lives with his wife and three young children. His study is a large front room, with a huge desk and shelves full of efficient looking box files. He is a well-organised writer. "It can become an affectation, being disorganised. It's a bit silly. I like to meet deadlines: I get very bothered if I don't". He studied architecture at Newcastle University, but soon found it didn't suit him. "I started writing with serious intent when I was about fifteen. I think I wanted to be James Thurber, really". There were some Turber short stories in the shelf behind him. He started writing plays for radio through the BBC regional drama section in Leeds, and regrets the narrowing-down of local opportunities. "I just wonder about some kid who may be starting now". He became a regular writer for the top Northern police series, Z Cars and Softly, Softly. Apart from stage plays and television scripts, he has written a screenplay for a film that has just been made - from D H Lawrence's short novel The Virgin And The Gypsy. He is just starting on another screenplay, from Jean Rhys' brilliant, subtle book Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of Mr Rochester's mad West Indian wife in Jane Eyre. He is also very involved in plans for the new Hull Arts Centre, which he has been helping to organise for the past two years, and is working on a play for the new theatre company there. "I like doing a lot," he said. "I like working. People seem to think that anyone who writes a lot for television is automatically a hack". Not surprisingly, he sounded mildly indignant at that opinion. (Radio Times, October 16, 1969 - Article by Anne Chisholm). Cast : Dudley Foster (The Expert), Alan Browning (John Milburn), Colin Douglas (Thomas Milburn), Bryan Pringle (Geordie), John Woodvine (Jackie), Geraldine Moffatt (Ruth), Brenda Peters (Mary Anne Milburn), Ralph Watson (Frank Milburn), Kevin Stoney (Will Jobling), Robin Parkinson (The Vicar), Jean Becke (Jean), James Garbutt (Hughie), Colin Hale (The Policeman), James Gavigan and Patrick Lewsley (The Pitmen), Augusta Walker and Jean Stirling (The Pitmen's Wives). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of eighty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:30pm. Songs featured in this episode were by Alex Glasgow. Musical Director was William Southgate. Original Stage Design was supervised by Brian Currah. Script Editor for this episode was Shaun MacLaughlin. Close The Coalhouse Door was unexpectedly delayed during the production process, resulting in its eventual withdrawal from the schedules for the eighth season of The Wednesday Play, and its eventual relocation to appear in the schedules for the ninth and final season of the programme. This episode enjoyed a repeat broadcast on September 23rd, 1970.
Publicity : For Roland Culver, playing the part of a drunken old failure was something of a relief. He's sixty-nine now and in the theatre and on films and television nearly all the parts he's offered are "colonels or generals or admirals and it's driving me mad. I'm offered these people to play and I have to do it because they don't offer me anything else. Anybody less likely to be a colonel or an admiral or a general I just can't imagine". He has a touch of the military about him none the less. Although he's courteous and helpful and hospitable he can be a little gruff at times. He's certainly not the kind of man you'd want to take liberties with. And it's hard for one to imagine him not getting his own way. This Services thing all goes back to Commander Rogers in French Without Tears. Commander Rogers made Roland Culver's name and even though that was back in 1939 he still can't live it down. "I'm an actor and I can play any part that anybody asks me to play. But at the moment I've just played a colonel up in Manchester and the BBGC has asked me to play a general. I'll probably end up in heaven with pips all over me". The Sad Decline Of Arthur Maybury is about a schoolmaster who goes to the dogs. It was written and directed by John Gorrie. "No similar experience has ever happened to me I don't think, no, and I've certainly never taken to the bottle as a result of my miseries. Obviously I've had my disappointments, but in my old age you can't compare my disappointments to that old man. He obviously wasn't very good anyway, ever, and I always think I've been very good always. He thought so, too - but he was wrong and I'm right, that's the difference". Roland Culver lives in a very desirable modernised cottage with two cars in the garage near Henley-on-Thames. Despite being only forty miles from London it's beautifully rural, so much so that in the hard winter of 1963 the entire village was snowed up. The farmers had to get people out by tractor and a snow plough once ploughed right into a snowdrift and right through the middle of a car, cutting it clean in two. Arthr Maybury was hard work. "I had a devil of a lot of words to say. But it was an interesting part. He's a very good director, John Gorrie. I don't know how many plays he's written but if this was his first or second effort it was a jolly good effort you know. I'm interested in playing any part if it's well written and I think this is". It's especially hard for Roland Culver to find a theatre play worth doing. "Look at all the people of my age, they're nearly all doing revivals. Very few are doing original plays nowadays. Acting in the theatre is the best thing you can do because you can get one-hundred percent. Even on films you don't necessarily get one-hundred percent because you are in the hands of a cutting machine. A big scene of mine recently ended up on the cutting-room floor. I'm pretty old now you see and one isn't the star that one was". (Radio Times, October 23, 1969 - Article by Gus Marlbehart). Cast : Roland Culver (Arthur Maybury), Lally Bowers (Mrs Scott), Valerie White (Mrs Perry), John Ringham (The Schoolmaster), Barbara Atkinson (Miss Price), Matthew Robertson (Mr Russell), John Savident (Mr Brummitt), Kit Taylor (The Barman), Sheila Grant (Berryl Forbes), Robert Gillespie (Pickthorn), Jill Brooke, Janie Booth and Joan Hart (The Radio Women), Mirabelle Thomas (The Secretary), Jane Carr (June), Heather Canning (Mrs Carstairs), Richard Aylen (Mike), Harry Littlewood (Dave), Sylvia Coleridge (Paula), Patty Thorne (Jane), Wesley Murphy (Roy), Angela Galbraith (The First Woman Inb The Pub), Petronella Ford (The Second Woman In The Pub), Robert Wilde (The Second Man In The Pub), Paul Greenhalgh (The Shop Assistant), Michael Beint (The Town Hall Attendant), Jeffrey Segal (Mr Dumpton), Paul Farrell (The Council Employee), Peter Stenson (The First Man), Jeremy Child (The Second Man) and Maurice Hedley (The Elderly Gentleman). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of eighty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:30pm. Lighting for this episode was supervised by Dennis Channon.
Cast : Sandra Gleeson (Jan), Mark Edwards (Robert), Jennifer Young (The Courier), Kerry Francis (Nev), Vivienne Lincoln (Carol), David Gilchrist (Jim), Warwick Sims (Colin), Betty McDowall (Liz), Peter Arne (Peter Steiner), Joanne Dainton (Emma Steiner), Jasmine Greenfield, Beatrice Aston and Helen Harper (The Girls In The Pub), Eileen Way (The Woman In The Pub), Bill Riley, Peter Collier and Francis Phillips (The Men In The Pub), Brian Harrison (Joe), John Knightley (The First Man At The Party) and Donald Pickering (The Second Man At The Party). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:20pm. Music for this episode was provided by Dudley Simpson. The broadcast of this episode coincided with an increase in the cost of the Radio Times, cited as "From 30 October 1969 the price of Radio Times will be 9d, an increase of 1d a week. The price has been held at 8d since September 1967, although, soon after, publishing costs rose steeply as a result of devaluation of the Pound, and have continued to rise since. Further increases in costs are taking place and the rise in price can no longer be avoided".
Publicity : The New Steve McQueen Is Still The Quite New Malcolm McDowell - Malcolm McDowell, the star of If … is in the BBC Television play Happy. Timeri Murari found out that: Malcolm McDowell is on the telephone, listening with a worried frown as the person at the other end tells him what is wrong with his new sports car. "You should've opened the black knob," the voice says. "What black knob?" Malcolm asks. "I never saw a black knob". "It's a lovely car," he says, when he's put the telephone down, "but life gets complicated once you become successful. You have to have accountants to look after the money, and lawyers, and taxes. I don't know whether I have any money or not. In the old days I just went to the bank and knew exactly how much I had". The old days for Malcolm McDowell were those five years before the fantastic success of If… In those days he lived in a six-pound-a-week flat in one of the unfashionable parts of London and worked in repertory at the Royal Court. He also did endless television serials and the occasional television play. "It was a hard life," he saus. "I think acting is - because of the insecurity. I never liked television too much. We'd get three weeks for rehearsal and then the taping. In films it's more leisurely, though you have to concentrate for a longer period of time". If … was the break all actors dream about, Malcolm went to the auditions and was chosen for the part. Lthough the critics were enthusiastic when it opened in London nothing much happened to him. Then he went to the States when it opened in New York. "They thought it was great," he says. "I was offered quite a number of scripts to read and they did take an interest in me. On the television talk shows, they kept pigeon-holing me as the new Steve McQueen or the new Dustin Hoffman - I didn't mind too much as long as they were happy with their categories". Since If… he's been in Spain filming Barry England's novel Figures In A Landscape. The director is Joseph Losey and Malcolm's co-star is Robert Shaw. After that he's making a film with Jean Simmons. "I try to look for the combination of a good script and a good director. Which is easy. Where it becomes hard is when you get a good script and a new director. He may be good. You have to decide". He avoids the star circuit and the big parties. He has the same friends as before and spends most of his spare time writing a film for his own production company. The idea has been in him for eight years but before he became a success he never had the time. (Radio Times, November 6, 1969 - Article by Timeri Murari). Cast : With Malcolm McDowell (Happy), Richard Vernon (Lord Oscar), Brenda Bruce (Ma), Leslie Sands (Brack), Pauline Collins (Angelina), Wendy Allnutt (Frances), Joseph Cuby (Steff), Kenneth Colley (Jock), Ian Gardiner (Curtis), Freda Bamford (Mrs Holloway), Philip Newman (The Police Constable), David Ashford (The Solicitor) and Frank Mills (Charlie). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of eighty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:30pm. Lighting for this episode was supervised by Jim Richards.
Synopsis : Colonel Sutherland, about to retire as commanding officer of a nuclear missle regiment, is shocked to see his daughter Sally on television - taking part in a student demonstration. Cast : Glyn Houston (Ronald Sutherland), Jean Harvey (Cynthia Sutherland), Ann Penfold (Sally Sutherland), David Burke (Len), Neville Smith (Izzy), Luke Hardy (Joe), Geraldine Sherman (Rosemary), John Nettleton (Henry), Kenneth Farrington (Bill Morgan), Alec Ross (The Major), Christian Comber (John Sutherland), John Bull (The Guitarist), Willie Jonah and Robert Wilde (The Students), Corbet Woodall (The News Reader), Alistair Maclane (The NCO), John Baker (The Hall Porter), Peter Macann (The Interviewer), Raymond Farrell (The MP), Michael Sloan, Jerry King and James Allan (The Americans), Cecil Cheng and Richard Woo (The Chinese). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of sixty minutes and was transmitted from 9:15pm to 10:15pm. Script Editor for this episode was Shaun MacLoughlin. This episode was the first edition of The Wednesday Play to be recorded and transmitted in colour, as confirmed by the Radio Times. All future episodes of The Wednesday Play would now be transmitted in colour. This episode enjoyed a repeat broadcast on June 24th, 1971.
Synopsis : The title has a double meaning. Not only does tonight's Wednesday Play feature two Johnny Speight plays but the central character in both of them is called Bill. This gives Marty Feldman the opportunity for something of a dramatic tour-de-force in his first "straight" venture on BBC Television. Both thue plays have been shown before separately and it was Johnny Speight who wanted them combined, featuring Marty. Surprisingly, Johnny Speight has only had four plays on television before - these are two of them. In The Compartment, Bill plagues an old man in a train carriage and in Playmates his (female) victim is in a country house. Cast : Marty Feldman (Bill), Eileen Atkins (The Woman), Joby Blanshard (The Man), Diane Aubrey and Donald Gee (The Couple). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of sixty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:10pm. Incidental Music for this episode was provided by Carl Davis. Script Editor for this episode was Shaun MacLoughlin. Playmates enjoyed a repeat broadcast under the Play For Today banner on April 8th, 1971. This episode is one of only twelve episodes from the ninth and final season of The Wednesday Play which still exists.
Synopsis : A liner from South Africa is the setting for this powerful three-cornered drama. Alec, a student architect from Cape Town, and his coloured girlfriend, Mary, are leaving for the bigger world of London. Sharing a cabin with Alec is Albert, a strange and magnetic Austrian. While Alec is an innocent, Albert has experienced everything. He is played by Frank Finlay, whose most recent BBC Television appearance was as Brutus in Julius Caesar, and who has recently filmed Cromwell and The Molly Maguires. Cast : Frank Finlay (Albert), Nicola Pagett (Mary), T P McKenna (Joe Katz), Anthony Corlan (Alec), Donald Morley (The Purser), Trevor Martin (The Steward) and Raymond Mason (The Barman). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of eighty minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:30pm. Script Editor for this episode was Shaun MacLough.
Cast : Margaret Leighton (Florence Lancaster), Alan Melville (Pawnie), Patrick Barr (David Lancaster), Jennifer Daniel (Helen Saville), Barry Justice (Tom Veryan), Richard Warwick (Nicky Lancaster), Felicity Gibson (Bunty Mainwaring), Nancie Jackson (Clara Hibbert), David McKail (Bruce Fairlight) and Patricia Mort (Preston). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:20pm. This episode is one of only twelve episodes from the ninth and final season of The Wednesday Play which still exists.
Script : James Hanley Director : James Ferman Synopsis
: Some people will do anything to get rid of an ageing father. George
and Edna visit the sinister Mr Shafton and his son - who guarantee to
solve any problem. But their solution isn't quite what they expected
and George and Edna see one another in a new and frightening light.
The shrewish Edna is played by Frances Cuka, a distinguished member
of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her recent appearances include The
Silver Tassie and Pinter's Silence. Ronald Lacey has been in two recent
films - Take A Girl Like You and How I Won The War. This is a new play
by the novelist James Hanley whose best-known play was Say Nothing.
Script : Desmond McCarthy and Johnny Byrne Director : Desmond McCarthy Publicity : Julie Driscoll this week makes her debut as an actress, but her fans needn't fear that she's giving up the singing career that made her a star by the time she was eighteen. "Acting and singing - it's all part of the same bit," she explained at the council flat in Lambeth where she lives with her mother. "The play seemed to be saying something I wanted to say, so I took it". It's called The Season Of The Witch, the title of a Donovan number she used to sing. "It's about a period in this girl's life when she's unsure of herself. She's looking for answers. Yes, she does find some". Julie was recently in the same sort of situation herself. It's a year since she broke with Brian Auger and the Trinity and took a rest from the pop-and-jazz scene. "I'd done four years on the road and I'd had enough. I want to get back with live audiences. They really turn me on. But I'm not going to do it like it was". When she did play last year she was, she says, "in the middle of a breakdown - which didn't help. Or perhaps it did". Now twenty-two, very pretty, and softer than the photographs of her which emphasised the "soul" and forgot the girl, she says she's discovered that part of the answer is not to look for the answers. "I'm just going along with it all. I'm not forcing things anymore. I have no anxiety. I feel things will come along in their own time". A while back she was offered a part in a play in America. "I'd have loved to do it, but I'm not an actress and to do a six months' gig was just too much". At the moment she's happy writing the songs for her next album, I Nearly Forgot But I Came Back, due out shortly. Liltingly she recited the whole of the long title song. "It's about the park across the road there," she said, waving towards the window. "I hand't been there for years, and I suddenly realised how much it had changed. Or I had. It's really all about change. The whole album's about this period in my life". One of the lines from the song reads: "Turned on by life is the best kind of high" - which is what, apparently, the play, too, is trying to say. One thing was puzzling - but not really so. Unlike her alter ego in the play, Julie hadn't left her home in Coronation Buildings, a pretty grim place from the outside. "Which coronation? Victoria's, I should think". She laughed appreciatively. "But I really dig it here. It's so warm. And then there's my mum. She's so marvellous. She knows I have to do what I have to do - and now I'm able to do it. I think I'm just now beginning to appreciate it. I am a very lucky bird. I really am". (Radio Times, January 17, 1970 - Article by Bob Smyth). Synopsis
: Julie Driscoll stars in this moving and unusual play about a girl
who drops out of the automated world of the typing pool. It follows
her on her search for personal freedom. Her search for fulfillment typifies
the way of life of many young people today, combined with a sense of
excitement underlined by the film's powerful music.
Script : Athol Fugard Director : Robin Midgley Cast : Michael Bryant (Stirling Moss), Ronald Lacey (Denis Jenkinson), Guy Deghy (Alfred Neubauer), George Roubicek (Hugo), Douglas Ditta (The Waiter) and Fabio Galvano (The Radio Commentator). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:20pm. Script Editor for this episode was James Brabazon. This episode enjoyed a repeat transmission as part of The Wednesday Play series, having previously been broadcast on BBC-2 in 1968 before its inclusion in this anthology series. Athol Fugard's play was later adapted for the stage under the title "Drivers" by David Muir.
Script : Roy Minton Director : Michael Tuchner Cast : Robert Powell (Lionel Crane), Michael Robbins (Sergeant Billings), Don Hawkins (George Binns), Geoffrey Hughes (Flash Blakey), Anthony Trent (Bern), Sandra Shipley (Pamela), James Grout (The Squire), John Barrett (Christmas Potter), Walter Sparrow (Lionel's Father), John Rees (The Gamekeeper), Veronica Doram (Margery), Leslie Anderson (Bramlett), Will Leighton (The Pub Barber), Reg Lye (The Lorry Driver), John Comer (The Warrant Officer), Ambrose Coghill (The Colonel), Charles Adey-Gray (The Camp Barber), John Sarbutt (The Assistant Gamekeeper), Chris Webb (The Corporal), Terence Angel, Mike Daly, Andrew Grant, Hugh Halliday, Tom Laird, Albert Lampert, Jerry Martin, Barry McCarthy, Paul Prescott, Mark Rivers, Adrian Shergold and Peter Winter (The Members Of The Squad). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy-five minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:30pm. Music for this episode was provided by Martin Baggott. Film Editor for this episode was Geoffrey Botterill. Sound for this episode was supervised by Peter Edwards. Film Cameraman for this episode was provided by Peter Bartlett. This episode is one of only twelve episodes from the ninth and final season of The Wednesday Play which still exists.
Script : Alan Plater Director : Michael Hayes Cast : Susan Jameson (Jenny), Corin Redgrave (Richard), Anne Dyson (Mrs Thomas), Jack Watson (The Reverend Beaumont), John Barrett (Mr Thomas), Brian Rawlinson (Bernard), Ruth Dunning (Aunt Meg) and Jo Rowbottom (Christine). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of sixty minutes and was transmitted from 9:15pm to 10:15pm. Music for this episode was by Tubby Hayes And His Quintet. Script Editor for this episode was Shaun MacLoughlin.
Script : Tom Clarke Director : Jack Gold Publicity : One Man's Protest Against The System - Siegfried Sassoon, poet, writer, and Foxhunting Man, was also famed for his protest against inhumanity in the First World War. Tom Clarke's play, Mad Jack, tells his story: When Tom Clarke wrote Made Jack, which is based on what happened to the poet and writer Siegfried Sassoon in the first world war, he had two aims in mind. He wanted to pay tribute to Sassoon's courage and idealism, and he wanted to comment on the nature and effectiveness of an individual's protest against the system. "I was at one of the Grosvenor Square demonstrations in 1967, and everyone was having such a marvellous time," says Clarke. "I saw lots of my friends there, all out with their kids: everyone was very jolly. That sort of protest doesn't cost much. Sassoon was a desperately conventional man who wanted to be considered a Foxhunting Man. He did something that was absolutely against his own instincts. The contrast seemed to me to be very relevant". Mad Jack compresses the events of about two years into a few days, but is otherwise very close to actual events. It tells how in 1917 Sassoon, a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who had been in action on the Western Front and won the Military Cross, wrote an official protest against those responsible for the appalling and unnecessary sacrifice of men's lives. The army sent him to think things over in an hotel in Liverpool. During a miserable week there he was visited by a friend of his, who persuaded him not to stand by his statement lest his friends consider him a coward and he be declared insane. Sassoon finally agreed to go before a Medical Board hoping to be passed fit for active service. But instead he was sent to a hospital for shell-shocked officers, thus providing an excuse for his protest to be dismissed. Tom Clarke feels that Sassoon's brave attempt cost him a great deal, that he was misunderstood at the time and was afraid of being misunderstood for the rest of his life. "It was an emotional protest, not a political one," he says. "The play demonstrates that although it may seem futile for one man to protest against a whole system of social brainwashing, there's also hope. Sassoon's example - and his poetry - have lived on. After the war, Sassoon made a brief bid to enter politics as a Labour MP, but soon retreated to Wiltshire, where he rode and continued his writing. He became a bit of a recluse, and disliked the recurrent interest that his gesture of protest inevitably aroused in successive generations. He was a reluctant hero. Tom Clarke met him and they exchanged letters while he was working on the play. He found that although Sassoon wished him well, he did not really want to get too much involved. "He remained a pacifist, though he preferred to describe himself as a quietist," says Clarke. He seemed almost worried that continuing interest in his story meant that he could be guilty of exploiting his wartime experiences. Nothing would have been more abhorrent to him. My renown as a war writer has become a burden on my mind," he wrote to Clarke. When he was dying, in 1967, he talked a lot about his moment of protest fifty years before". He remained obsessed with the horrors of war. He told his nurse, "Nobody really knew how terrible the war was". (Radio Times, January 29, 1970 - Article by Anne Chisholm). Synopsis
: Protest has become easy and respectable now. But for a young subaltern
in 1917 to speak out against the horrors of the Western Front was unthinkable.
One did. Second-Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, a young English country
gentleman who made public his revulsion against the war. This film,
directed by Jack Gold, tells of the week in a Liverpool hotel was Sassoon
re-examined his protest in spite of its complete rejection by Authority
and the public.
Script : Barry Bermange Director : Barry Bermange Publicity
: Barry Bermange is one of our leading
playwrights. His name was in the news last year following the much-discussed
showing of the play Invasion on BBC-2, in which guests at a dinner-party
were horrifyingly destroyed by the effects of a Vietnam newsreel on
the telly. Bermange is concerned, not with yesterday or even today,
but rather with what's happening tomorrow and the day after. His ideas
consequently are controversial, far-reaching, radical, always thought-provoking,
and one would be very surprised if Nathan And Tabileth does not come
in for a similar barrage of comment.
Script : William Trevor Director : Herbert Wise Publicity
: You've been a professional actor
for fifteen years. The suddenly your caricature of Hitler in a play
by Brecht called The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Uri makes you a star.
The critics get so carried away that they lavish on you a whole year's
supply of complimentary adjectives. You say to yourself wryly that you've
been giving similar performances - in the theatre, films, and television
- for some time now without managing to inspire such overwhelming praise.
But you can't help smiling as new plays are sent to you by theatre managers
who a year ago would have said: "Leonard Rossiter? Yes… but
he wouldn't really be box-office".
Script : George Friel Director : Pharic Maclaren Synopsis : "I'm not one of your juvenile delinquents you know. I believe in God. Maybe my God isn't your God, and maybe your God isn't my God. But we both mean God, and you can't get past God. I thought I could find peace in God and be a poet … But you can't be a poet just because you want to". Publicity
: Laurance Ruddick, seventeen, and
Jonathan Watson, thirteen, co-star in this week's Wednesday Play from
BBC Scotland, The Boy Who Wanted Peace, by George Friel. Jonathan, although
younger, has actually had more professional experience than Laurance:
as well as commercials, he has appeared in schools television productions.
He's a bit puzzled by his diminuitive stature. "I don't really
understand it. I eat an awful lot and I drink about two pints of milk
a day, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. I think I'm four-foot-eight-inches".
Laurance, like Jonathan, went to Hillhead High School, which is a stone's
throw away from the BBC in Glasgow.
Script : David Mercer Director : Alan Bridges Publicity
: "This trilogy is partly
my swan-song to conscious politics in drama," says David Mercer
of his three latest television plays, the second of which, The Cellar
And The Almond Tree, is this week's Wednesday Play. The first, On The
Eve Of Publication, seen in November 1968 (and repeated last June),
looked at the life and death of Robert Kelvin, a famous left-wing writer:
the third, which Mercer has already completed, takes up the story of
Kelvin's young girlfriend Emma. The Cellar And The Almond Tree moves
the trilogy out of England into a central European communist country
in the late 1940s, where a former friend of Kelvin's, Volubin, a poet
who has become a party official, is enmeshed in the political machinery
of a state about to plunge into a succession of Stalinist purges.
Publicity : The Year Of The Sex Olympics is about a world that has taken the permissive society about as far as it can go. Since the play was first shown twenty months ago we seem to have moved, for better or worse, perceptibly towards it. Just what is being permitted? Sex? That has never been seriously hindered. Even the Victorians managed to rear huge families and to keep mistresses on the side. They just didn't like to talk about it. We talk about sex, we write about it, and we show representations of it on stage and screen. We are entering one of our civilsation's recurrent "frank" phases. Censors tumble. Nakedness is part of the visual vocabulary. The New Honest is limited to sex, of course. It doesn't extend to such facts of life as sickness and senility and death. About these we remain more po-faced than the Victorians ever were. What is actually being permitted, then, is voyeurism. A new, kingsize, superstyle voyeurism on the grandest possible scale. The tremulous Peeping Toms, the lonely self-gratifiers and genital-exposers, have come into their own at last - and we are all invited to join their fun. For this particular phase of new morality has happened to coincide with a communications explosion. Bared bosoms in Los Angeles can be reflected instantly on to all the screens of the world. All harmless, if mindless, fun? Well, we live in a world that is finding it increasingly hard to keep a grip on reality and to separate fact from fiction. Wait, then, till the permissive screens take over and channel vies with glittering channel to offer vicarious excitements. Ever more voluptuous bodies, coupling for our pleasure in hi-fi detail. Sexual athletes performing in competition, superbly and constantly. Pop-sex idols drawing their vast audiences into total identification and topping their wildest, most libidinous dreams for them … Imagine a Twenty-First Century Establishment using such power. For the good of the world, naturally. Employing mass voyeurism to quench the population explosion and all its attendant tensions. Fighting sex with sex-substitute, stunning the gigantic idle super-audience with ceaselessly applied pornography. Watch, not do. Man's most personal physical act would flicker very low. He would function only briefly in the universal gene-pool before being allowed to degenerate and die young, sitting till the last in front of the universal screens, agog for the Sportsex and Artsex programmes. And every four years, to give the population graph a sharp downwards jolt, comes the biggest treat of all - the Sex Olympics. (Radio Times, March 5, 1970 - Article by Nigel Kneale). Cast : Leonard Rossiter (Co-Ordinator Ugo Priest), Suzanne Neve (Deanie Webb), Tony Vogel (Nat Mender), Vickery Turner (Misch), Brian Cox (Lasar Opie), George Murcell (Grels), Martin Potter (Kim Hodder), Lesley Roach (Keten Webb), Hira Talfrey (Betty) and Patricia Maynard (The Nurse). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of ninety minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:40pm. This episode had originally been transmitted on July 29th, 1968, as part of the Theatre 625 collection of plays. This repeat performance saw the high-profile play enjoy renewed appreciation under The Wednesday Play banner. The repeat transmission of this play fell ten minutes short of the original running time. This episode enjoyed Region 2 DVD release courtesy of the BFI in April 2003.
Script : Alun Owen, music and lyrics by Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott Director : Piers Haggard Publicity : "It's Pure Television - It Simply Couldn't Be Anything Else" - Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott have written the music for an adaptation of an Alun Owen story for, what is this week, The Wednesday Musical. Elizabeth Cowley talks to the people who put it together: Hands up anyone who has heard of Reginald Leonard Smith. Nobody? All right - Marty Wilde? That's who Smith turned into somewhere around 1956. Still no? Well, think back to the late 1950s - Elvis and Bill Haley, Little Richard and Rockers in tight trousers and leather jackets… He made his first record at seventeen and his first big hit, "Bad Boy", which he wrote himself, was in 1959. His fans - and they were legion - wept when he married a pretty Vernon girl named Joyce. And the adult world started to take him seriously when he appeared in the Broadway musical Bye-Bye Birdie. Today Marty Wilde blushes at the thought of the old days. He has become more repsectable, and is making a steady living both singing straight ballads on the northern club circuit and writing good songs. These he does in partnership with a young music publisher named Ronnie Scott. (No - not the Ronnie Scott). Together they make an interesting double act. They obviously spark each other off, and in their music the teamwork shows. "I'm a tiger," which Lulu recorded, "Jesamine", recorded by the Casuals, and "Abergavenny", recorded by Marty himself, have all been high in the charts. This week, their growing reputation should take a big step forward because the Wednesday Play is a musical - and the music is all theirs. It's an adaptation of Alun Owen's classic No Trams To Lime Street. Set in pre-Beatles Liverpool, it tells the story of Billy, Taff and Cass, three young merchant seamen who put into their home port after more than three years away. They find everything has changed - no trams for a start … The play traces their own private voages of discovery - and rediscovery - through the alleys and pubs of the old city. "It's the sort of story that should go well with music," Alun Owen told me on the telephone from Wales where he's immersed in another Wednesday Play. "But I haven't seen the finished product. I just adapted the original here and there and handed it over to the producer, Harry Moore, and the director, Piers Haggard, to get on with. I heard the demonstration discs Wilde and Scott had prepared and liked them, but the final product will come, I hope, as a happy surprise". Well, I've seen No Trams and I think everyone connected with it should be very happy indeed. Director Haggard, who did Gershwin's Tiptoes for BBC-2, has outdone himself. "There's no film in it anywhere, except in the black and white back projection," he said. "It's all studio movement in super colours against sepia and monochrome flats. We could have shot the play straight with the actors stopping every so often to burst into song, but we didn't. Their songs on the soundtrack follow their actions, so the play never stands still. It's pure television; it simply couldn't be anything else". "I got a great charge out of doing this musical, you know," said Marty. "I now want to work on one about the Tsar of all the Russias. But I hear Hollywood is already doing it…". So, until he finds another subject, Marty is back on the club circuit - ("I love the North") - and, just for old time's sake, is making an LP…of rock and roll. (Radio Times, March 12, 1970 - Article by Elizabeth Cowley). Cast : Rosemary Nichols (Betty), Glyn Owen (Old Cass), Anthony May (Billy), Paul Greenwood (Cass), Elian Wyn (Taff), Artro Morris (The Chief), Julia Hand (The Barmaid), Gerard Healy (The Sergeant), Pat Spencer, Brenda Armstrong, Su Chin, Stella Courtney, Valerie Griffiths, Louanne Richards, Peter Ardran, David Browning, Eddie Connor, George Giles, Colin Griffith, Bernard Jameson, Joseph Kully, Dickie Martyn, Harry Pitch, Don Vernon and Norman Warwick. Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of fifty minutes and was transmitted from 9:15pm to 10:05pm. Music for this episode was arranged and conducted by Ken Woodman. Choreographer for this episode was David Toguri. This episode enjoyed a repeat broadcast under the Play For Today banner on March 11th, 1971.
Script : Alan Plater Director : Roderick Graham Synopsis
: The first in a series of three plays by one of television's top
writers - Alan Plater. Norman Rodway stars as Murphy "a humble
pen-pusher in a cardboard box factory" who tries to brighten his
life with home movies, tape-recording, and home-made wine. But success
can come out of failure…
Script : Alan Plater Director : Gilchrist Calder Cast : Nigel Davenport (Donkin), Norman Rodway (Murphy), Stephanie Bidmead (Mrs Mellish), Fiona Walker (Susan), John Bryans (Mr Mellish), Jill Melford (Mrs Donkin), Clive Francis (David Donkin), Donald Webster (Mike), Gareth Robinson (Terry), Helen Cotterill (Brenda), Patricia Maynard (The Receptionist), Richard Armour (MacAllister), Robert McBain (Perkins), Tony Blackburn, Judith Chalmers, Stephen Jack and Graham Parker (The Radio Voices). Notes & Trivia : This episode had a running time of seventy-five minutes and was transmitted from 9:10pm to 10:25pm. This trilogy of plays had originally been broadcast as part of the popular Theatre 625 series on BBC-2 in 1968, before enjoying a repeat transmission on BBC-1 as part of The Wednesday Play series. Music for this episode was provided by Norman Kay. Michael Billington of The Times hailed this trilogy of plays, on its original transmission, as follows: "It was the sheer fluency and ease of the writing that struck me most about `The Curse Of The Donkins'…Mr Plater gave us an extremely entertaining and swift-moving seventy-five minutes".
Script : Alan Plater Director : Naomi Capon Synopsis
: Donkin and Murphy find themselves sharing a cabin - if not interests
- on a cruise ship. Donkin, typically, arranges a little feminine company.
Murphy's "find" Kate is played by Anne Stallybrass, who was
the ill-starred Jane Seymour in The Six Wives Of Henry VIII.
Script : Nigel Kneale Director : Gilchrist Calder Publicity : Britain In 2050: Nigel Kneale is a professional television dramatist whose strange stories, from The Quatermass Experiment in 1963 to The Year Of The Sex Olympics in 1968 have sacred and stimulated audiences with outstanding success. He is a tall, friendly, balding man with large, anxious, grey eyes. He lives in reassuring normality with his wife and two nice children (who are already writing curious stories, rather to their father's alarm) in a Victorian house overlooking Barnes Common. The room where Kneale thinks and works is at the top of the house, looking out at treetops and sky. A battered, bug-eyed creature with several legs and horns sits outside the door, as if on guard. It is a relic of Quatermass, and, significantly enough, today it has a positively old-world charm. Kneale talks rapidly in tones of slight surprise at his own stream of ideas; they come pouring out, half-formed, as if their potential only strikes him as he speaks. His attitude seems to be one of amused horror at the possibilities proliferating in the world by the minute. His art is to isolate one or two, intensify them, project them, convert them to human terms, and confront us with the results, pleasant or not. His new play, Wine Of India, takes place in the world of 2050. He presupposes that illness and death have been abolished, and that people can be maintained at a chosen age indefinitely, at their point of optimum performance. Society and the individual make a form of contract for a period of time, during which the individual is kept in peak condition and society gets the best out of him. What happens when his time runs out? This is what the play is about. "It's the opposite of The Sex Olympics, really," said Kneale. "It's another model of society - one of a number that can be designed". He picked up a large, gleaming set of earphones and put them on. Each earpiece had a little aerial sticking up like antennae. "Take me to your leader," he said obligingly. It turned out to be a Japanese stereo radio set. "You can walk around in a total cocoon of sound. A television version of this can't be far away. There will soon be some way to fix a visual image, maybe on the air ahead of you. Or it might be possible to by-pass the eye and put it straight in here" - tapping his head. Kneale's plays are more and more concerned with ideas, not apparatus. "Funny machinery doesn't mean a thing. The more a play is concerned with people, the less boring it'll be". Despite his ominous fantasies, Kneale does not seem like a haunted man. "The bomb may drop next week," he said cheerfully. "It's optimistic to assume that there'll be a future at all". (Radio Times, April 9, 1970 - Article by Anne Chisholm). Synopsis
: 2050: A celebration is organised, for an apparently middle-aged
couple, in a world regulated from beginning to end for the contentment
of its inhabitants.
Script : Don Shaw Director : Alan Clarke Publicity
: The Game Of Dressing Up To Kill
- Don Shaw talks about the play that was, he tells Gordon Burn, "mouldering
in my mind for eighteen years": Within minutes of meeting Don Shaw,
you know two things about him. He's crazy about football and he loves
Repton. Repton is the small village near Derby where he lives quietly
with his family, close to the old walls of the public school.
Script : Hugh Whitemore Director : Roderick Graham Synopsis
: A German businessman develops an obsessive passion for a girl
he picks up in an East End pub. But she, and her brother, are playing
their own game…
Script : David Mercer Director : Alan Bridges Publicity : "Why I Could Never Be Like Emma" - Michele Dotrice, who stars in this week's Wednesday Play by David Mercer, talks to Lewis Nkosi: In Emma's Time, the last play in David Mercer's television trilogy, Michele Dotrice plays mistress to a celebrated left-wing novelist: the boozy Nobel Prizewinner, Robert Kelvin, witness of great socialist revolutions and hoarder of rich memories of friendships, political persecutions, and private defeats. As the student who rescues the famous author drunk at a Cambridge party, who then shacks up with him until he expires from too much booze and hard living, Michele Dotrice must have been an inspired choice. She is small, bright, very articulate about her work. At twenty-two she looks the kind of girl many novelists would like to have around but rarely do, in fact, except in the fantasies of their own novels. With two years of Royal Shakespeare Company behind her and such glittering acting roles on television as Dorothea in Middlemarch and the youngest of the Three Sisters in the recent BBC Television production of Chekhov's play, Michele brings to the role of Emma a superb and chilly confidence. She speaks as though she is almost desperately awed by Emma. "She's a very strange girl," she says, "and certainly for me the most challenging role I've ever played, because when one approaches a part one always approaches it from outside, and you sort of look for covers-up like accents or some sort of characterisation". Did she think she resembled Emma in any way? "No," she said very firmly. "I'm much more out-going than Emma. Emma has this marvellous sort of facilty of being the observer and standing on the outside and being able to look in from outside. I haven't got that sort of confidence. In a strange way, Emma does have great emotional feeling, but only with this one man. This is why once he's dead, she has this strange love affair which is sort of emotional and erratic with Mark, the interviewer, who comes to find out about her and what's happening to her now that Robert Kelvin has died. And she only does it to see if she can feel once again". She recalled how Mercer developed the idea of Emma from the seed of his first play: "It was quite interesting the way it happened," she said. "After I'd finished On The Eve Of Publication (the first play in the trilogy) David Mercer got on to me and said: `Come to lunch, I've got an idea'. So I went out with fear and trembling at the thought of having lunch with him. But he's a charming and delightful man. It was fascinating to hear his ideas of what he wanted to do with Emma, her life after Kelvin died, what she did in order to discover more about this man she lived with. When we started rehearsing Emma we, in fact, didn't have a completed script until after a week of rehearsals because Mercer was out in Paris and posting it off, and it was delivered by jet - and coming straight from the rehearsal room we'd sort of start on the next scene. But after a week I suddenly got the completed script. I went to have some fittings, and I sat there and started to read it. And I suddenly noticed there were tears dropping on the page. I thought this is ridiculous! But you see, David Mercer has this marvellous ability of making one deeply moved". (Radio Times, May 7, 1970 - Article by Lewis Nkosi). Synopsis
: Robert Kelvin, author-hero of On The Eve Of Publication, is dead
and Emma, who lived with him for the last two years of his life, is
involved with a television film about him. This is the third play by
award-winning writer David Mercer to feature the character of Robert
Kelvin; the first was On The Eve Of Publication, when he was played
by Leo McKern, and the second The Cellar And The Almond Tree. This
episode enjoyed a repeat broadcast on April 6th, 1972.
Script : Tony Parker Director : James Ferman Publicity : Tony Parker's Wednesday Play - about a man who interferes with little boys - is a plea for understanding. He Tells Anne Chisholm "Most People Will Talk If Someone Will Listen": For his new Wednesday Play, Tony Parker has chosen about the trickiest subject imaginable: sex crime. His last play, Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It, dealt with the pitfalls of amateur child minding; he is perhaps best known for his series of books based on tapes made after months spent talking to different types of criminals, in and out of prison. It hardly needs saying, then, that Tony Parker is not primarily an entertainer, though his work is always fascinating. This play, Chariot Of Fire, is about a housewife who through her visits to a prison becomes involved in trying to help a man who has spent twenty years of his life locked away for sexual offences against small boys. The character is based on a man Tony Parker knows well; he met him while working on a book about sex offenders, The Twisting Lane. One of the greatest impediments to public understanding, let alone sympathy, for this kind of offender is that we tend to react as if all sex crimes are equally horrifying; in fact there is the widest possible range of offences. This man is not violent, sexually or in any other way; as the play brings out, he is impotent. Tony Parker is a slight, quiet man, who thinks before he speaks. He manages to convey intense interest in human nature without seeming morbid, and universal sympathy without sentimentality. It is not hard to see why criminals trust him and talk to him with such astounding freedom. Of the sex offender, he says: "It's considered the worst offence among prisoners: this type of man is a prisoner within a prison. The point of the play is that this man is a human being; that all that has happened to him so far is that he has done twenty years inside. He is doing a life sentence in instalments. People don't want to think about the subject at all; they'd much rather just punish the offender. The more people realise that criminals of any kind are human beings the less punitive they will feel". Of the man on whom the character in the play is based, he says: "He is a close friend. He's scrupulously honest and upright as a citizen; he's an extremely courteous, kind, honest and considerate person. He's a very fine man. Yet he is execrated by the community because he commits this particular offence". Parker found the work he did on the book about sex offenders particularly demanding. "It was the most shattering to me personally to do. Here were eight people, all of whom had committed sexual offences, who don't talk about what they've done even in prison, and here they were talking for hours with great frankness and honesty about themselves. They seemed to me to be among the most dignified people I'd ever met in my life. They could no more understand by they did what they did than we can". In the play, a policeman makes a point that most psychologists make. A child can suffer far more from the sense of outrage of his parents and the authorities at what has happened to him (and from subsequent intensive questioning) than from the event itself. "What is needed," says Tony Parker, "is understanding". How did Tony Parker become involved in the world of prisons and the task of bridging society's self-imposed barriers between the criminal and the rest? "I used to be a prison visitor". In the early 1950s he was a publisher's representative travelling the country with no thoughts of making contact with prisoners, let alone writing about them. It was the Craig and Bentley case in 1953 that suddenly made him feel he must do what he could. In that case two boys were charged with the murder of a policeman - the younger one, who had fired the shot, was too young to be executed, Bentley, just old enough, was hanged. So Parker became a prison visitor. But after four or five years he came up against a regulation which at that time prevented prison visitors keeping up contact with offenders after release. "I was thrown out," he says, savouring the irony. Parker's work requires great patience, as well as great sensitivity. He has long preparatory talks over weeks and months with the people he interviews; sometimes he has known them for as long as three or four years. "Most people will talk," he says, "if someone will listen. Most people don't listen". His respect for them is deep and genuine. "I'm quite sure I could never be as honest about myself". (Radio Times, May 14, 1970 - Article by Anne Chisholm). Synopsis
: Stanley Wood is a man who interferes with little boys - an outcast
in society and even in prison. Would you invite him into your home to
try to help him? This play by Tony Parker is a sympathetic and understanding
story of a Prison Visitor who believes that no one is beyond helping.
"Stanley Wood" is a real person. His name is different and
he has just been sent to prison again, for six years.
Script : Obi Egbuna Director : Naomi Capon Synopsis
: This is a gentle play which deals with the changing world of Africa.
Chief Ozuomba wants to fight the new law about polygamy; he is provided
with an ideal weapon when Counsellor Ogidi and Mr Madu come to his court
both wanting to marry Elina.
Publicity : "A Terrifying Power" is how Leonard Cheshire describes the unleashing of the A-bomb. He takes part in a week of programmes - including the first television screening of "The War Game" - to mark the fortieth anniversary of that event. Jim Crace reports: On Tuesday 6 August the atomic bomb - and the nuclear debate which so absorbed and obsessed post-war politics - is forty years old. There is another anniversary to "celebrate", too: it is twenty years since the BBC, amid much public hand-wringing and wrangling, failed to broadcast Peter Wilkins' post-holocaust film, The War Game. It was, they said in 1965 and maintained for two decades, "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". The scenes of irreparable destruction in a fictional Tunbridge Wells and, particularly, the image of a revolver-toting policeman executing the injured, were judged by former BBC Director General Sir Hugh Greene (as recently as 1982) to be "so terrifying that old people sitting alone might go out and throw themselves under a bus". But the film was not suppressed entirely; it has been shown to an audience now estimated to exceed six million in cinemas, meeting rooms and school halls. Unilateralists describe it as one of the most successful recruiting sergeants for CND and sections of the "pro-bomb" lobby also welcome it for showing what could happen to citizens who don't "Protect And Survive". It's clear The War Game - unbroadcast - has played a more pivotal and haunting role in the nuclear dissarmament debate than if Sir Hugh had approved its screening in 1965. Peter Watkins' own feeling is that the media - television in particular - have "minimised, trivialised, fragmented and diffused all discussion about nuclear weapons over the past twenty years". But, as the films to be broadcast during this week's commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagaski bombs will show, television has, in more recent years, accepted the thankless milestone of investigating and illustrating the effects of a nuclear explosion. From dramatisations such as the American The Day After to unblinkered documentaries such as Q.E.D's A Guide To Armageddon, Jonathan Dimbleby's two documentaries for Yorkshire Television and BBC Bristol's On The Eighth Day, television in Britain has fuelled, focused and vivified the nuclear debate. The bleakest - and possibly the most accurate - film was Threads, which charted the post-bomb "survival" of two Sheffield families. According to its producer-director Mick Jackson, the film attempted to dispel the unfounded optimism of some war strategists. "In addition to physical injury there would be depression, disorientation and prolonged apathy," he says. "Even after the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Allies poured in money to reconstruct those cities there was no psychological improvement. The War Game is historically important, but it did not show the full effects [of a nuclear disaster]. It is a powerful film, but it has become a period piece". There can be few adult viewers who could now repeat the claim, made at the time The War Game was shelved, that "Britain would soon be on its feet after a nuclear attack". One man who has not been entirely satisfied by television's presentation of a post-nuclear world is Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, whose charitable foundation operates two-hundred-and-forty homes for the disabled in forty-fiive countries. "Those television films underestimate the horror of nuclear war, simply by showing survivors," he says. Group Captain Cheshire has seen the effects of nuclear war close up: in 1945 he was one of the two British observers at the atomic bombing of Japan and in Nagasaki - Return Journey he goes back to the city he once saw destroyed. His experiences have caused him to adopt a stance on the nuclear issue which many might count as callous, while others applaud his realism. In August 1944, after flying over one hundred missions above Germany with Bomber Command, the twenty-seven-year-old Cheshire (a Victoria Cross winner) was suddenly grounded and finished up in Washington as one of the officers planning British support for the United States invasion of Japan. It was an enterprise that offered a prospect of three million casualties. Then on 18 July 1945 Cheshire was summoned by Field Marshal Lord Maitland-Wilson and was let into "the best kept secret of the war". "He told me," says Cheshire, "that the Americans had successfully tested an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert and that its use was being considered against Japan. I was sworn to secrecy, warned that I should expect to be followed wherever I went by intelligence agents, and informed that I had been chosen as one of the two British observers on the bombing mission. I realised that it was a turning point of history - and that for some inexplicable reason I was part of it. I had to report back to Churchill on the mechanics of getting the bomb on target and the implications for the future of air warfare. I knew it would be a catalytic experience". It was an experience, however, that Cheshire almost missed. The Americans "had no room for the Britishers" aboard the B29 Superfortress bomber that killed seventy-eight-thousand people, gravely wounded another ninety-thousand and destroyed two-thirds of the city of Hiroshima at 8:15am on 6 August. When space was found for him on the Nagasaki mission on 9 August, his pilot missed a rendezvous point. Cheshire was fifty miles away when, just after 11:00am, the lead aircraft, "Bock's Car", found a "window" in the cloud and dropped its bomb. Group Captain Cheshire's recollections of the following few minutes are expressed graphically, methodically and with surprising emotional reticence. "There was a flash," he says. "And then we saw the explosion. There was a ball of fire, two-thousand feet above the ground and half-a-mile in diameter. The fire died out and became a boiling cloud which grew bigger and rocketed up at, I guess, thirty-thousand feet per minute. It settled at sixty-thousand feet above the city, poised on the top of an immense revolving column. On the ground the column fanned out into an almost black pyramid which was drawing dust and heat and rubble up into the air. And little fires were springing up around the periphery. The sheer heat had set fire to the wooden houses of the town. The whole sight was finely sculpted and symmetrical and therefore gave a terrifying sense of control and power". Cheshire remains certain that this second bomb was neither "unnecessary nor hard-hearted". "It was the only way," he says. "It felt too one-sided - but it had to be done. As I looked at that cloud engulfing Nagasaki my only conclusion could be that the nature of war had changed forever. The bomb was saying, `You can't fight me'. I began to wonder what had become of the people on the ground. The bomb had taken sixty-thousand lives. But there had been so much killing already in the war that I simply could not absorb the immensity of it. The war was now over, but there was no elation". Group Captain Cheshire reported back to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who had recently defeated Churchill in the general election. He described the atomic bomb as "the decisive weapon" which Britain should possess if it wished to avoid a third world war. And, with a chilling prescience that did not however impress Attlee, he predicted "star wars": "It's not the atomic bomb that counts, I told him. Anyone can build that, given time. What counts is the delivery system. Whatever happens, get Britain into the space programme!". What makes Cheshire's views on the atomic bombings unattractive in some circles is his scepticism about fall-out injuries. "Much exaggerated, I think. Remember, I have lived and worked with disabled people, including those still carrying the physical and psychological damage of the war and the concentration camps. I am not sure that I see the difference between being deformed by fall-out or a bomb-splinter". He maintains a cogent and dogged adherence to the notion that the atomic bombings "saved more lives than they took" and that the bomb liberated the Japanese from war as much as it liberated the Allies. "The Japanese could end the war with honour," he argues. "It allowed Emperor Hirohito to say, `"This is not surrender to a human enemy. The Home Army has not been defeated'". This was not a view, however, that was well received in Nagasaki when Group Captain Cheshire visited it for the BBC film. "They wouldn't allow me to attend their peace ceremony," he says. "Instead I spent an hour quietly in the old Catholic church. I prayed and thought of Nagasaki then and its implications for our future. I felt sorrow and regret. But I still cannot see how one can construct a moral argument to show that it was better to lose three million lives on the beaches of Japan rather than several hundred thousand with atom bombs. I do not want to evade responsibility for what happened or hide behind my title of `observer'. As a young man, all I wanted was peace, yet I became a bomber pilot and flew with the atom bomb. How can you explain that? All I know is that going back to Nagasaki for the making of this film has allowed me to close a chapter in my life which has remained open for forty years". The After The Bomb programmes are: Nagasaki - Return Journey, Monday 9:25pm, BBC-1; The First Forty Years, Tuesday, 10:15pm, BBC-2; The War Game, Wednesday, 9:30pm, BBC-2; Threads, Thursday, 9:25pm, BBC-1; Facing The Future, Friday, 10:00pm, BBC-2. (Radio Times, July 27, 1985 - Article by Jim Crace). Synopsis
: Ludovic Kennedy introduces the third of five programmes
to mark the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tonight: The War Game. The story of a nuclear
attack on Britain in the 1960s. Until this week's special series of
programmes - After The Bomb - the BBC felt unable to transmit this disturbing
film in isolation. Peter Watkins' controversial 1965 drama, made with
the scientific facts available at the time, envisages the consequences
of nuclear war for the United Kingdom. Using amateur actors it follows
a deterioration in international relations; Russia seals off Berlin
and NATO prepares for war. Britain begins to evacuate its large towns
and cities. One morning, with little warning, the first bomb drops in
Kent and we witness the terrible effect of a nuclear explosion in a
civilian area and the resulting breakdown of society…
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