And Did Those Feet? - w David Mercer. Maverick writer David Mercer’s first play for the strand departs from much of his previous work, and in the process goes further down the road of experimentation than just about any previous television drama. Told in a series of skits, visual gags, dream sequences and bits of stock footage, with an arch linking voice-over, halfway between a Man Alive commentary and Lewis Carroll’s narrative voice in Alice in Wonderland, the play tells of the fight between cantankerous, ageing aristocrat Lord Fountain (Patrick Troughton) and his illegitimate twin sons, the skinny Timothy (David Markham) and corpulent Bernard (Willoughby Goddard). Being illegitimate, via Fountain’s cockney servant Maggie (Diana Coupland), the twins serve no purpose to Fountain for furthering his dynasty, and, on Maggie’s departure to live with brash, didactic artist Towser Griddle, who takes to keeping her in a cage while he paints her, Fountain tries various ways of sending the hapless pair off into obscurity. A stint at Oxford, where they prove less than successful with the girls via an alienating lack of small talk, is followed by a period in the army during WWII, which they spend in the Burmese jungle, befriending the local wildlife, and a lost Japanese soldier, Ishaki, who plays the flute while they sing twee and forlorn Carollian nonsense songs. On return, the boys take jobs as junior zookeepers and hook up with two working class girls, Poppy and Laura, though the latter fell increasingly frustrated by the brothers’ emotionally retarded whimsical conversation and lack of sexual potency (as the recently-certified-virile Lord Fountain frustratedly bounds from one barren wife to the next). Lord F’s involvement in a dog food company leads the brothers, in a state of panic, to unlock the zoo’s cages, leaving gorillas and wombats to charge about the Home Counties. Their borderline schizophrenic condition is not helped by any of this (Timothy: ‘Every morning when I open my eyes, I feel as if I’ve just arrived […] and everything’s new and mysterious. At one time it was very serious. I had to go round at bedtime putting cards on things with their names on. Chair, bed, lamp, Bernard. Bernard looked quite odd with a card pinned to his pyjamas with “Bernard” written on it.’) Poppy and Laura connive with lord Fountain to sue the brothers for breach of promise, an act which sends Bernard into a porpoise-filled coma. Ever more egocentric, Lord F dreams a conversation with God, who unsurprisingly backs him all the way (Lord F: ‘You’ll forgive me if I grin.’ God: ‘Why not? It’s your dream.’) The brothers move into their new womblike sanctuary - a condemned swimming baths which they decorate with candles and inflatable animals, and swing from two trapezes while singing nonsense to each other. Poppy and Laura turn up to voice their disgust at this further dereliction of duty (‘You’ve had all the advantages. You should be helping to run the country.’) A game of Russian roulette goes nowhere (‘Did you put the bullet in?‘ ‘No […] it makes me too nervous.‘) Finally, at a dinner party thrown by Lord F in ‘honour’ of his sons, set somewhere in limbo and with all the play’s characters, including Ishaki, attending, the pair are humiliatingly denounced by all in turn, before receiving a gift of a female mannequin each, and exiting dolefully to derisive laughter. Their swimming pool sanctuary destroyed by Fountain to make way for a supermarket, the boys flee, and are last seen in the company of Ishaki, piloting a canoe up the Amazon jungle. Even from this outline the manic scope and absurdity of the play is obvious, but there’s a lot more here than bizarre satire at the expense of a crumbling post-war social order. After the brothers purchase their swimming pool, the pace and tone shift from quickfire farce to a more introspective, melancholy style, which mainly springs from the childlike questioning moroseness of the brothers themselves - a hauntingly real-sounding voice of madness in amongst the intentionally cut-out appearance of the play‘s world. While it’s pointless to speculate on the mental make-up of the fictional twins (a doctor cautions Timothy: ‘Look old man, don’t let’s go careering down one of those Freudian side-tracks, eh?’) there is much here that tallies with Mercer’s fascination with schizophrenia, and their alienation from society, combined with their proto-hippie love of animals and desire to just ‘be’, makes a canny, and not overstated, link between the fragmentation of the boys’ egos and that of post-war society in general. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the play meanders to a close, but this is the nature of practically all of Mercer’s work from 1962 (when he wrote the groundbreaking A Suitable Case for Treatment) onwards. From then on, he claimed he never planned a play before he began writing, and so in the process it took him in directions as surprising to him as to the first-time viewer. A brave and foolish strategy - some times - as here and in his fine Robert Kelvin plays (see below) he gets away with it in style; at others (the fragmented Play for Today The Bankrupt) he loses his way utterly and no amount of melodrama can bring him back. Here, though, Mercer is triumphant, as is director Don Taylor, managing his way through uncharted directorial territory with aplomb, coping with an ambitious and expensive shoot (the swimming pool scenes took two weeks after hours in bent ford Baths, with the crew working flat-out overnight in electrically-hazardous conditions) and handling the disparate elements (filmed scenes, silent inserts, limbo vignettes and stock footage) with obvious relish, taking care to steer the play away from the, as he put it, ‘twee’ abyss it constantly teeters over. Predating the anarchic cut-up comedy of Monty Python et al, while giving vent to a truly affecting voice of inner sadness that hasn’t surfaced in quite this way since, rarely was television drama to get this ahead of the game as Mercer did here.  

The Man Without Papers - w Troy Kennedy Martin. Study of an American beatnik (Benito Carruthers) from the creator of Z-ars. Bob Dylan supplies the songs, garage band The Seeds play.

The Pistol - w Troy Kennedy Martin/James Jones. Adaptation of From Here to Eternity author James Jones' novel in which a platoon of US Army officers find themselves at each tohers' throats while holed up in a remote Hawaiian stockade during the attack on Pearl Harbour.

The Seven O'Clock Crunch - w David Stone. Peter Jeffrey's marriage to Zena Walker comes under strain as he eyes friend Nigel Stock's carefree bachelor lifestyle with mounting envy.

Alice - w Dennis Potter. An exploration of the undertones of the Lewis Carroll books a year before Jonathan Miller's famous adaptation. An elderly Carroll is accosted on a train by a grown-up Alice, prompting flashbacks to his time writing Alice in Wonderland and his time spent with the young girl, to the consternation of her mother and his Dean. The subject of child abuse is present as an undercurrent, but never openly acknowledged. Scenes from the books are played out in front of line-drawn backdrops. Heavily reworked some twenty years later as the film Dreamchild.  

The Girl Who Loved Robots - w Peter Everett. Near-future take on the film noir genre, with a detective on the trail of an embittered former astronaut for the murder of a nightclub singer.  

A Designing Woman - w Julia Jones. Lancashire housewife Rhoda Lewis' obsession strains relationships with family, friends and husband Reginald Marsh.

Up The Junction - w Nell Dunn. Possibly the most celebrated of the strand's early successes, this slice of the highs and lows of working class Battersea life, ending with a then-controversial pro-choice message, firmly established the Wednesday Play strand. Starred Carol White, Tony Selby. Ably directed by Ken Loach. Later reworked, as so many Play for Todays were, into a film.  

The much-maligned 'kitchen sink' factor - two sides of working class London life with Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home.

The Trial and Torture of Sir John Rampayne - w Alan Seymour. Jack Hawkins is the eponymous Old Tory bigwig whose bluff, traditional values are brought crashing round him one fateful night. With Ian McKellen.

The End of Arthur's Marriage - w Christopher Logue/Stanley Myers. Ken Loach directed this, a rare foray into the territory of the musical, in which Ken Jones is the estranged lead, breaking free of the worries of his old life with the help of his daughter.

Tomorrow, Just You Wait - w Fred Watson. James Chase is a factory-working teenager in desperate love with Janina Faye. Tony Selby, Charles Lamb and Joss Ackland feature.

The Bond - w Terry Wale/Dawn Pavitt. Portrait of a superficially perfect marriage between young couple Barry Lowe and Hannah Gordon.

Stand Up, Nigel Barton/Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton - w Dennis Potter. Two outings in two weeks for Potter's semi-autobiographical hero. Upwardly mobile Keith Barron goes to Oxford and is disowned by his humble mining home town, yet looked down upon by the university grandees. Charles Collingwood is briefly seen. In the 'sequel' (actually written and produced first), Barton stands as a Labour MP (as Potter once did), but is again caught in the middle of contradictions, this time political. Full of witty exchanges and memorable scenes, particularly, in Vote..., an embarrassing canvassing trip to an old peoples' home and a showdown with the Tory candidate at the council dinner. Arnold Ridley also stars.  

The Coming Out Party - w James O'Connor. James O'Connor ends the strand's first full year with a raucous and touching comedy set around a London family's Christmas. With George Sewell, Wally Patch and Carol White.

The War Game - w Peter Watkins. The first of these to be banned (famously decried as a danger to the mentally unstable), this perfectly-crafted piece of pseudo documentary covering the aftermath of a nuclear attack on London was still affecting on its eventual transmission in 1985. Use of handheld cameras, a carefully-paced 'timeline', and the familiar tones of Michal Aspel all helped shift the notion of televisual realism up several gears. Watkins, who also directed, had previously turned the same documentary eye on the battle of Culloden.  

1966  

The Boneyard - w Clive Exton. Series producer James MacTaggart was succeeded by Peter Luke at this point in the series, leading the overall tone of the series to perhaps waver more to the theatrical from MacTaggart's more contemporary, social-realist domain, though the former directed this well-received black comic study of police inspector Nigel Davenport having his judgment called into question when he reveals his experiences of psychic "visions". Based in part on the real life case of corrupt Metropolitan Police Detective Sergeant Harold Challenor, which also inspired the character of inspector Truscott in Joe Orton's stage farce Loot, produced theatrically in the same year. Exton's baroque writing style demanded (as he insisted) a sober, simplistic direction, which was achieved here, though not before a few false starts involving some over-elaborate production design, which Exton and MacTaggart agreed to scrap during production. Sadly Exton's sole Play for Today, The Rainbirds, fared rather less well. Support came from Michael Robbins and John Barron.  

A Man on Her Back - w Peter Luke/William Sansom. An uneasy love triangle develops between Norman Rodway, a pianist in a slightly shabby drinking club, Valerie Gearon, and Barrie Ingham, a rather wet and spineless individual who clings to Gearon for moral support.

Rodney, Our Intrepid Hero - w Brian Finch. Baroque goings-on at Graham Crowden's exclusive organisation dedicated to the facilitation of illicit pleasures, exposed by ace reporter Jim Norton.

Calf Love - w Philip Purser/Vernon Bartlett. An Edwardian teenager travels to Prussia to study german. lodging at the house of Warren Mitchell, he becomes infatuated with his two daughters Isobal Black and Deborah Watling.

Silent Song - w Frank O'Connor/Hugh Leonard. Dialogue-free study of the antics and hardships of two trappist monks (milo o'Shea and Jack MacGowran) in an Irish monastery. Leonard wrote the script for this piece with full dialogue, with instructions for the actors to merely mime the essence of what was being (un)said. A second dumb-show, The Retreat, concerning an innocent young priest newly arrived in Dublin, was written at the same time and screened later in the year. 

Who's A Good Boy Then? I Am - w Richard Harris. The uneasy relationship between elderly couple Thora Hird and Ron Moody and a sheerful stranger who moves in with them (Ronald Lacey).

A Game - Like - Only a Game - w John Hopkins. A lower-middle-class terraced house in a northern town, elderly Mrs Everton (Susan 'Angels Are So Few' Richard) receives a routine visit from her daughter Beth (Alethea 'The Bankrupt' Charlton). But amongst the tea and pleasantries, something is amiss - Mrs E is looking shifty, worried, frightened. She won't tell Beth what it is, though it must have something to do with Sammy, one of her two cats, having recently been run over. Suddenly, she says she must 'go somewhere', and Beth reluctantly minds the flat (and remaining cat) while she goes on her mysterious errand. Her destination turns out to be the police station, where Sergeant Carter (Stanley 'Macready's Gala' Meadows) hears he tale of intimidation at the hands of two local youths - they threatened to kill her cats and have been taking a pound a week of her as 'protection' ever since. Carter visits the boy's home, where mum Mrs Jones proves as difficult to talk to as the accused brothers Peter and Lawrence (Jack Wild and his real life brother Arthur). Peter, the youngest, is petrified, clinging to the taciturn, mouthy Lawrence for help. Mrs J threatens them with violence, they squabble amongst themselves, Lawrence claims he needed the money for a holiday for Peter, and Carter gets nowhere. After he leaves, a telling teatime standoff occurs between Mrs J and Lawrence - she is clearly afraid of her son, over whom she has no control. The best she can do is threaten him with their still-absent dad. At Mrs Everton's, the whole story comes out, and Beth and her husband (David 'The Gorge' Webb) try to talk through things calmly, but the prospect of a court case and local headlines lead Beth to round angrily on her mother, accusing her of 'pushing away' her and her siblings, then pathetically calling for help in her lonely dotage. At the Jones', Mr J arrives home and a similar row ensues with his wife, he accusing her of spinelessness in the face of Lawrence's posturing, she of fatherly neglect. Beth and Frank return home and, after sending their young son (on whom Beth, we learn, dotes to an extreme degree) off to sleep with nursery rhymes, they reflect on events more clamly. Beth agrees to make up with he mum the next day, though something she said - that the malevolent youths could well have included her children - sticks in her mind. At the Jones', Lawrence sends Peter to sleep with a story of his own devising, about the two brothers escaping to a foreign shore. Mrs Everton prays tearfully, alone, before turning in for the night. It's not only the police involvement that gives this play a similarity to John Hopkins' work on Z-Cars - the two domestic milleux - lower-middle and working class - could have come from Newtown itself. But 75 minutes allows more light and shade to be cast then in an episode of that series, and the subtelties of the dilemma and the characters' takes on in are well sektched. Mrs Everton, in particular, starts off scared, becomes defiant, then instantly regrets her decision to tell the police, and finally all but breaks down after her daughter's barrage of insults. The point that the two brothers are, or feel themselves to be, alone together in their unloving family is deftly made, as are the various sides of the debate on the limits and scope of juvenile punishment. One device that moves the play away from police procedural styles into more typically Wednesday Play fare is the use of interstitial location footage of children of increasing ages playing increasingly less innocent games - they begin playing cowboys and indians, watch a young girl parody a stripper, then lurk in the bushes to watch a couple snogging, and finally some teenagers set fire to an abandoned car. The point made here is obvious, and possibly slightly overdone, but the scenes, like the rest of the playy, are well-staged by the reliable Christopher Morahan.  

Why Aren't You Famous? - w Ernie Gebler. Irish girl Fionnuala Flanagan arrives in London and shacks up with northern bohemian artist Alan Dobie.

Macready's Gala - w Hugh Whitemore. The governors of a public school find events taking a turn for the strange as they find themselves trapped for a night in the school's memorial room. Among them are John Le Mesurier and Michael Bates. 

A Walk in the Sea - w James Hanley. Lyrical study of the lives of eldery Nora Nicholson, vicar Marcus Goring and other rural community members, including Kenneth Griffith.

A Boy in the Smoke - w Patrick Galvin. The fortunes of two Irish immigrant labourers in the tiny community centred around London's Paddington station. Sean Caffrey and Ray Mort star.

Barlowe of the Car Park - w Paul Ableman. Jack Woolgar is the ramshackle, tragicomic custodian of a municipal car park. An experiment with semi-silent comedy techniques that received unfavourable notices on transmission.

The Portsmouth Defence - w Nemone Lethbridge. The first in a trilogy of wry courtroom satires from Jimmy O'Connor's wife and former barrister Lethbridge, who'd represented the Kray brothers among other cases.

Pit About the Abbey - w John Betjeman/Stewart Farrar. Betjeman tackles the intrigue and double-crossing prevalent in the world of the ecclesiastical heritage lobby. With Henry McGee, first shown as part of BBC2's Londoners series.

The Big Man Coughed and Died - w Brian Wright. Comic study of the beleaguered relationship between redundant machinist George Baker and mysterious young girl Eileen Atkins.

The Snow Ball - w Brigid Brophy/Ursula Gray. At a sumptuous New Year's Eve costume ball, a torrid relationship blossoms between Patrick Allen and Katherine Blake (Gray under a stage name).

A Cheery Soul - w Patrick White/Torquil. Hazel Huges' excessively charitable lifestyle brings her few friends.

The Connoisseur - w Hugo Charteris. Derek Francis is an unscrupulous housemaster in a public school teeming with abuse and covert homosexuality.

The Retreat - w Hugh Leonard. Dialogue-free sequel to Silent Song, with Gerry Sullivan as a wet-behind-the-ears country priest contending with the earthier side of Dublin folk.

Ape and Essence - w Aldous Huxley/John Finch. Adaptation of Huxley's post-nuclear story of an impoverished, devil-worshipping land.

Toddler on the Run - w Shena Mackay. Four-and-a-half-foot petty thief Ian Trigger faces social prejudice and an uneasy romance on the run with girlfriend Anneke Willis.  

The Executioner - w Robert Muller. Sandor Eles and Rosalie Crutchley play a Russian man and his mother, charged with carrying out the execution of Trotsky.

Two social comedies - David Turner's Way Off Beat and Peter Nichols' The Gorge

Way Off Beat - w David Turner. A fine comedy of class and ambition set in the suburban 'scampi belt' of an anonymous Midlands town (in 'Urbshire'). Well-to-do self-made owner of a chain of hairdressers' (it says 'coiffeur' on his card) Arthur Bradshaw (Sydney 'Blaustein in The Cellar and the Almond Tree' Tafler) dotes on his quiet, vaguely morose daughter Linda (Helen 'Jumbo Spencer' Fraser) as she makes her faltering way through the highly competitive world of amateur ballroom dancing. After she finishes a novice class competition in third place (and receives a microscopic trophy for her trouble) Arthur decides to help her progress along by wooing Norman, male partner of the winning pair, into partnering her daughter in the 'pre-champ' section. Norman, a working class foundry worker living in council estate penury with his mother (June Brown) and sarky, technical college-bound younger brother Colin, is awestruck by the Jag-owning Arthur and his offers of much-needed financial assistance, and willingly agrees. Arthur's wife Betty (Brenda 'A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts' Bruce) takes a while to be convinced, until Arthur reveals his grand plan of ballroom star Linda lending her name to a continental-style nightclub ("A the-danson in the early evening, followed by Steak Diane or Chicken Maryland while they're watching the floor show [...] everything very continental and in the highest of taste.") and she's taken with the idea that "the Bradshaws will have the sort-of stranglehold on culture in these parts". Linda's reticence, however, gives rise to awkward scenes when she and Norman first meet, but an enrolment with ebullient dance tutor Vicky Rayburn (Stephanie 'To See How Far it is' Bidmead) helps break the ice - too well, in fact, as when Norman confides his misgivings about the partnership to Vicky, and she gives her summation of the girl - "When they don't have to battle for a living, all they can do is follow instructions, and wait [...] can't you see it written on her face, 'waiting for something'?" - the resultant 'get to know' session turns into a full-blown romance. For Arthur, who'd planned on ditching Norman as soon as a more impressive partner came along, and who rather fancied Linda pairing off with the hideous but well-moneyed Piers, this is a step too far, and in breach of their working arrangement. More heinously, it is an affront to the class barrier he's spent his career building up ("Bottom rung and top drawer won't wash. Never have done and never will.") Norman, meanwhile, is busy being alienated from the scheme by Colin ("Go to Ascot, why don't you, or watch them arrive for a royal garden party. Stand behind the railings and bust yourself with laughing at 'em [...] 'cos it's them what you're imitating.") In the final scene at the novice graduation comp, the pair heroically desert Arthur, shedding their ballroom finery and riding into the night in Norman's motorcycle combination. Birmingham schoolteacher David Turner comes up with a fine slice of observational, character-based comedy within what's more or less a straightforward sitcom (or Comedy Playhouse) plot. Tafler's Arthur is of course the standout creation - commanding a fine lower-middle-class vocabulary of portentous, over-fruity verbosity ("To economise on breath, mother, I think I shall wait till Linda has joined us before I divulge...") which, though a hackneyed trope by today's standards, was at the time a fresh and pertinent observation on the self-conscious artifice of the then still-emergent nouveau riche. (Although they are heading for trouble - Betty cuts swathes of tulle from Linda's dress, griping "I said to Connie, a hundred yards of tulle might have been au fait two or three years ago when we never had it so good, but it's Mr Wilson in charge now or haven't they heard of him?") It is the perceived gulf between the working and newly-aspirant lower middle class that gets Turner's goat here, and while ballroom dancing per se is not mocked - Vicky Rayburn, though a nice comic turn, is smart and respectable throughout - the airs and graces that so often come along with the discipline are held up as the nefarious traits they are, personified in Arthur's shameless social oiling, and the smarmy and eminently corruptible adjudicator he bribes, Antonio Laveline (Jeremy Hanley). Talk of Steak Diane and boites de nuit conjures up thoughts of Abigail's Party a good eleven years down the line, but Turner lays on a more sympathetic ear to the denizens of the aspirant classes, understanding the origins of their need to 'get on' while ably condemning their follies, and Arthur is never reduced to the impenetrable caricature Alison Steadman's Beverley becomes. Turner's work has much more in common with the plays Jack Rosenthal would turn in during the late '70s (qv) - finely-wrought natural dialogue combined with a compassionate grasp of character and community. Sadly his was a wayward talent, and alcoholism, a need to take piece work (writing for The Archers and various adapted serials) and an ill-advised trek into what he described as 'Jonsonian' comedy meant very few of his original plays were seen on television after this. Carl Davis scored the music for this production.  

A Soiree at Blossom's Hotel - w Simon Raven. Fabia Drake runs a seedy boarding house for the nobiliy in Mayfair, whose inhabitants settle uneasily alongside the much richer newly-minted 'arrivistes'.

Cock, Hen and Courting Pit - w David Halliwell. A love affair is uneasily revisited through the eyes of the couple when they meet again ten years after the fact. A multiple viewpoint narrative from the writer of Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, and the later Play for Today Triple Exposure.  

Photo Finish - w Peter Ustinov. Ocotgenarian Paul Rogers revisits various stages of his past life.

A Hero of Our Time - w Mikhail Lermontov/Ian Dallas. Alan Bates is a Russian cavalry officer having a disastrous affair with mary Miller in this adaptation of the Lermontov novel.

The Frighteners - w Daniel Farson. Michael Johnson's move from Chelsea to a converted warehous in Limehouse provides a golden opportunity for petty criminals Tom Adams, Ben Howard and Griffith Davies.

A Piece of Resistance - w Terence Dudley. William Kendall's resigned endurance of the Nazis' wartime occupation of the Channel islands is tested by the arrival of charming German officer Frederick Jaeger.

Where The Buffalo Roam - w Dennis Potter. Troubled illiterate Hywell Bennett escapes from his miserable, violent home life with helpless mother and war-obsessed grandfather with wild west reveries, which eventually overspill into reality when, after a humiliating attempt to learn to read, he gets hold of a gun and embarks on a shooting spree - first pigeons, then grandad and mother, and finally a policeman. Cornered by armed police on the roof of a cold store, he is finally gunned down himself. The usual Potter traits are all here - the "outsider", fantasy mixing dangerously with reality, and lashings of heavy symbolism. Filmed, highly unusually for the time, with Grandstand's OB television cameras on location in Cardiff. By this time Peter Luke had retired as series producer, and the bulk of the work was split between Lionel Harris and the more socially motivated Tony Garnett, who would produce the strand's most famed entry, Cathy Come Home. 

The Head Waiter - w John Mortimer. In an out-of-season seaside hotel, a neglected young member of staff bonds with the charismatic head waiter (Donald Pleasence).  

Cathy, Come Home - w Jeremy Sandford. Carol White was on the streets of London, as in Up the Junction, but this tale offered no respite from the welfare misery as she lost her home, saw her marriage (to Ray Brooks) break up, and eventually had her children taken from her on a railway platform. Again, Ken Loach directed, Tony Garnett produced. Also seen - Geoffrey Palmer, Ruth Kettlewell, and a young Tim Brooke-Taylor.  

The Private Tutor - w Alan Gibson. Daughter of well-to-do parents Marty Cruickshank is appointed a private tutor (Ian McShane) to prepare her for Oxford entrance exams. The reulting relationship brings resentment from her boyfriend and his girlfriend alike.

A Pyre for Private James - w Simon Raven.Basil Henson faces court martial for murder of the eponymous soldier in the Malayan jungle.

A Tale of Two Wives - w Marc Brandel. Dinsdale Landen's long running affair comes to a dramatic end when the two women involved - Amanda Barrie in London and Suzanna Leigh in Paris - finally meet.  

Little Master Mind - w Nemone Lethbridge. Second in Lethbridge's wry legal trilogy, centring on the exploits of the Barking brothers (led by George Sewell), with many characters carried over from The Portsmouth Defence.

The Mayfly and the Frog - w Jack Russell. A central London road rage incident between wealthy Jack Gielgud's Rolls-Royce and penniless Felicity Kendall on her moped comes to a head when Kendall breaks into Gielgud's mansion and confronts the supercillious millionaire.  

Alice in Wonderland - w Jonathan Miller. Miller's famed, darkly psychoanalytical, star-studded treatment of Lewis Carroll, with Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, Leo McKern, Michael Redgrave, John Gielgud et al. in minimal make-up, disconcerting camerawork aplenty and a sitar-drenched soundtrack.  

1967  

Person to Person - w Joan Henry. Divorcee Elizabeth Sellars fall for wayward student Michael Wilding.

The Order - w Fritz Hochwalder. John Neville plays a Viennese detective investigating the killing of a Dutch girl by an Austrian Nazi police officer during WWII. Produced across Europe as part of the prestigious (though wildly varying in quality) Eurovision drama banner The Largest Theatre in the World.  

Everybody's Rich Except Us - w Thomas Clarke. Alfred Lynch plays a successful, ebulliant conman. Richard Vernon is among his 'marks'.

The Lump - w Jim Allen. Ex-coalminer and fervent socialist Allen's first BBC work (rejected by Granada, for whom he was then working on Corrie scripting duties) concerning the exploitative use of casual labour in the building trade. Directed by Jack Gold.  

Who's Going to Take Me On? - w Andrew Davies. Trisha Mortimer is a disgruntled typist for a lingerie firm who seeks a more fulfilling career.

Death of a Teddy Bear - w Simon Gray. A peaceful village in the 1930s is disrupted by the arrival of Canadian millionaire Kenneth Warren and his young, bohemian wife Brenda Bruce.

Days in the Trees - w Marguerite Duras. A middle-aged lothario (George Baker) finds his posessive mother (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) less than amenable to his mistress (Frances Cuka).

In Two Minds - w David Mercer. This accomplished and controversial play about mental illness was both a triumph for director Ken Loach and a major departure for Mercer from his usual, more baroque, style. Kate Winter (Anna 'Schmoedipus' Cropper), a young, lower middle class girl in her early twenties, is the subject of the investigations of a doctor (Brian Phelan) after she has been diagnosed as schizophrenic. A doctor interviews her parents (Helen Booth and George A 'Grange Hill' Cooper) with whom she still lives, her independent older sister (Christine 'Spongers' Hargreaves) and an ex boyfriend to trace the story of her 'illness'. Gradually the story is pieced together - her parents, preoccupied with what is 'right and proper', have serially disapproved of her lifestyle, particularly her relationship with actors and writers ('Beatniks' her mum calls them), one of whom got her pregnant, and the resulting abortion is a cause for much bitterness and confusion (as Mrs Winter tells it, Kate wanted to have the child, but she knew she *really* did not). After Kate returns home late to find herself locked out, she throws a fit in the kitchen the following morning, allegedly throwing a breadknife at her mother, and from then on is submitted to a medical regime of tranquilisers and visits from the mental health officer. Probing deeper, the investigating psychiatrist visits Jake, an old boyfriend who is acting in a play by another boyfriend (the one who fathered her aborted child, though this was not revealed to him) which, in a self-referential moment, is revealed to be based on Kate's story. A family visit from Mary, Kate's sister who left the fold at the first opportunity, and who blames Kate's 'weakness' for staying, ends in discord and tears. Gradually the picture is built up of systematic repression and control - not just the button-down values and bluff double-talk of her parents, but by the conventional medical establishment who, after she is admitted to hospital, treat mental illness as treatable by drugs and behavioral programming - 'just like a broken leg' as Mr Winter approvingly notes. This technique, though seemingly modern and enlightened as opposed to the fearful shunning of the mentally ill which was the norm in the past, is shown to have a detrimental effect on Kate, alienating her further from the world, retreating into a paranoid fantasy of being controlled by a great machine 'like at Cape Kennedy' and throwing more violent (but victimless) fits, which the hospital nurses deal with by physically restraining her in an equally violent manner. After she is accused of ruining the progress of a male fellow inmate with her 'talk' (the outwardly cheerful boy in question happily sees the hospital as some kind of mental National Service, and his keep-your-nose-clean, don't-annoy-the-bogies attitude, while fine by the standards of the system, is arguably not the healthiest way to look at one's own problems). Finally, after a nightmarish episode in which a window is smashed, the hospital - with, it seems, the full co-operation of her parents - submit her to a course of electro-convulsive therapy which, as the doctor discusses with students, is not fully understood, but used anyway as it seems to work quite often ('God, if we always waited until we understood how these things work!') This final quote, over the end credits, sums up what Mercer, and his mentor, the controversial psychoanalyst RD Laing, finger as the main fallacy in the attitude of the medical establishment (as was at the time) to mental illness, responding with a regime o off-the-peg drugs and treatments which enforce, rather than ameliorate, the repressive 'group patterning' that serves to alienate the 'patient' (even the label 'patient' is part of this) further into their delusional retreat. The technique Mercer and Loach use to make this point was highly original at the time, and still retains its power despite decades of hackish rip-offs - the first person camera perspective. The first half of the play, dealing with the piecing together of Kate's story by the investigating doctor, is filmed from the doctor's point of view - whether in a hospital, front room or pub, the viewer is put in the place of the (unseen) questioner, inviting empathy with his point of view. After Kate is (re-) hospitalised - the doctor's diagnosis having gone against the evidence gathered up to now and fallen in with standard medical practice - the camera now 'becomes' her, and a new voice intrudes on the soundtrack - Kate's 'inner voice', the 'other Kate', delusional, violent, disrespectful, the one Kate's mother knows 'isn't really her' when she behaves in an aberrational way. By treating this Kate as something to be cut out, disposed of, the doctors merely aggravate it, until, by the end, a doped-up Kate is shown, possibly free of 'the voice', but also divested of her own personality as well - as the play ends, we are given the impression Kate has as good as likewise been consigned to oblivion. This startling device (Mercer wrote the play before he knew Ken Loach was to direct) is allied with a more documentary way with dialogue than is usually found in his work, free of the baroque aphorisms of Let's Murder Vivaldi or the strung-out whimsy of And Did Those Feet..? (both qv). But the combination is uniquely Mercer. On transmission, the play raised many hackles. The medical establishment claimed Mercer's depiction of conventional psychiatric treatment was exaggerated and outdated, and his schizophrenic characters inaccurate, though Mercer did take certain events from Laing's published case histories, as well as personal experience of mental illness which informed his entire career. On an artistic level, Anthony Burgess, while praising the craft of the play, poured scorn on its lack of 'salvation' for Kate, and derided the documentary style as aesthetically lazy, propagandist 'anti-art', a position which seems extreme with regard to both this play and other works of this nature in the Wednesday Play strand, though ironically today's blanket deployment of one-size-fits-all camera-shaking 'realism' fits Burgess' diatribe much more neatly. This play, however, shirks no artistic responsibilities. As well as comprehensively researched, it is compassionate, not just toward Kate, but to her parents, at whom it never points a condemnatory finger. Approbation is reserved for the endlessly perpetuated social patterns, whether of 'respectable' family life or conventional medical wisdom, which hold back progress as much as they stifle the vulnerable individual. Didactic he may be at times, but Mercer's sympathies are firmly with those who need them most. Loach made a film version, Family Life, in 1971 for his Kestrel Films company, with Sandy ‘Sue Osman’ Ratcliff in the title role, which inevitably ‘opened up’ some of the scenes, in particular swapping the lengthy recounting of the knife incident with a dramatic depiction, thus arguably picking up the pace of certain scenes, but also compromising the original’s startling dramatic conceit.  

Hardline social comment from the front lines of labour (The Lump) and battle (The War Game).

Another Day, Another Dollar - w Michael Standing. Tony Selby finds life working on a cruise ship not to be the breeze he imagined, with wily bar steward Victor Maddern calling the financial shots.

Public Inquiry - w Raymond Williams. Signalman Charles Williams' tiredness when his son Clive Graham is late for his shift leads to tragedy.

A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant - w Thomas Murphy. Twentysomething Irish shop boy TP McKenna faces a crossroads in his life, torn between quiet, respectable provincial life and a more adventurous future, hearing conflicting advice from all sides.

A Breach in the Wall - w Ray Lawler. In the near fuuture, wily churchman Barry Justice happens on the long-lost tomb of Thomas a Becket during restoration work at his parish church. The prospect of a pilgrimage site being revitalised, to say nothing of implications for the relationship between the Anglican and Catholic churches, are among the dilemmas unearthed along with it.  

The Voices in the Park - w Leon Griffiths. Kenneth Haigh is a long-time lecturer at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, who one day is given the chance to fulfill his dreams of leadership. One of the first solo pieces of television work from future Minder writer Griffiths.  

Dismissal Leading to Lustfulness - w Thomas Whyte. Serial sackee John Moffat takes solace in a raucous party held by the tenants at his new flat.

A Brilliant Future Behind Him - w Thomas Clarke. A minor traffic offence turns out to have ramifications that go to the heart of government when it comes to court. A process of hushing-up is set in motion, but ambitious young barrister David Buck is keen to make his name by bringing it all into the open.

Message for Posterity - w Dennis Potter. Elder Tory statesman Joseph O'Connor receives as a gift from his party the honour of being painted by maverick artist Patrick Magee, who's determined not to produce a flattering image. Partly inspired by the infamously subject-unfriendly portrait of Churchil by Graham Sutherland.  

A Way With the Ladies - w Simon Gray. Bill Fraser and Barbara Couper are a slightly sinister couple keen to look after Iris Russell's elderly aunt.

The Playground - w Hunter Davies. John Ronane avoide employment and commitment, weaving his way between his estranged wife and his mistress.

Drums Along the Avon - w Charles Wood. Off-beat, comic, pseudo-vox-pop take on racial integration from the writer of The Knack. Leonard Rossiter plays arch-liberal Mr Marcus, taking integration to its logical conclusion in Bristol by blacking up and donning a turban in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Bristol's Asian community, and finding his vaguely well-meaning sentiment shown up for the lazily simplistic solipsism it is. 

Sleeping Dogs - w Simon Gray. Old colonial couple Marcus Goring and Rachel Kempson return to England to find the country has changed a great deal - and not to their liking.

Wanted: Single Gentleman... - w James Broom Lynne. Claustophobic, Pinteresque tale of two simple-minded men and a girl living in an innocent, if slightly retarded, relationship, their small world broken up by the arrival of a smart, cynical lodger. By this time the main production chores of the strand were split between Graeme MacDonald (who worked closely with Dennis Potter) and Irene Shubik. This set-up would remain for the rest of the strand's life, and last some way into the early seasons of Play for Today. 

A Black Candle for Mrs Gogarty - w Edward Boyd. Duncan Macrae is a mysterious Glaswegian gent known as The Crocus, who turns to the feisty Mrs Gogarty (Pegy Marshall) for financial help, setting a bizarre chain of events in motion..

Pitchi Poi - w Francois Billetdoux/Peter Mayer. An entry in the Pan_eurovision drama initiative The Largest Theatre in the World, in which one country per year provided a play, which was then adapted by a television company from each of the other participating nations. George Rouquier is a peasant entrusted with bringing up a Jewish infant towards the end of the war, and sets off around the continent to find the child's roots. The episodic structure of this mammoth two-hour-plus production cleverly allowed many European countries a look-in in the production side.

The Devil a Monk Wou'd Be - w Alphonse Daudet/Peter Luke. Adaptation of a Daudet short story by series producer Luke, telling of a remote English monastery fallen on hard times, who turn to Elizabeth begley for their salvation - super-strong home-brewed liquor. With Tony Selby, Max Adrian and Joan Bakewell.

Fall of the Goat - w Fay Weldon. Bumptious country landowner Joss Ackland defies his aloof wife Patricia Lawrence by openly taking a second, Christine Hargreaves - though Lawrence, her sisters and other local women have other ideas.l  

The Profile of a Gentleman - w Jimmy O'Connor. Lee Montague is a gangster organising one last, elaborate job before he retires from the game. With George Sewell, Ken Jones.

Dial Rudolph Valentino One One - w Ewart Alexander. Ladies' man Keith barron and timid friend Alan Lake stumble through the former's wedding. With Nerys Hughes, Roy Dotrice and Colin Farrell.

Kippers and Curtains - w Vickery Turner. Blueblood Fiona Duncan has trouble fitting into Angela Baddely's rough-and-ready boarding house.

Death of a Private - w Robert Muller. An army private is driven to desperation, and finally murder, when his wife falls for a pop singer. A partial update of George Buchner's Woyzeck, this featured songs composed by Ron Grainer and performed by Paper Blitz Tissue.  

An Officer of the Court - w Nemone Lethbridge. The trial of East End hoodlum Tommy Godfrey in the final part of Lethbridge's Old Bailey trilogy. With Yootha Joyce, Bryan Pringle and Coral Atkins.

The Fat of the Land - w Jack Russell. Joan Greenwood runs a bizarre health farm. Willoughby 'And Did Those Feet..?' Goddard and Peter Jones are among the hapless inductees.

1968  

Toggle - w Ian Roberts. Semi-eponymous child Torquil is adopted by warring couple Moray Watson and Mary Webster. Alan Badel is his 'uncle'.

House of Character - w David Rudkin. Strange stuff from David 'Penda's Fen' Rudkin's first commissioned BBC work. Alfred Lynch moves into a flat in which a host of bizarre events occur - hands come through walls, lightbulbs explode, furniture talks, Lynch turns into a table-top model in an advertising agency, etc. Finally it's revealed that the new flat is, in fact, a room in a psychiatric asylum.  

Jamie, On a Flying Visit - w Michael Frayn. Caroline Mortimer and Dinsdale Landen's quiet suburban lives are disrupted by arrival of Mortimer's brash, sports car-driving old college flame Anton Rodgers.

Monsieur Barnett - w Jean Anouilh. A visit by famed tycoon Michael Redgrave to Harold Lang and Miriam Karlin's upmarket hair salon leads to a remninisence over his far-from-ideal past.

The Drummer and the Bloke - w Rhys Adrian. Quarrymen Michael Robbins and Donal Donnelly strike over a petty demarcation issue. Their superiors, pedantic Peter Sallis and wily Peter Vaughan, join in and escalate the dispute.

Rebel in the Grave - w Marc Brandel. An English lord (Gregoire Aslan) has his comfortable living made off the back of a deceased artist under threat when said artist's nephew (Michael York) comes to visit.

Coincidence - w Piers Paul Read. CLive Revill, Emrys James and Donald Douglas share a dark secret from their past when they meet at the british German embassy.

Light Blue - w Gerald Vaughan-Jones. US jazz trumpeter Calvin Lockhart takes up with Maureen O'Brien in a small English town. With Robert Gillespie.

Leonard Rossiter in Drums Along the Avon and John Hopkins' A Game - Like - Only a Game.

Let's Murder Vivaldi - w David Mercer. In a shabby Camden flat, draughtsman Ben (David Sumner) and secretary Julie (Glenda Jackson) conduct an uneasy courtship of physical (him) and verbal (her) violence. Ben’s vicious jealousness is due to a long-fermenting semi-affair Julie has been having with her middle-aged, predatory boss Gerald (Denholm Elliot). Julie denies having slept with him (‘ If I slept with another man, you’d be relived, wouldn’t you? You’re desperate for it.’) Ben, unapologetic (‘I’ve been bad tempered ever since I was old enough to throw a rattle’) dumps her clothes on the floor and orders her out of his flat. An altercation on the threshold about truth (Julie: ‘I wouldn’t ever lie about something where you needed the truth.’ Ben: ‘You sanctimonious twat!’) results in Ben producing a knife and cutting her cheek. Julie flees. In ST John’s Wood, Gerald and wife Monica (Gwen Watford) are discussing Julie, the latest in what’s apparently a long line of girls from work he’s ‘bedded’, and also Ben, who neither have met, but who fascinates both of them. Their marriage is clearly dead, and Monica emotionlessly turns over the practicalities of Gerald’s extra-marital activities and a divorce (’ Do you think {Julie} would agree to be the - what do they call it? - the Named Woman?’ ’Might, if we’d had - what do they call it? - sexual intercourse.’) and their dead-end situation (‘I don’t hate you or anything. I don’t even dislike you. I don’t even not love you. It’s just that you’ve become microscopic to me […] I’ve got you terrifically in focus.’) Gerald takes Julie to a Suffolk motel room to consummate the affair, which is grim indeed - he changes coyly into his pyjamas in the bathroom, she wears a bikini under her clothes, and sex is obviously not on the cards. They leave for London. The following day, Monica accosts Gerald, with the same dissociated disdain, over the failed spot of ’cohabiting’ (’My anxieties haven’t been about whether - but why not’) and reveals her own history of infidelity (‘When you were in Hungary, I had a Hungarian. Isn’t that a coincidence?’ ‘I might have had a Hungarian when I was In Hungary…’ ‘But you didn’t.’ ‘I nearly did.’) Warming to her theme, Monica goes further than she seemingly ever has before in her dismal sport of baiting Gerald (‘Anyone who knows you at all can see there’s something disturbing about you. You’re a bewildered, desiccated wreck with pathetic sexual fantasies that paralyse you out of your wits.’) Gerald finally tips at this last, plunged from his usual perch of lofty self-denial into an alien existential maelstrom (‘I can’t evade responsibility for what I am’) and takes a knife to Monica. This time the results are fatal, and Gerald places her vacantly on the settee and calmly phones the police. Julie returns to Ben, and finds nothing much has changed in their ‘constant process of leaving each other’. They discuss the physically repulsive Gerald (‘What did he look like in his pyjamas?’ ‘Like a striped hen. A donnish striped hen.’) Ben erupts into violence again, lobbing cups at Julie, which miss. Then, becalmed (‘I’m ludicrous. Aren’t I? Why is that? I can see I’m ludicrous. Why should genuine feelings come out ludicrous?’) he entreats her to sit at the piano, while he accompanies her in the only way he can peacefully manage - on the violin. ‘Come on then - let’s murder Vivaldi.’ Despite the gulf in age, class and original (Ben and Julie hail from Hull) between the two couples, all indulge in intense self-analysis that’s clearly not meant by Mercer to pass for authentic, ‘kitchen sink’ dialogue, but nevertheless succeeds on its own terms in believably articulating to the audience the inner feelings of four livers of A Life Examined, who paradoxically can’t articulate anything useful about their lot to each other, or even themselves. The boiling-point agonising between Ben and Julie, the bitter verbal sparring of Gerald and Monica, and the ‘worlds collide’ small talk Between Gerald and Julie are all baroque aspects of a very realistic depiction of personal isolation. The neat symmetry of the scenes between the various couples highlights the relationship that perhaps shapes the whole play - that of Gerald and Ben, both highly jealous, and perhaps some what in awe of, the mysterious other, attacking the perceived enemy through their respective spouses. (By contrast, Julie and Monica’s fascination with each other remains on the level of amused curiosity). Aspects of autobiography notwithstanding (Sumner as Ben wears the fierce black mop of hair and goatee that had come to identify the Yorkshire-born Mercer himself) this superficially modest-looking chamber piece, shorn of the visual and temporal experimentation of much of Mercer’s other work for television (qv), is a simultaneously funny and excruciating study of relationships on a self-propelled hiding to oblivion.  

The Golden Vision - w Neville Smith/Gordon Honeycombe. The trials and tribulations of a group of fottball fans, starring Ken Jones and co-written by future ITN newsreader Honeycombe.  

The Man Behind You - w Jeremy Scott. Lonely, depressed Michael Bryant finally snaps when a practical joke goes too far.

Infidelity Took Place - w John Mortimer. A happily married couple seek a divorce for tax purposes, only for the shabby, lonely divorce lawyer the woman visits to fall in love with her, naively try to court her, and react with (hypocritical, for a lawyer) shock when their deceit is finally revealed to him. An early exercise in the tragi-comedy of legal proceedings from ex-barrister and future Rumpole creator Mortimer.  

Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It - w Tony Parker. When an elderly woman collapses and is taken to hospital, she is discovered to have been illegally fostering fourteen children, whose case histories are told over the course of the play. One of the first Wednesday Plays to break with the initial rule that a certain proportion must be shot in a conventional TV studio, being filmed as it was entirely on location, mainly in a run-down Cricklewood house.  

Spoiled - w Simon Gray. Young Simon Ward attends a fateful 'cramming' session with maths master Michael Craig.

The Gorge - w Peter Nichols. An acclaimed and original play, in which Neil Wilson shows some friends home movies of his family's trip to Cheddar Gorge, which starts off innocuously enough but soon turns into a catalogue of mutual resentment and embarrassing accident.

A Night with Mrs Da Tanka - w William Trevor. A lonely bachelor (Geoffrey Bayldon) makes a yearly pilgrimage to a Hastings boarding house in a vain search for his long lost childhood sweetheart, only to meet up with loud, vulgar serial divorcee Mrs De Tanka (Jean Kent) who lures him up to her room for an uncomfortable crash course lecture in the hopelessness of love and life.  

Charlie - w Alun Owen. Content young man Julian Glover finds elder brother Barrie Ingham at the end of his tether in a seedy motel room.

Anyone for Tennis? - w JB Priestley. Michael Pennington's suicide triggers a complex tale of his life, the lives of those he knew, and a 're-ordering' of his past, in one of Priestley's series of plays dealing with theories of time and experience.

Mooney and his Caravans - w Peter Terson. A young couple seek to escape a life of council estate drudgery by moving to a Cotswold caravan park, the titular owner of which proves to be a petty dictator.  

The Lower Largo Sequence - w Edward Boyd. A Scottish-set, modern day musing on the legend of Robinson Crusoe, with Patrick Allen and Isobel Black.

Hello, Good Evening, and Welcome - w Hugh Whitemore. Robert Hardy plays a Frostlike TV bigwig. Michael Robbins, Ralph Bates and pop group The Eclection feature.

A Bit of Crucifixion, Father - w Julia Jones. Devout Liverpudlian Catholic Jean Marsh, denied any further children on medical grounds, contemplates using contraception in this early TV entry from the always brilliantly warm and witty Julia Jones.  

Nothing Will be the Same Again - w James Hanley. Patrick Magee's cosy family life is turned upside down when a figure from his past (Bernard Lee) reappears.

A Beast With Two Backs - w Dennis Potter. An Italian and his dancing bear wander into a turn of the century Forest of Dean village community, wherein a married man has killed his pregnant lover. First the local simpleton, then the bear and its foreign owner are blamed, and eventually set upon by a mob stoked up by the village priest. 

On the Eve of Publication - w David Mercer. First in Mercer's trilogy centred around Nobel prize-winning novelist and outspoken, adventurous left-wing lush Robert Kelvin (Leo McKern). Kelvin is attending a celebratory dinner on the eve of publication of his latest novel, The Last Days of Buster Creek. Among those present are his publisher (Thorley Walters) and latest in a long line of partners, Emma (Michele Dotrice), a good thirty-odd years his junior. The mood is superficially convivial, but Kelvin is isolated, ignoring the conversation and retreating into his thoughts to dwell on his myriad ailments and compose a hypothetical letter to Emma whom, he comes to realise, he has treated with the same kind of supercillious disdain he has lavished on most of his other acquaintances. As Kelvin repeatedly retreats to the bathroom in an attempt to gather his increasingly drunken thoughts, his last chance at redemption expands to take in his childhood - like Mercer, he was from working class stock - both he and his impetuous, gay cousin Charlie fled the Nottinghamshire pit community to pursue artistic, globetrotting lives. There's also a dose of British Trotskyite guilt - having spent time in Eastern Europe during and after the war, Kelvin is under no illusions about what the Soviet regime did to its intellectuals - particularly a sorely missed fellow writer, a poet named Sladek - and his grief over continuing to comfortably spout pro-Communist prose from the safety of the UK weighs heavily. Holland the publisher knows this, too - "I've always had a sneaking suspicion that... politically... you've been a phoney, Robert." Mixed in with this collage of reminiscences is a traumatic vignette on a train in central Europe in which Kelvin takes a previous partner, Jane, to have an abortion, along with a photo session of the Kelvin family in their Sunday best, and stock footage of miners and the storming of the winter palace. This is all presented in mercer's trademark fluid, choppy style (Kelvin: "I get confused now and then. My memory infuriates me... it slips and slides...") Firmly identifying as we are made to with Kelvin, we are left to take his proclamations and reminisences on trust, with only the objections and contradictions of the others at the table for guidance. This identification is made possible by a neat, but not overused, trick - when Kelvin retreats from the party, the sound of the ambient chatter cuts completely out, leaving us with Kelvin's point of view of the silent conversation, over which we hear his own stream of consciousness. The ending is tragic - on the way back from the party, Kelvin becomes increasingly incoherent, and finally dies in Emma's arms. Then, in a shock twist, Holland turns up with a copy of his new book - it transpires the publication dinner has not yet happened, but is scheduled for next Wednesday evening. Kelvin's last stand has been a fiction played out by his increasingly addled brain. Amid the gloom, however, Mercer injects much wit. The tale of Charlie burning his dad's wooden leg and scarpering to the continent is fun, and the scenes between Emma and Kelvin are full of knockabout vitriol - a self-pitying rumination on the ear-hair-sprouting of middle age turns into a fight ("I don't see why you have to turn something perfectly commonplace into an obsession!" "Supposing you started getting furry in a non-regulation area?"). It's a technically daring piece of work that nevertheless holds together brilliantly, and was followed up in 1970 by The Cellar and the Almond Tree and Emma's Time.  

1969  

The Fabulous Frump - w James Gibbins. The eponymous fortysomething woman, ostensibly a fashion editor, recruits an effeminate, timid designer (Peter Butterworth) to organise a makeover fashion show for tramps in order to marry him, but finds herself competing for his heart with one of their new (male) models. One of the many, often overlooked, Play for Todays that resembles high farce more than the 'gritty' kitchen-sinkery of popular stereotype. 

Smoke Screen - w Fay Weldon. Ad man Edwin Richfield makes a fine living plugging a brand of cigarettes, but his mother is dying of lung cancer. A meditation on advertising morality from former copywriter Weldon.

Dr Atkinson's Daughter - w Hugo Chateris. Doctor's daughter Jennifer Hilary returns from a year's VSO trip to the stultifying provincial world of her parents. Her fathers assistant, Peter Barkworth, is the sole local who'll listen to her.

The Apprentices - w Peter Terson. Larks and arguments among young apprentices in a Yorkshire factory yard, performed by the National Youth Theatre (featuring Barrie Rutter, Paula Wilcox and Gareth Thomas) in the manner of Terson's acclaimed football play Zigger Zagger.  

Birthday - w Michael Frayn. Sisters Rosemary Leach and Angela Pleasence share a fraught birthday meal.

The Big Flame - w Jim Allen. A Liverpool dockers' strike, whipped up by Norman Rossington, escalates into a clash with the police. A highly polemical tale from Allen, set, more to pre-empt complaints than for any prognosticatory reasons, in the "near future".  

Potter's A Beast with Two Backs and Leo McKern as Mercer's Robert Kelvin in On the Eve of Publication.

A Serpent in Putney - w Fred Watson. Couple Tony Britton and Frances White, Barry Stanton and girlfriend Angela Brown, and loner John Alderton, have no choice but to get tied up in each other's lives living in a crowded shgared house.

Bam! Pow! Zapp! - w Nigel Kneale. Kneale satirises the Batmanesque stylisation of violence with this tale of a comic-devouring gang of mates' fisticuffs getting out of hand. Clive Revill is the victim, Robert powell the sole voice of conscience.  

Sling Your Hook - w Roy Minton. Comic, yet highly polemical tale of a group of Nottinghamshire mine workers' coach trip to Blackpool, led by publican Michael Bates. One by one, in tacit comment of the gloomy future mass pit closures were bringing, the miners 'dropped out' in the town rather than face life back home, and eventually, after symbolically releasing his pigeons on Blackpool beach, Bates returns home in the coach, on his tod. The first full-length play from the future writer of Scum. Also starring Joe Gladwyn. 

A Child and a Half - w Owen Holder. Geoffrey Bayldon enchants busines partner Dinsdale landen's young daughter with tales of fairies - but the innocent fun cannot last.

Son of Man - w Dennis Potter. Potter's brazen take on the passion of Christ, with a robust Jesus (Colin Blakely, commenting on the fine timber used to build a cross) confronting a debauched Pilate (Robert Hardy) while disciples including Brian Blessed as Peter ("Beats fishing, eh?") look on. An enormous, sprawling production which nevertheless was filmed entirely in TV Centre - partly in a studio nicked from the Play School team.  

The Exiles - w Errol John. The author plays a black former GI who revisits his old artime European haunts, and meets his affluent cousin Michael Griffiths, who takes him on a tour of his - largely white - social world.

Blodwen, Home from Rachel's Marriage - w David Rudkin. The titular unstable daughter of a staunchly religious Welsh family returns from a raucous wedding in Ireland to become the centrepiece of a bizarre rag week student festival. Another decidedly weird turn from Rudkin. 

The Parachute - w David Mercer. Werner von Reger (John Osborne) is a private in the German army during World War Two, assigned to a parachute test regiment. As he prepares for the highly dangerous test mission, we see the story of his early life through a series of disjointed flashbacks. The son of landed Baron George von Reger (Alan Badel) and his wife Helen (Isabel ‘Jack Point’ Dean), Werner’s youth is the classically cold and unloved childhood of the neglected gentry. His father has passed beyond the realm of the eccentric into misanthropic self-delusion, embodying the common aristocratic belief that the nobility are above and beyond history, religion and nationality, and are only responsible for themselves. He knows that brewing discontent in the country will lead to war, even (somehow) predicts the outcome in precise detail, yet treats it all with the same aloof, cold irony he lavishes on his son, a budding poet who has no real stomach for the fencing and shooting lifestyle his father is trying to instill in him. His mother is already a distant figure, distantly tolerating George’s many affairs (particularly with a famed ballerina) and spending much of the year apart from her husband in nearby Laugstein. The sole comfort young Werner has to hand is a close, possibly sexual relationship with ageing family retainer Helmut (Esmond Knight) and a tentative romance with cousin Anna (Jill ’Country’ Bennett). In the ’present’, Werner forms a close bond with fellow private Klaus (Barry ’Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It’ Jackson) which leads to a beating from the rest of the regiment, and suspicious questions as to how someone of his high standing has ended up a private. In the ’past’, young Werner has a series of obtuse arguments with his father, and vivid nightmares centred around a dimly-recalled ball in Poland, where he and Anna first made out. As the day of the test arrives, and Werner is selected (naturally) to be the first to climb the tower and make the test jump, we see how the family finally tore itself apart. Anna, a supporter of the German communist resistance, calls Werner to witness her perform an assassination on a Nazi party official (and known homosexual) Schacht. Horrified, Werner runs out into the street to Schacht, and takes the bullet instead. Back home, the invalid Werner is interrogated by secret policeman Holz (director Lindsay Anderson) who prizes the information that Werner and his father’s balletic mistress had relations on the day of the shooting, and Schacht, a ‘good friend’ of his father, had also attempted to seduce him. Anna returns to tell of her sexual humiliation at the hands of Holz in his ‘cellar’, and to confront Werner with the wilful ignorance of Germany’s destiny he has inherited from his father (‘If you know what they are capable of - why can’t you listen?’) At the tower, Werner’s chute - perhaps by his own design - fails to open in time and, crippled, he sits out the rest of the war in Laugstein, where his mother, now totally senile, believes him to be his father. With his father dead in an air raid, and Anna missing presumed likewise, Werner reluctantly assumes the role of his father as his mother sorrowfully lambastes him with reminders of his congenital arrogance (‘You said “The von Regers are strong enough to piss on history!”’) as more parachutes fall out of the sky - the invading Russian army, signalling Germany’s final defeat. Originally shown as a BBC2 Play of the Month, this is a highly complex bit of Mercer dramaturgy, employing all the techniques in his arsenal – blackout dream sequences (a re-imagining of a childhood sleigh ride, with a full moon threatening to engulf the cowering Werner, is especially effective) long exchanges of wry, predatory dialogue (between Werner’s father and Werner, Werner’s father and Werner’s mother, Werner’s father and anyone who’ll listen) and a constant cutting between different periods in the story, which brilliantly heightens the drama toward the end of this play (a later work, The Bankrupt (qv), demonstrates how Mercer could sometimes fail with these techniques). It’s a story with personal undertones – Mercer lived in Europe for a number of years, married to an exiled Czech heiress, before he began his playwriting career, and her family’s experiences combine with the life story of a poet Mercer befriended in West Berlin, as well as his own experiences and concerns. A dramatically difficult play, full of arch exchanges and complicated set-ups, is handled magnificently by both young director Tony ‘Headmaster’ Page, and the cast – Osborne, though clearly far too old for the callow twentysomething Werner, gives a good performance as a frightened nihilist. Werner’s parents, symbolizing the willful, suicidal decadence of the crumbling Old Germany, are vividly portrayed, and minor roles, especially Anderson’s small-time lawyer turned plain clothes officer, relishing the power given to him by The Party, but still fearful of the likes of Werner’s confident father, add even more richness. Mercer was entering his imperial phase with this and the subsequent Kelvin trilogy, and it’s a great shame personal problems and the changing landscape of television drama meant his output fell rapidly into sharp decline, in both quantity and quality, after these.  

The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel - w Peter Terson. Entertaining fantasy in the Billy Liar mould from the author of school production favourite Zigger Zagger, in which innocent trainspotter Richard O'Callaghan encounters various bizarre characters on a journey through the titular tunnel, before it is closed for good. The simple assuredness of the obsessive spotter is contrasted favourably with the various neuroses of the 'normal' people who confide in him.  

Patterson OK - w Ray Jenkins. Andrew Robertson has an uneasy time growing up in Glasgow. Roddy MacMillan is his father.

The Mark II Wife - w William Trevor. Another study of relationships and social embarrassment from Trevor. Faith Brook launches into an awkward, self-pitying tirade at a drinks party about her doomed relationship with her husband, who she is sure is having an affair. An elderly couple, themselves no strangers to adultery, are the only guests who stay to listen. Finally Brook calms down, contacting her psychiatrist and claiming it is all delusion, and leaves. Then enter her husband... with his 'Mark II Wife'. One of the last Wednesday Plays to be shown in black and white. 

Close the Coalhouse Door - w Alan Plater/Sid Chaplin. Old pitworker Bryan Pringle and his wife reminisce about the good old days at their golden anniversary bash. Songs written by Alex 'Maths-In-a-Box' Glasgow provide a deceptively upbeat tone to the grim commentary on the present and future of the British coal industry. A later Plater musical - Curriculee Curricular, written with Dave 'Greenslade' Greenslade - was one of the first UK stereo simulcasts (with Radio 2).  

The Sad Decline of Arthur Maybury - w John Gorrie. Ronald Culver plays the titular alcoholic old buffer on his uppers.

All Out for Kangaroo Valley - w Noel Robinson. Two Australians find the going rough on holiday in London.

Happy - w Alan Gosling. Malcolm McDowell is a Suffolkian famer's boy.

There is Also Tomorrow - w Hugo Chateris. Retiring nuclear regiment commander Glyn Houston clashes with peace protesting daughter Ann Penfold.

Double Bill: The Compartment/Playmates - w Johnny Speight. "Serious" outing for Till Death... scribe Speight, with a double bill of a couple of his early stage plays, starring Marty Feldman as an impish, annoying social intruder (named Bill, natch) harrassing first an old man in a railway carriage, then Eileen Atkins in a country house. Directed by John McGrath, who also took the reins of the original '62 stage version, with Michael Caine in his first lead role as Bill.  

The 'lighter' side of Play For Today - The Last Train Through the Harecastle Tunnel, and The Italian Table.

Blood of the Lamb - w Leon Whiteson. Young mixed race couple Anthony Corlan and Nicola Pagett flee Aouth Africa for Britain, but meet charismatic man-of-the-world Frank Finlay en route.

The Vortex - w Noel Coward. Adaptation of the Coward classic (and very untypical for the strand) with Alan Melville.

It Wasn't Me - w James Hanley. Frances Cuka and Ronald Lacey take desperate measures to free themselves of burdensome father Harry Hutchinson.

1970  

The Season of the Witch - w Johnny Byrne/Desmond McCarthy. Julie Driscoll makes her acting debut as a young woman dropping out of workaday life in a typing pool. Robert powell and Paul Nicholas feature. 

Millie Miglia - w Athol Fugard. Michael Bryant plays Stirling Moss in this tale of his triumph at the titular gruelling 1000 mile road race.

The Hunting of Lionel Crane - w Roy Minton. An army deserter survives by hiding out on a country estate, but is eventually shot by the gamekeeper. A perhaps too simplistically class-obsessed slice of allegory from the avowedly socialist Minton.  

Rest in Peace, Uncle Fred - w Alan Plater. Tragicomic study of a northern funeral, with Corin Redgrave, Ann Dyson and Jack Watson.

Mad Jack - w Tom Clarke. Michael Jayston plays war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Jonathan Cecil is Lytton Strachey, Charles Lewson palys Bertrand Russell.

Nathan and Tabileth - w Barry Bermange. Sepia-tinted (with brief flashes of colour) Dutch co-production in which an ageing couple are visited by their young grandson.

The Italian Table - w William Trevor. Leonard Rossiter plays AR Jeffs, a shabby, lonely junk dealer who becomes embroiled in a tug of love between a woman, her husband and his mistress, via the symbolic buying and selling of the titular item of furniture. A magnificent, Rigsby-foreshadowing performance of pity from Rossiter, even with the occasional "My God...", and wonderful lines from Trevor. "Every day of my childhood I was beaten for eating my fingers."  

The Boy Who Wanted Peace - w George Friel. Percy Phinn and Frank Garson are two Glaswegian teenagers caught up in sectarian rivalries. With Roddy MacMillan.

The Cellar and the Almond Tree - w David Mercer. Second in Mercer's Robert Kelvin trilogy, this play concentrates on his former friend, the eastern European poet Sladek (Peter Vaughan). Now a communist party committee member operating under the name Volubin, he returns to the palace that once saw him brutally 'interrogated' by the Gestapo (we see many flashbacks to this cellar-bound torture throughout the play), to help organise a ceremonial dinner to celebrate the post-war 'liberation' of the country by the Red Army. Old friend Blaustein (Sydney Tafler), a German Jew of highly-strung, sweatily demonstrative temperament, presents Volubin with the situation. The Countess Isabel von Reger (Celia Johnson) is living a cloistered existence in an apartment in the palace having been spared a worse fate by the Communists. Driven mad by circumstance and age, she still believes it to be 1943, with the war still raging. She also holds the key to the well-stocked but solid-doored wine cellar, which they need for the banquet. Blaustein delegates the job of procurement to Volubin, to which he reluctantly agrees. There follows an uneasy, stilted exchange between Volubin and the Countess, who believes him to be her long lost butler. Bitterly sarcastic interjections come from the Countess's maidservant Marenka (Patsy Byrne). The Countess's sad reminiscences include flashbacks to her late nineteenth-century childhood, particularly the time she planted an almond tree in the palace courtyard, which she repeatedly gazes out onto (though it's implied there really is no tree there). Volubin initially tries to snap the Countess out of her reverie and awaken her to the reality of her situation, but mention of the war brings on memories of the cellar beating, and his last meeting with Robert Kelvin (played in this instance by Bernard Kay) in a cafe during the war with two Gestapo officers nearby. In this final exchange, the two old friends berate each other obliquely on their failings. Volubin predicts Kelvin's safe, prosperous future in England, and laments his own ideological weakness ("I've always come to heel in the end. In my discomfiting fashion - I'm a good party man. Split right down the middle.") Finally, convincing the Countess the dinner is to be held in her honour, Volubin retrieves the keys for Blaustein, only to find two Communist party officers waiting in the dining room to take him away to the same cellar the Gestapo held him in. As he is escorted to his inevitable fate (which he accepts resignedly, without emotion), Blaustein suddenly finds himself accompanying the befuddled Countess, dolled up to the nines, into the banquet, walking her arm-in-arm up to the head table of flabbergasted Communist part officials. This last, empty, confused act of defiance (for both of them - as a Jew, Blaustein will not last much longer under Communist rule than he would have done under Hitler) is contrasted with Volubin's disillusionment - the party he blew up trains for in the war has summarily betrayed him and his people. Mercer based the story of the Countess on an apocryphal anecdote, and there is a strong element of autobiography in this play - Mercer had in the '60s married a Czech woman from an aristocratic lineage whose father had been killed by the Gestapo. Elements of this also found their way into The Parachute, and it is strongly hinted the Countess is related to the von Regers of that play. Fantastic tragicomic performances characterise this play - Vaughan is great as ever, Johnson's Countess has a sympathetic, Miss Havisham quality about her, and Tafler does his usual gimlet-eyed schtick with aplomb - along with wonderful visuals on a par with The Parachute, courtesy of the trilogy's nimble director, Alan Bridges. A third play, Emma's Time, completed this trilogy.  

The Year of the Sex Olympics - w Nigel Kneale. Leonard Rossiter presides over a pornography-placated future society, and with Brian Cox hits upon a new ratings-grabbing idea - strand a couple in an island wilderness and televise the results. An extremely prescient media satire from the Quatermass author, although, like most science fiction, the production has dated rather badly. Also with Derek Fowlds. Originally screened on BBC2's Theatre 625 play slot.  

No Trams to Lime Street - w Alun Owen. A sort of British version of On The Town, with three sailors on shore leave in Liverpool. Songs and music provided by Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott. First performed for ITV's Armchair Theatre strand some ten years earlier. 

To See How Far It Is - w Alan Plater. A trilogy of plays set on a cruise ship, with Geoffrey Bayldon and Nigel Davenport, first broadcast on BBC2's Theatre 625 strand - Murphy's Law, The Curse of the Dorkins, and finally To See How Far It Is. Each part was helmed by a different director.  

Wine of India - w Nigel Kneale. More futurology from Kneale, this time the story of a society of immortals, which to keep the population down employs a policy of euthanasia. Brian Blessed and Annette Crosbie are a couple preparing to make the sacrifice.  

Sovereign's Company - w Don Shaw. Military cadet Gareth Forwood finds army life distressingly inhospitable. With Ronald Culver as The General.

Party Games - w Hugh Whitemore. German industrialist Frederick Jaeger gets more than he bargained for when he picks up sassy Eastender Eileen Atkins.

Emma's Time - w David Mercer. The final play in Mercer's trilogy takes up from where On the Eve of Publication left off, with a fraught discussion between Emma, Kelvin's lawyer and his accountant over the divvying up of the estate. From there we flash back to Emma's first encounter with Kelvin (played here by Andrew Kier, a more vibrant, aggressive Kelvin than McKern's, as seen through Emma's eyes) throwing up drunkenly in a thunderstorm in Cambridge. Then we intercut between the story of the beginnings of their uneasy relationship and discussions between Emma, the accountant and Kelvin's secretary Jane (with whom he had an affair, though it's not established whether she is the Jane of ...Publication) about the impending visit of a documentary programme maker researching Kelvin's life ("Does he wear tight pants and one of those flowered scarves tied round his neck?") Then we see Emma leaving her parental home for Kelvin's in front of her bewildered mum and dad who, it's shown, never really understood her ("There's something so... inaccessible about you, Emma.") The producer arrives, and proves to be an altogether more serious man than the popular stereotype, a Hungarian ex-pat with a personal interest in Kelvin's work. After initial resistance, Emma agrees to take on the role of interviewer in the documentary. An interview with Kelvin's still-living mother is the result, moving from easy talk of life in a pit town to a rather uncomfortable grilling by Mrs K of Emma ("Must have been over forty years between you. That is too much.") Emma stops the interview. After an automatic, loveless affair with Mark ("That was a loathsome coupling for you!") the increasingly numb Emma leaves for Paris, and the domicile of Kelvin's outrageous, raddled old queen of a cousin, Charlie. For all his sub-Wildean bravura, he cuts a tragic figure. Charlie explains his deathbed conversion to Catholicism in cynically blase terms ("I decided... to peg out in arbitrary allegiance to a great metaphor... the Christ kick won on points aesthetically.") and dismisses Kelvin's Marxism as deluded, half-arsed ("A self-disgusted spectator of other people's corrupted and abortive revolutions.") But he's ultimately admiring of Emma's 'stoicism' ("You're a delightful child. I wonder why? You make no egotistic exertions... and yet... you emanate a curious peace... you have genuine humility. I hope you will cherish that.") Back at the house, Emma encounters Ruth, an ageing ex of Kelvin's, who has come for some old photos and pours scorn on her ("You aren't even a person. You merely typify your generation... They pulled something like you from between my legs twenty years ago...") Finally, Sladek/Volubin, aged since the last play and nearly blind, turns up, and during a tender walk in Holland Park Gardens, Emma agrees to help him write one final book - "a true history of the Czech Communist Party." We fade from his reminiscences of Lenin's funeral to footage of the real thing, and then to black - a fitting end to a play which marked Mercer's swan-song to overtly left-wing political drama. If the documentary is a rather cumbersome plot device compared to the deft interweaving of the previous two plays, this is made up for by some fabulous characterisation, particularly John Sharpe's misanthropically moribund Charlie Bourne. Dotrice's portrayal of Emma, spurned by just about everyone except Sladek and (in his own unique way) Kelvin, is a fine piece of controlled internalisation in the face of the demonstrative grotesques. The linking footage this time comes from Andrez Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds, a film starring the "Polish James Dean" Zbigniew Cybulski (one of Kelvin's old friends) as a resistance fighter in the closing days of WWII.  

Chariot of Fire - w Tony Parker. A mock-documentary study of a convicted sex offender's failed rehabilitation by a prison worker (based on the real life case of Stanley Wood), told in a series of interviews between the two. Filmed entirely on one set, apart from a few location shots in Pentonville.