The Long Distance Piano Player - w Alan Sharp. A dingy municipal hall in a nondescript northern town plays host to Pete (Ray Davies) a phenomenon, a true one-off of Herculean proportions - at least, according to his loudmouth, cod-American manager Jack Burnshaw (Norman Rossington). Over the next few days, as Jack barks at nonplussed townsfolk through a megaphone while his gofer Alf (James 'Red Shift' Hazeldine) bangs resignedly on a drum, Pete will be attempting to break the record for non-stop piano playing. Why, apart from the 'uniqueness' of the achievement, no-one can be quite sure, least of all Pete's long-suffering wife Ruth (Lois Daine) holed up in a makeshift bedroom for the duration, within earshot of the relentless drone of Pete's playing. Locals seem none to bothered either - two old duffers dusting down the snooker tables in the hall chat idly about him because - well, he's being talked about, apparently. Audience members come to witness the freak, make fun and shout out confusing requests. Much speculation on either of the couple 'going without' while the marathon continues is loudly made. A gang of youths headed by Ken 'Just a Boy's Game' Hutchison intimidate Pete's girl and break into the hall at night, almost forcing Pete to stop until Jack storms in and beats them into submission. But as time passes, and Pete's playing slips from a medley of recognisable tunes into a relentless atonal stew, things fall apart of their own accord. Ruth demands he choose between his pointless record attempt and her. Doesn't he love her? Pete's reply is as incoherent as his playing. Then she confronts Jack about his exploitation, but Jack, his transatlantic accent slipping as he tenses, remains adamant that he is the only one who matters to Pete. And so the marathon wears on, with Pete's fingers bandaged, and shaves and sponge baths taken in situ with the help of the ever-eager Alf. Finally, however, Pete snaps, and puts down his bandaged hands, running past an irate Jack to fall - rather spectacularly by way of the fire escape - into Ruth's arms. Weatherbeaten and wasted, he takes the promise of life over empty achievement in the end. Alan Sharp freely admitted this story was based on Horace McCoy's depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which was coincidentally being made into a Hollywood film at the same time this was in production (an earlier radio version of the play predates the film entirely). The play shares with that film the same flaw in its one-note allegory - how easy is it to care for the characters, or try and anticipate their moves, once the metaphor has been set in motion? Davies, while certainly no revelation in the acting stakes, does at least come into his own as the days wear him down - when he sings to Alf a giddy, weary song Marathon (an original Davies composition for the film) the flight from sanity is clearly underway. Lois Daine copes well with her scenes, especially the showdown with Jack, in which Norman Rossington also proves himself a capable actor above and beyond the comic turn his mutton-chopped, tight-pullover-wearing demagogue seems in the early scenes. As appropriate to a story concerning the balance on the razor edge of sanity, wayward director Philip Saville turns in one of his more 'together' productions, brilliantly racking up the claustrophobic tension in the interior scenes, and photographing the back-to-back terrace locations with a sharp eye for their relentless, maze-like oppression. (The exercise bars folded into the walls of the hall-cum-gym are likewise framed to give a sense of Pete being a 'caged animal', fortunately without the point being rammed home too forcefully.) Only twice does the over-exuberance that would later scupper overblown outings like The Rainbirds (qv) surface - a short Bunuel rip-off fantasy sequence showing Pete dragging a piano up a hill, and a final piece of film footage showing a fox racing through woodland, to illustrate a rather half-baked bit of symbolism from earlier in the story (Pete had been repeatedly babbling about 'seeing a fox once' to Alf). While this first outing for the renamed strand is far from a classic, and doesn't provide a great deal to think about after the credits have rolled past to the strains of the Kinks' Got to Be Free, the atmosphere of the piece is undeniably affecting, and there's certainly more to recommend it than mere curiosity at seeing Ray Davies act.  

Local heroes - Ray Davies in The Long Distance Piano Player, and the factory workers in Leeds - United!.

The Right Prospectus - w John Osborne. A strange entry from the 'father of kitchen sink drama', following the efforts of self-made George Cole and his wife to choose a public school - not, as it transpires, for a child of theirs, but for themselves. So, drafted into different houses, Newbold, JA and his wife, Mellor, PL (accepted unquestioningly as fellow pupils by the rest of the school) get stuck into the ritual of cold showers, chapel, rugger and maths, she with far more evident relish and contentment than he. Eventually, at the end of the term, Newbold, JA decides he can't hack it, and they leave ignominiously in their chauffeur-driven car, ignored by the rest of the school. A troubled production for two reasons - the script required much location filming in a public school, but the Headmasters' Guild, post-If..., were decidedly lukewarm about offering their premises for the filming of possibly subversive material, and Osborne got into one of his famous strops with the production team over their treatment of the work, only to recant after the finished play was widely well-received. The Guild needn't have worried really, as it's a more subtle and (at least quasi-) affectionate examination of the public school system than Lindsay Anderson's sledgehammer effort, depicting headmaster and head boys not so much as sadistic monsters, rather forthright, ultra-confident but permanently distracted eccentrics. The head welcomes Newbold and wife to the school in the same stuttering, rambling manner he conducts the chapel service, while the 17-year-old head of Newbold's house is given to tortuous, meandering and increasingly bizarre stream-of-consciousness speeches about the school ("You're neither in a doss-house for scruffy-minded New Statesman wet eggs or the offspring of fecund women graduates breast-fed from Aldermaston to Grosvenor bloody Square.") and, in a very odd way, society in general ("Planet speaks not to planet, earth not to earth, nation not to nation and man - not - not, we say, to man. If you don't see it, doubtless you never shall and if you do, it will finally astonish me.") The location work is fine, and Cole is, of course, perfect in the role of bumbling lower-middle-class husband almost completely crushed by social and hierarchical superiors nearly twenty years his junior ("You are not expected to reply or express an opinion. You have none nor probably ever will do.") The story meanders along in the same disjointed way as the protagonists talk, and doesn't so much end as peter out, the humbled lower-middles realising their class-hopping experiment has failed. A great, weird, funny gem from Osbourne, far removed from the 'kitchen sink' cliche he (inadvertently) helped to found in the 1950s, and from which Play for Today was, with productions such as this, decisively breaking away.  

The Lie - w Ingmar Bergman. The violent break-up of a marriage between Frank Finlay and Gemma Jones, much in the manner of Bergman's later Six Scenes from a Marriage. Annette Crosbie and Joss Ackland also star. Shown Europe-wide as part of The Largest theatre in the World (cf The Rainbirds).  

Angels Are So Few - w Dennis Potter. Tom Bell plays a charismatic stranger who arrives at the door of a bored housewife trapped in a dreary marriage claiming to be an angel - or is he just a vagrant? Other encounters cause a postman to crash his van and the husband of an elderly couple to have a heart attack. Not a favourite of his plays, but it became a touchstone for Potter's later work - the theme was reworked, in slightly 'rawer' terms, as Schmoedipus, the infamous Brimstone and Treacle, and the play itself revisited in Only Make Believe.  

The Write-Off - w George Salverson. A man is made redundant but can't bring himself to let anyone know, plunging into a web of deceit as he keeps up the charade he is still in work.  

I Can't See My Little Willie - w Douglas Livingstone. Council officer Nigel Stock's mid-life crisis at his brother's pub causes him to see life as a game show populated by Donald McGill-style saucy seaside postcard cartoon characters, animated in inserts throughout the play. A second play by Livingstone in the same style, Everybody Say Cheese, concerning a failing marriage and using family snaps as a visual device, was broadcast the following year. 

A Distant Thunder - w Maurice Edelman. Uncharacteristically old fashioned drawing room intrigue by then Coventry Labour MP Edelman, with a newly-appointed knight finding his honours celebrations cut short by a visitor from his traitorous WWII past.  

Hearts and Flowers - w Peter Nichols. Thirtysomething, Bristolian, married-two-kids municipal architect Bob (Anthony Hopkins) has trouble getting wife Jean interested in a round of saucy bedtime ‘treats’. She responds to his every advance with a yawn, leading him to insensitively accuse her of frigidity. She hits back with accusations of lewdness (‘You talk as though you’re some pathetic lurker in a mac, forced to pick up tarts in doorways!’) The truth is, though, that Bob is a bored, and boring, man, what life there was in him having been ground out by the family life he professes to loathe, but lacks the wit to escape, or even modulate. His way of life is a humdrum pragmatism, to treat any problem the same way as he would a council plumbing issue. Jean suggests she might be expecting a third child, and Bob’s response is stoic to a fault (‘If you are, the damage is done. If you’re not, we must continue to put our faith in the drug manufacturers.’) This static existence is interrupted – and just when Bob is about to get his leg over, too – by a phone call from his mother Marie. His father has collapsed. Over at her house, the doctor establishes death (‘He had a good innings’) and, almost without pause, funeral preparations are set in motion. The undertakers arrive, solicit tea and offer empty consolation (‘I always say, at a time like this, that’s all you can do, really and truly – drink tea.’) For the funeral, Bob’s brother Tony (two ex-wives, no kids), a highly successful TV current affairs presenter in the David Frost mould – arrives, and quickly injects a dose of emotion into the repressed proceedings. He laments the lacklustre funeral service. Bob counters, ‘the vicar only gets a pound.’ He sentimentally ululates on seeing dad’s meagre possessions either purloined by grasping relatives or given to the rag and bone man (Bob: ‘He wasn’t Tolstoy!’) Jean escapes from the front room wake of sausage rolls and small-talk to the back bedroom, where Tony finds her, and waxes lyrical about the time the room was his – ‘The bed where I used to lie as a virgin wondering what it was like. And where I found out. You were as bold as brass.’ Jean, it transpires, was his first conquest, and something still exists between them. They begin to touch, and Jean’s expression is a world away from the ceiling-inspecting face she wears when with her husband. The man in question, however, turns up in the room, and an increasingly heated exchange follows between the two men. Tony pours scorn on the lack of real grief among the mourners. Bob ridicules his nostalgia – ‘I believe in the ordinary, the prosaic.’ Jean is caught silently in the middle, aware these diatribes are as much for her benefit as theirs. Eventually, more out of a sense of duty than anything, she takes sides with Bob, but her yearning for the passion that Tony represents is clear to all. Back in the bedroom, Bob finally gets what he’s been denied, though Jean insists they keep quiet, as Bob’s mother is now staying in the children’s playroom next door. They retreat into their respective books, and we close on that image – not one of domestic bliss, but estrangement, frustration and fear. Like his Wednesday Play The Gorge, this entry is full of wonderful Nichols observations on the routines and speech-patterns of lower-middle-class suburbanites. The funeral scene is a miniature masterpiece of social awkardness, needless busywork (Bob organises the journey to the cemetery in various cars as f it were a military campaign), and inappropriate humour (Uncle Will reminisces about when funeral processions used to travel at a properly sedate speed, which segues into a reverie about the ‘urine woman’). Relatives bicker about the correct moment to open the car door. Noses are blown during the eulogy. Throughout it all, we hear Bob’s voice-over, reading from the hopelessly prosaic funeral procedure literature he was handed by the undertakers. Nichols got the idea for the play when he was writing Forget-Me-Not Lane, a stage piece full of fourth wall-breaking and other stylistic devices, far removed from what he calls the ‘keyhole naturalism’ of his television work. But Hearts and Flowers grew out of a scene in that play involving a funeral, which sent Nichols back to his diary entries concerning his own father’s ceremony, and became a play in its own right. With the three main characters, Nichols again sets sentimentality aside. A lesser writer would have felt compelled to show Bob’s humble everyman virtue in the face of Tony’s arch histrionics, but Nichols avoids such easy class romanticism.  

Robin Redbreast - w John Bowen. Recently-separated thirtysomething metropolitan script editor Norah (Anna Cropper) moves into a remote Vale of Evesham cottage reluctantly inherited from her ex. Various encounters with mysterious locals - Norah's help, the ruddy, wise Mrs Vigo; toothless simpleton odd-job man peter; sinister, self-taught Fisher and, oddest of all, young Rob, an orphan raised by Mrs V, discovered by Norah practising semi-nude karate in the woods. Lonely and curious, Norah succumbs to the inevitable and invites Rob round for dinner (a roast chicken personally strangled by Mrs Vigo), though his one topic of conversation - uniforms of the "Woffen" SS - drives her to despair, and after an awkward bit of polite shooing, he leaves. Otuside, however, Fisher, Peter and Mr Wellbeloved the butcher are waiting, and Rob is knocked cold. Inside, Norah is startled out of sleep by a bird which has mysteriously found its way down the chimney. Just in time, Rob bursts in and saves the day. Confused, flustered, Norah succumbs to the inevitable, and they go to bed, despite her Dutch cap having mysteriously gone walkabout earlier that day. Pregnant, but unsure of what to do, she moves into a tiny B&B in London, but Rob tracks her down, naively but threateningly demanding she keep "his" child. Distraught, she returns to the cottage to move her stuff out for good, but her car oddly refuses to start, and she's told a spare part won't arrive for a fortnight. Driven to distraction by the resulting entrapment, she finally confronts Rob in the cottage, and threatens him with a knife. She quickly realises, however, that whatever "plot" she's unwittingly become a part of, he's in the same boat. The other locals descend on the cottage, and Norah passes out with shock, while Rob is summarily executed off-screen. The next morning, all is tranquil - the car's fixed, the formerly hostile Mrs Vigo is all smiles, and a shaken Norah moves out. As she leaves, Fisher puts a calm proposition to her - let Mrs Vigo look after her son-to-be, that he might replace Rob as the mythical Robin Redbreast, to live in the village for twenty years until such time as his blood be used to ensure the continuance of the village harvest, just as young Rob's has. Norah, shattered, blankly refuses, and drives off, glancing briefly behind her to see Fisher, Vigo and company transformed into mythical figures - Herne the Hunter, Hecate the crone etc. - in one final, eerie shot. The story, in theme and, for the most part, execution, looks like a genre piece more suited to the later anthology series such as Thriller and Hammer House of Horror. Indeed, it was originally submitted by Bowen to the series department, who rejected it on the grounds that the abortion, contraception and pagan/religious references were too near the knuckle for a generic slot. Fortunately, Play for Today series producer Graeme MacDonald rescued the play from purgatory. While its "British Gothic" suspenseful style and twist ending certainly invite comparisons with the best of Thriller et al - by no means a bad thing - there's more going on here than a simple horror story. Norah, though far from immediately likeable, is a more strongly-drawn central character than the screaming damsel of popular cliche. She resolutely refuses to be intimidated by the silent menace of the likes of Fisher, which gives the final scenes far more power than had she been a panicky girl from the outset. (It's notable that only the "innocents" Norah and Rob are prone to any display of physical violence until Rob's demise.) Conventions of the suspense genre are played with, even sent up to some extent, but always respected for the tools of craft that they are. Peter the giggling halfwit, the phone cutting out leading to frantic jiggling of the cradle, mysterious figures watching in the distance - all are present and correct. But others are self-consciously examined, often by the combative Norah. Mrs Vigo's habit of asserting, of a particular trait of a local, that they are "known for it" is spat back mockingly by Norah, as are the Black Country "you'm" grammatical constructions. Norah finds herself, alone and panicking in the cottage, talking to herself, as solitary heroines often do to help move the plot along, and chides herself "stop talking to yourself. You're making me nervous." These self-aware tricks help Norah ground herself in reality, while also doing the same for the drama. Elsewhere the locals provide weird comic moments, none better than when a desperate Norah tries to get on the infrequent bus to Worcester, but is conned into standing in the wrong spot by a group of silent middle-aged ladies. As for that final mythical tableau, it certainly provides an effective punchline for the play (after the relatively low-key denouement with Norah and a calmly sinister Fisher) but it sits oddly with James MacTaggart's otherwise largely restrained, unfussy direction (the recurring, unexplained motif of a marble cut in half is a much less OTT, and more effective, representation of mysterious menace). Like any good genre director, MacTaggart keeps it simple - aside from one nice, ethereal montage, it's straightforward (and very accomplished) storytelling all the way, never overdoing the visuals for the sake of supernatural spectacle. In fact, sound becomes far more important than picture in a lot of scenes. The overlaid chopping of Peter's double-headed axe, nocturnal birdsong, the scrabbling of mice in the walls, and the distant sound of voices blowing in on the wind are expertly co-ordinated to give a sense of off-screen happenings going on "out there" that help root the viewer firmly in Norah's cottage, apprehensively looking out.  

The outsider - Tony Calvin fits in in The Hallelujah Handshake.

The Hallelujah Handshake - w Colin Welland. A social misfit gets the friendship and affection he craves by deceitfully insinuating himself into various church congregations. Directed by Alan Clarke.  

1971  

Alma Mater - w David Hodson. Civil servant Ian Carmichael returns home after a long period working abroad, to visit his old school's sports day, and old school grudges come flooding back.  

Circle Line - w W. Stephen Gilbert. Gilbert's first broadcast work was the winner of a BBC playwriting competition, but it's a play far from the sort of 'sound but safe' affair that would suggest. Michael Feast is a cynical student lodging with a professional woman and her fourteen-year-old son, who sees life as one continuous, numb journey on the titular underground track. The inevitable conflict between his existential disaffection and her (and especially her boyfriend's) orthodox worldview come to a startling head when he casually sleeps with the woman's fourteen year old brother after they have shared a joint . As a sign of the times, it's worth noting that the joint caused more consternation in the Beeb's drama department than the underage sex. This resulted in a postponement of over a year (the play was originally intended as part of a Wednesday Play season).  

Hell's Angel - w David Agnew. Upper-crust Katherine Blake and Richard Morant are pressured by the behaviour of their fast-growing adopted son (Michael Kitchen) when he joins a biker gang. Andre 'Quatermass' Morell also features. 'David Agnew', the BBC's Alan Smithee-style pseudonym of choice for authors who for various reasons prefer not to be identified, is in this case the novelist Hugo Charteris.  

The Piano - w Julia Jones. Taut tragicomic tale of progress and its opposition across the generations in a small Northern town. Elderly couple Ada (Hilda Barry) and Edgar (Leo 'William's dad' Franklyn) live in an ancient terraced house, run down on the outside but kept sparkling clean inside, especially the incongruous grand piano, an heirloom of Ada's father's, which takes up the entire front room of the house. Ada's nephew Willie (Glyn Owen) is the head town planner, a dynamic, no bullshit figure straight out of a business-based soap opera of the era (ironically Owen would play the initial incarnation of one of the titular trucking company clan in infamous '70s soap The brothers). Willie's wife Mabel (Janet 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire' Munro, tragically in her last ever screen role) acts as his secretary, but is not entirely happy with his grandiose scheme to sweep away all the old town to make way for a new, ultra-planned environment. Visiting Ada, whose street is to be demolished soon, Willie comes up against a problem - the council bungalow allocated for the couple will clearly not accommodate the gargantuan instrument. Ada staunchly defends her right to remain with the piano, while Edgar, more keen on the proper garden that comes with the bungalow, tries to mediate. Meanwhile, Mabel encounters old flame Jeremy (James 'Rainbirds' Cossins) in his music shop - Jeremy, less dynamic by far than Willie, and passed over by Mabel two years ago for him - detects a tiredness in her, brought on, he claims, by the relentless Willie. Back in their slick, modern home, Willie and Mabel argue the toss about the piano. Willie suggests housing it in their house, but Mabel - never a fan or friend of Ada's - refuses, suggesting Jeremy buy it off her. At the mention of the name, Willie flies off the hook, and a shouting match ensues. Later, Willie meets up with fellow councillor Ted (Brian Wilde) and others (including Roy Barraclogh) for band practice - the band being conducted by Jeremy. A vicious debate about the value of progress (and Willie's marriage) inevitably follows, with Ted trying to calm things down. The street begins to be demolished, Ada and Edgar standing firm in their house, comically donning ARP firewarden's headgear to cope with the falling plaster. Edgar's antipathy towards Ada's stance begins to show itself when Ted visits and tries to get her to see sense. Things come to a head in a comically disastrous Sunday lunch at the terrace, with Willie and Mabel at loggerheads with Ada and each other in the crumbling dining room. Willie suggests he buy Ada and Edgar a larger house, which thrills Ada. Edgar, however, has his own source of pride - he refuses to accept charity of any sort, and threatens to leave Ada for the bungalow. Finally Willie swallows *his* pride and takes Jeremy to Ada's to see about buying the piano, but by then Ada has given in - she wants the piano to remain in the house. As the wreckage of the piano is removed from the remains of the street, Ada stands lost in the new bungalow, while Edgar contentedly works on the garden. While touching on the sentimental side of things, Jones' injection of humour keeps the play from collapsing into melancholy, and the way each main character's particular pride gradually comes out to set them against the others is deftly handled, as is the terse Northern idiom of the conversations. The direction (from veteran James Cellan Jones) is simple enough, but for a "matching shot" device used to link scenes (eg. a scene ending with a close-up of Ada in tears fades into a close-up of the band practice contingent in raucous laughter) that eventaully becomes slack through overuse. Then there's the heavyweight symbolism of the titular instrument, which is just about realistically transposed from an obvious piece of writerly symbolism into a believable, almost understandable foible of a stubborn and proud woman. This is partly down to the strength of the performances - Barry and Munro in particular are great during their flint-eyed exchanges with each other.  

Billy's Last Stand - w Barry Hines. First PFT outing for Kes author Hines, a weird, minimalist story of young Billy, a self-sufficient coal-shoveller, who falls in with the seedy Darkly (Dudley Foster), a business partner with ambitions for the lad. When a rival shoveller turns up, things get nasty. Adapted from a radio play.  

The Rainbirds - w Clive Exton. A man attempts suicide by jumping from a hotel window, and as doctors operate on him to save his life, distorted flashbacks of his unhappy life with his brutish, domineering parents appear in ever more outlandishly exaggerated forms. Eventually he is brought back to life in a permanently vegetative state, which it turns out is fine by his possessive mother. Swinging from medical tragedy to melodramatic sci-fi to hysterical satire, this highly ambitious play packs a hell of a lot in to both text and direction, its mix-and-match mise en scene matching the nightmarish confusion of events and dreams in the comatose boy's mind. No target is left standing - middle-class familial torpor, political corruption, corporate greed, medical misanthropy and organ-harvesting, the paranoia and sexual unease of young manhood - only John's war veteran granddad gets anything like a sympathetic look-in (there was quite a tendency in plays of the post-Lord Chamberlain '60s to venerate the elderly as profoundly as they excoriated their immediate forebears). Either the zenith or the nadir, depending on your point of view, of the 'dark' and experimental tendency of Play for Today. Already vague enough in its premise, the play fell under the flamboyant aegis of director Philip Saville, who was undergoing something of a wayward streak at the time, and interpreted the script in a decidedly bizarre way. When Exton found out he decided that, perhaps, this production wasn't going quite the way he had envisaged, and disassociated himself from the work. Incidentally, Exton - after starting as a strictly naturalistic 'kitchen sinker', moved, via Wednesday Play The Boneyard (about a policeman who experiences visions, based - as was Joe Orton's Loot - on the Inspector Challenor case) to this highly experimental work. Then, moving through science fiction (Doomwatch, Survivors) via a few big screen successes (10 Rillington Place, an adaptation of Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane) he matured into a highly successful ITV drama writer/adaptor (Poirot/Jeeves and Wooster). His most recent work in a singular career is whimsical Felicity Kendall vehicle Rosemary and Thyme. This play (or at least, versions of it made by the various countries involved) was transmitted simultaneously throughout the EU, as part of The Largest Theatre in the World, a Eurovision project.  

Reddick - w Munroe Scott. Left-wing vicar Donald Harron rubs the local community up the wrong way, leading to accusations of misdeeds at the youth club he runs. 

Wind Versus Polygamy - w Obi Egbuna. Originally shown in the Theatre 625 strand, Nigerian author Egbuna's adaptation of his own novel examining African attitudes to polygamy in the face of the so-called 'wind of change' blowing through the post-colonial continent. With Rudolph Walker. 

When the Bough Breaks - w Tony Parker. A baby from a gypsy family admitted to casualty with multiple fractures prompts social worker Hannah Gordon to track down the parent responsible, which turns out to be the slight, unassuming Cheryl Kennedy.  

The Foxtrot - w Rhys Adrian. Fiftysomething marrieds Thora Hird and Michael Bates are visited by long-lost friend Donald Pleasance, who, it transpires, is Hird's real husband, the outwardly normal relationship between her and Bates having been a long-term affair. At the end they all settle down together to watch a US sitcom which bizarrely seems to be about their odd menage-a-trois. Much theorizing and comment on the changing face of Britain takes place between the trio along the way.  

Provincial Britain, alien and homely - Robin Redbreast and Three for the Fancy.

Orkney - w John McGrath. A triumverate of tales adapted from the short stories of Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown detailing the simple life of the islanders in both past and modern times - A Time to Keep, talling of a crofter's hard life making a living with his young wife and local disapproval; The Whaler's Return, a picaresque drunken trek across the island for the titular homecomer; and Celia, the present day story of morose young woman Hannah Gordon who lives with her stepfather (Fulton Mackay) and 'entertains' local menfolk in return for whisky.  

The Rank and File - w Jim Allen. Hot-off-the-press account of the St Helens Pilkington Glass factory workers' strike of the previous year from the eternally committed Allen, covering the work of the Rank and File Strike Committee (headed up by Peter Kerrigan) and their betrayal by union leaders in London. Allen came to write this play when he took a copy of his Wednesday Play The Big Flame round to the factory to show to workers, and was cornered by an old glassworker who showed him the grisly injuries of his trade and told him he’d been summarily dismissed after fifty years loyal service for refusing to cross picket lines, and had his pension taken away. Allen remarked “He’d got me by the bollocks, hadn’t he?” Allen himself found the dramatisation wanting, and later dismissed this play as “a lantern lecture,“ inferior to his more fictional The Big Flame, though for such a quick reaction to real events, it‘s far from the failure he claimed. Directed, as ever, by Ken Loach.  

The Man in the Sidecar - w Simon Gray. Successful novelist Edith (Gemma Jones) becomes increasingly distanced from her unsuccessful playwright husband Gerald (James Laurenson). Their long-time lodger Tommy (David Collings), a freewheeling Welshman and hangover from their earlier 'swinging' lifestyle (Edith and Tommy slept together before the marriage) becomes increasingly tiresome to Edith as he invites himself round to their social gatherings, gets pissed and throws up, but to his best friend Gerald he is, more so than their baby, the only thing keeping the marriage together (there's a lovely scene where a game of tiddlywinks between the two men develops into a - fully clothed - wrestling match a la Women in Love, which of course Edith walks in on). Edith's latest novel, written longhand at a schooldesk, turns out to both echo and prefigure what happens next, as she kicks out first Tommy and then Gerald. Gerald, in turn, makes off with her manuscripts. After several frantic calls, Gerald turns up at night, and proceeds to overdose on sleeping pills in front of Edith. A great script, full of tirades and sniping between the three main characters, and completely devoid of warmth and affection (though this is certainly not a minus point). Gray never takes this middle-class frostiness for granted, always examining why these rather objectionable people are as they are, not just using the icy brittleness as a default setting for drawing-room duels in the manner of many lesser studies of marriage breakup. It's this ambiguity - the confused motives and inconsistencies that characterise real life - that Gray excels at, and if as a result his plays lack the easy dramatic closure of a more generic marriage drama or family saga, the melancholic echoes of unfulfillment provide a deeper, more profound value.  

Everybody Say Cheese - w Douglas Livingstone. Sequel/companion to I Can't See My Little Willie, with lusty, retiring beach photographer Roy Kinnear moving into old chum James Hazeldine's Margate guest house, making one last play for the birds, and reflecting on the end of an era (both that of the seaside photographer and his own career) by means of old photos brought to life with visual effects. Directed by Alan Clarke.  

Traitor - w Dennis Potter. A diversion from the usual Potter preoccupations and stylistic tics, with a fairly straight telling of a team of journalists encountering drunken former British aristocrat-turned-Russian spy Adrian Harris (John Le Mesurier) in Moscow. The erudite Harris, evidently closely modelled on Kim Philby, has flashbacks to his unhappy childhood, his distant, Arthurian legend-obsessed father, and what is gradually revealed to be an assassination of a fellow defector overseen by Harris. The repulsion felt by the intellectual upper-middle classes to their forebears' dreary Old Englandism, as a root cause of their embrace of communism, is the main theme here, but tackled in terms of a very personal alienation. Le Mesurier, relishing a role he later described as his best ever for television, gives a great performance as the broken-backed ideologue, a walking personification of Potter's desire for a patriotism untainted by jingoistic false nostalgia.  

Edna, the Inebriate Woman - w Jeremy Sandford. Stumbling down a road past oblivious traffic in the middle of the night, clad in greatcoat, floppy hat and endless skirts and cardies, stumbles Edna O'Casey (aka Johnson aka Morrison aka McLean - "Ain’t got no permanent name"), a shapeless, sexless vagrant (“I am not the vagrant!”) tramping the country’s streets and lanes in search of some kind of permanent place to stay. Passing haphazardly through lodging houses, spikes, psychiatric hospitals (she’s summarily examined and given ECT), Holloway Prison, derelict barns and assorted refuges, she bounces around society’s bilges, forever moved on (“Flitter, flitter…”) by the social services, the police (“shades”) and the unwanted attentions of other tramps (she’s friendly enough, and doesn’t avoid companionship, but in the end she needs to be alone, it seems). Only Jesus Saves, a permissive hostel in a suburban street run by the idealistic Josie (Barbara Jefford) proves welcoming, even when Edna turns up in the small hours, drunk on meths and screaming to be let in. After one too many of these incidents, the street’s middle class population take Josie to court, and, despite an impassioned defence, petty distaste wins the day and Jesus Saves is closed down, leaving Edna to tramp her way back into the night. A deservedly famous entry in the Play for Today canon, this mammoth production gained an audience of some 9¼ million on its first showing, an unqualified success. In the manner of his earlier sensation Cathy Come Home, Sandford took his subject incredibly seriously, living the life of a vagrant for weeks at a time as research, as detailed in the play's companion volume, Down and Out in Britain. It was intended as a standard studio production, to be part of a trilogy along with Till the End of the Plums, about hostile local attitudes to a gypsy settlement, and Arlene, about an unmarried mother. The two subsequent plays were scrapped, however, after it was decided to "open up" Edna's story into real-life locations, which sent the budget spiralling way beyond the usual PfT allocation (and draining cash from subsequent productions in the season). The narrative is fragmented, as life must be to Edna's rootless, confused mind. Sketches of scenes interrupt each other as she's shunted from pillar to post, which disorientates but crucially never detaches the viewer. The emotional range is great, too. For every violent scene of degradation under the arches, there's a moment of pure comedy, such as when Edna ceremonially empties a mug of tea and kippers on a fellow inmate's head, or hands a DHSS officer a stolen identity card that turns out to be from a man, necessitating a quick lowering of her voice by a couple of octaves. These hare-brained schemes are, briefly, immense fun, but of course round the corner there’s another incident of abuse in a hostel, or a no-holds-barred trudge through a soup kitchen under some railway arches. In the demanding title role Patricia Hayes - straight off the Benny Hill Show and into a floppy hat - is, needless to say, effortlessly funny at these moments, but she's a revelation during the more intense moments, too. Never has the old adage about comics having an instinctive grasp of the tragic been so boldly demonstrated. It’s like Chaplin’s loveable tramp shtick shorn of the sentiment and arch pantomime - pathos is everywhere, not least in the recurring incidence of Edna desperately assuming a ringing phone in an office must be for her. Among the rest of the forty-plus cast, seasoned actors like June Brown and Talfryn Thomas mingle with real life down and outs, populating a seamless and texturally entirely convincing slice of social purgatory. Perhaps some of the final moments are a little too pat - Josie, giving evidence in favour of Jesus Saves, turns to camera to deliver an impassioned defence of the permissive hostel, which is rather jarringly on-the-nose after the amazing picaresque of the rest of the play. However, this is clearly the most important part to Sandford, and apparently there was an acceleration in the opening of hostels like Jesus Saves in the wake of the programme (Sandford himself became director of the Cyrenians, a loose charitable organisation on which Jesus Saves was based), so such reservations are churlish at best. The final sequence of flashbacks to Edna's childhood, however, are similarly too obvious, and don't really perform any task that the monotone recitations of Edna's various co-habitees about their own terrible plights haven't already done more economically. With Hayes underpinning the character with her mighty performance, such biographical details don't need spelling out for us to side with her. Another aesthetic problem is the relative lushness of the film's production. While many critics nit-picked over the perceived "exaggeration" of Edna's misfortunes, Clive James argued it didn't go far enough, and that the production gave a "chipper" gloss to the story. It's something Sandford would have at least partially agreed with - he remonstrated with the BBC's fresh ruling against "going back" to producing programmes in black and white, arguing that colour would give the film a too-pleasant photogenic quality. It's true that Ted Kotcheff gets the best out of the photography, but today the "glamour" of the visuals has subsided massively, while the strength of the story remains as great as ever. Perhaps the only real flaw in the play is Sandford's narrowing didacticism. Compare Jim Allen's remarkable The Spongers of 1978 (qv), where an uncaring society is depicted without ever foisting the blame on individual villains - social workers, bailiffs and councillors fail single mother Pauline, but not through individual malevolence, just the general inflexibility and overarching inhumanity of the welfare system. Edna, on the other hand, is all too keen to point the finger - social services are impatient and uncaring, and the residents against the hostel are straight out of a Monty Python Women's Institute sketch. Sandford, understandably keen to show a side of society all but ignored by the usual drawing-room drama, can’t help viciously caricaturing its members when they necessarily creep into the story. It's this oversimplification that seems too easy, which is a shame as Sandford's achievement in not only highlighting the plight of the homeless, but giving them a convincing voice, is otherwise triumphant.  

Flitter, flitter - Patricia Hayes in Edna, the Inebriate Woman.

Evelyn - w Rhys Adrian. More light relationship comedy from the author of The Foxtrot. Edward Woodward embarks on a trepidatious affair with Angela Scoular but simply can't hack it, eventually returning to wife Phyllida Law, life carrying on much as before. 

O Fat White Woman - w William Trevor. The wife of a public school head becomes gradually aware that her husband has been physically abusing his pupils, causing the death of one and brain damage and double vision in another (recreated by simply sticking mirrors beside the camera lens).  

Thank You Very Much - w NF Simpson. Raucous satire from the famous absurdist author of One Way Pendulum et al. Featuring Ralph Bates, Stanley 'Howard Hughes' Lebor and Joanna 'Duty Free' van Gysegham.  

Michael Regan - w Robert Holles. The titular Irish labourer exacts his revenge on a snooty landlord who kicks him out of his pub for removing his jacket. The play ends with Regan barricaded in his small cottage, with his family, in a stand-off with the police.  

Skin Deep - w Michael O'Neill and Jeremy Seabrook . Semi-comic look at the effects of American-style corporate culture on a lower-middle-class provincial family. In the opening scene, set in 1958, ostensibly on the 17th floor of Seattle's Everest Insurance building, the chiarman and various economic advisers of Fontaine Cosmetics (incorporating the Pacific Coast perfume and Toilet Water Company), a downmarket direct sales enterprise clearly modelled on Avon, thrash out plans for expansion into Europe, alighting, by the most haphazard of measures, on the fictional Oxfordshire town of Litchborough (he was stationed there during the war and quite liked it). Fast forward to the present, and Gerry and Doris Muddiman (Donald Pleasence and Sylvia 'Penny's mum off Just Good Friends' Kay) are preparing for their shifts at the Fontaine factory. Doris is bright, cheery, and totally and utterly grateful for the prosperity Fontaine has brought to the area. Gerry, an old school trade unionist, is more sarcastic, and bitter about the lack of union representation within the company. Their teenage son, Paul, goes to drama workshops organised by Madeleine (Jean 'Upstairs Downstairs' Marsh), the wife of regional chairman Robert Walsh (Donand 'War and Peace' Douglas), and is in line for a possible sponsored university scholarship, about which Gerry is also scathing. At work, Doris and her fellow workers fill bottles with something called Hint of Hibiscus while merrily cracking bawdy gags, while Gerry, in quality control, smokes, shirks and rants about the days of union strength to an unimpressed junior colleague, before a shifty-eyed production monitor (Colin Jeavons) confronts him, and grasses his TGWU leafleting campaing up to Walsh. The Fontaine Family Fun day, a coach outing to a horse brass and prawn cocktail pub restaurant, gives the workers an opportunity to get obscenely drunk, and Robert and Madeleine Walsh the chance to "mix" with the lower castes, resulting in a scene of fantastically forced awkwardness, although Madeleine and Paul strike up something more akin to a conversation, and she invites him for personal tuition in French at their "ranch house". The next few scenes cut between madeleine and Paul, reading Baudelaire and rehearsing a bizarrely awful play called Hot Wind From the Delta, and Gerry and Doris in their kitchen chewing the fat about Fontaine. Paul opens up, relaxed at being able to be himself for once, while Madeleine, for her part, comes on to the lad in no uncertain terms. Paul is awarded the scholarship, and the Muddimans are invited over to a dinner party at the Walshes' to celebrate, which quickly gets out of hand as Gerry singularly fails to suppress his ill feeling toward Walsh, and he eventually storms out, with Doris following. Back home, recriminations fly as the pair contemplate mutual redundancy, and Doris threatens to walk out. Meanwhile, Walsh and the visiting company secretary from the first scene, noting falling profits, draw up a scheme of "redeployment" in a cunning way to avoid making actual redundancies. Summarily demoted to the packing department, Gerry plots a slow revolution, though the final scene brilliantly undercuts everything. Back in Seattle, the chairman of Fontaine, exasperated by British labour costs, decides to close the Litchborough operation as casually as it was launched, and hits upon Fez, Morocco as the site for the new plant, because his wife went there once and quite liked it. Thus the struggles of every character in the play are reduced to nothing in a moment of skillful bathos. O'Neill and Seabrook's play stands out from other anti-corporate pieces of the time in other ways as well - the Oxfordshire burrs of the workers make a nice change from the standard "up north" idiom usually heard in plays concerning the exploited working man, and the fact that half the workforce is female in this instance helps too - indeed, setting the play in a perfume factory negates any macho romanticism about working class labour. As well as the accents, the bawdy jokes, provincial trimmings, awful play and refences to the Rolf Harris Show provide a comic grounding in reality, thus preventing the play taking off into some abstracted, quasi-sci-fi limbo, into which aspects like the serried ducts and pipettes of the factory floor, and the Big Brother aspect of Fontaine propaganda, could easily push it. The result is a well-written indictment of the grandiose, inhuman pretentions of corporatism, which itself manages to avoid the grandiose, inhuman pretentions of bad anti-corporate fiction.  

Pal - w Alun Owen. Two mutual enemies, one black, one white, are forced together by circumstance and confront their prejudices.  

The Pigeon Fancier - w Peter Hankin. Retired mineworker Philip Jackson tends to his pigeons. With Geoffrey Hughes, Anna Carteret and Martin Shaw.  

1972  

Home - w David Storey. An adaptation of the feted 1970 Royal Court production of Storey‘s play, directed by Lindsay Anderson (who helmed Storey‘s This Sporting Life), one of several early Play for Today entries screened in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Company (Reddick and The Write-Off being the other two). Two amiable old duffers - tweedy, nostalgic Harry (John Gielgud) and dapper, rakish Jack (Ralph Richardson) meet on a sunny terrace one afternoon, and begin indulging in small talk about life, the weather, fishing, travel, the weather, the war, the weather… It gradually becomes obvious (though not to the two gents) that this conversation is going nowhere (the dialogue throughout makes '60s Pinter sound like Hamlet's soliloquy), and despite the camaraderie they have nothing to really say to each other, or if they do are entirely incapable of saying it. Two middle aged women, the bitter, cynical Marjorie (Dandy Nichols) and the bawdy Kathleen (Mona Washborne) indulge in a broader, more down-to-Earth conversation of similar elliptical pointlessness. When the two parties meet, their twin streams of blether collides in a flurry of non-sequiturs and mutual incomprehension, though some salient points begin to leak out, and we learn the four are inmates in a mental home, having been sent there for various reasons (Kathleen is violent and suicidal, and Jack, it’s alleged, is has committed paedophilic indiscretions). A young man, Alfred (Warren Clarke) appears from time to time, apparently an orderly at the home (he’s entrusted with menial fetch-and-carry jobs), uttering few words (Kathleen alleges they ‘took a bit of his brain‘) and proudly demonstrating his strength by lifting the garden furniture with one arm. Finally, the two old fellers are left alone again, musing fitfully on the Old Empire, before both lapsing into a tearful silence. What with the mutual lack of communication between the upper class men and the working class women, the uncommunicative, tough youth, and the sad, useless reflections on past glories both personal and national, the ‘home’ as microcosm of Britain angle is obvious, but, crucially, never over-schematically forced on the characters, or bludgeoned into the script - it becomes clear as the mad chatter carries on, quite naturally, and once accepted, works. This is down to Storey’s fine writing as much as the performances, which - while Gielgud and Richardson are, of course, the stars - are excellent all round. The two old girls’ music hall-style dialogue (‘See the doctor about you, my girl!’ ‘Oooooh!’) is wonderful, contrasting with the bluff, pronoun-free empty musings of the men. The final triumph, perhaps, is the emotional impact of a depiction of madness that never physically manifests itself on-screen - think of all the stereotypical room-trashing, screaming breakdowns that have been screened in the name of drama over the years. We’re not just invited to appreciate the metaphorical conceit, or pity the old sods - there’s an identification here, in the end, with our own daft, often lonely, lives which gives this play its impact. All inmates in the end, we are. Had a cousin once…  

The Gielgud fit of the summer - old boys and old dears in Home.

Still Waters - w Julia Jones. A middle-aged couple's marriage comes apart at the seams after an argument about a record player results in the wife walking off during a picnic. She meets various strangers and talks through her troubles with them. 

Stocker's Copper - w Tom Clarke. Gareth Thomas gets his big break as the titular riot policeman sent down to help control the Cornish clay miner's strike of 1913, and becoming friendly with the miner he is sharing a house with, leading to inevitable conflicts when the strike turns nasty.  

The House on Highbury Hill - w Piers Paul Read. Colin Farrell and Amanda Reiss move into the titular house and find some eccentric neighbours.  

In the Beautiful Caribbean - w Barry Reckford. A reggae-tinged folk opera (filmed with live band New Religion and entourage in the studio) telling of Jamaica's political coming of age, Black Power movement and unemployment problems via a West Side Story-like personal drama.  

Ackerman, Dougall and Harker - w Don Shaw. A sales rep on a corporate initiative course in the Yorkshire moors has all his youthful self-confidence knocked out of him by the various local characters he meets along the way (such as an encyclopaedia-owning shepherd). A sort of Pilgrim's Progress in reverse. 

The Villa Maroc - w Willis Hall. A middle-aged couple (Thora Hird and George A 'Grange Hill' Cooper) and their daughter holiday in a North African villa and discover their Arab houseboy lives under the floorboards in the kitchen. Filmed on location on the cheap with the help of a package tour to Hammamet.  

Cows - w Howard Barker. Social worker Tessa Wyatt visits a country farm to help people-shy young man Michael Grady. With Michael Gambon, and a theme song from Tim Curry.  

A joyous comedy, and so much more - Brian Glover, Ray Mort and Douglas Livingstone in The Fishing Party.

The Fishing Party - w Peter Terson.  Three Leeds miners - Art (Brian Glover), Ern (Ray Mort) and Abe (Douglas Livingstone) - roll up at the Whitby seaside for a weekend’s fishing. They order three teas from the quayside stallholder (John Comer) - ‘Pints or half pints?’ Art takes charge, ‘Half pints. Don‘t want to ‘ave you runnin’ water all afternoon.’ The Teaman points out the season’s over, which gets at the lads’ pride. ‘ He’s takin’ us for trippers! Are you takin’ us for trippers? He is, he’s takin’ us for trippers!’ ‘Well, you tripped ‘ere, you must be trippers!’ Art acts as avuncular peacemaker - ‘Aye aye aye! No truculence! We’re not funny ‘ats and kiss-me-quicks!’ before laying out his vision of the weekend. ‘I’m not goin’ back to my wife and saying I made a pig o’ myself!’ Art plans for a stay at a polite cliff-top guest house rather than the drinking spree the other two had envisaged. ‘If we’re offered a drink with meals, we have a drink with meals. A German dry hock!’ The others aren’t impressed. ‘Not me, we fought the Germans’ ‘And beat ‘em’ ‘Aye, and I put it down to them drinkin’ that there ‘Ock! You can’t beat a Brown Ale army!’ Art concedes, but is still adamant they don’t go Brown Aleing back to the guest house. ‘We act respectable, with respect to property and standards. We’ll show our wives we can be civilised without them!’ ‘No brown ale, no spewing over the wall?’ ‘A civilised weekend!’ Thus emboldened, they check with the teaman for a guest house. Looking for a boarding hose. ‘Not too rough and ready. Bed and breakfast, sheets, that sort of thing.’ The teaman, though suspicious, recommends a few small hotels - ‘They should squeeze one or two autumnal in. If you’re wearing ties.’ The guest house they happen upon is run by snobbish, puritanical Audrey (Jane ‘Summer Wine’ Freeman) and feeble, henpecked Brian (Frank Moorey), who look forward to a winter of continual airing of sheets and hard boarding over oak panels. Audrey sees the place as on the up, buoyed by the high standards she insists of her guests, the less desirable of which she has ways of dealing with (‘That family with the kiddie crying all night… I sent meself an anonymous letter of complaint!’ ) ‘I intend to retire owning this place.’ avers Aud. ‘Then I’ll do a bit o’ fishin’!’ muses Brian, wistfully. When the fishing party turn up at the door, Audrey, putting on affected pronunciation, initially turns them away (‘I don’t cater for fishing parties… we’re a small hotel really’) before a great circular argument with Brian, and an eye for some out-of-season profit, produces the notion of charging them an extortionate ofur guineas each for the night. ‘Each?’ ‘Ah, but that’s inclusive!’ ‘Ah, well, if it’s inclusive…’ And so the lads bunk down to a room each, communicating with each other uneasily through the walls. Ern and Abe want a game of card, but Art disapproves of sharing single rooms. ‘It’s not done!’ Ern dissents. ‘I’ve seen it in the pictures. James Bond does it.’ FInally, at the promise of cards, he caves in. Settling in, they even offer the evidently lonely Brian a place on their fishing boat, but Audrey turns that down flat, not wanting him carousing with their type. ‘Can you visualise what their wives are doing back in Leeds? Because if you can’t, I can.’ The lads, meanwhile, are avidly discussing what classy delights await them at dinner. Art moots the idea of entrees. ‘What’s entrees?’ ‘You’ve seen it on the side of a meat sauce bottle label, ‘aven’t you?’ ‘I don’t read meat sauce bottle labels.’ ‘Well, you should start. Revelation, they are.’ Sadly, Audrey deems it not to be. Evening meal time proving ‘inflexible’, the party repairs to a quayside café for bawdy crosstalk with the waitress and ‘a good line of grease on the stomach’. Here, in the more convivial setting, Art‘s determination for a civilised jaunt is gradually eroded. ‘We’d better take a little crate of beer on the boat with us, in case the pubs are shut when we get back.’ ‘Make it a big one.’ Finally they get out on their chartered boat, piloted by the strange, taciturn Fisherman (James ’When the Boat Comes In’ Garbutt) at the helm, staring out into the middle distance and warning them in stern tones of the inadvisability of mixing chips, ale and a swelling sea. Sure enough, the boys are already half-cut before they’re out of the harbour. By the time they reach the cod grounds, the boat’s rising with the swell, and the three are proper pissed, singing shanties and - in Pat’s case - quoting John Masefield. ‘Better than the ruddy canal, this is! And the pit pool!’ Even before they reach the grounds, Ern’s the first to succumb to sickness. ‘I wanna die, that’s all!’ Then, when the engines stop, Abe feel it. ‘You can’t curl up in the bottom!’ Art takes charge of all the lines. ‘Will you take a line, Fisherman?’ ‘Not me gave it up years ago.’ ‘A fisherman what doesn’t fish? That’s sad, that is!’ ‘I just use the boat to take trippers out.’ Art feels slighted, but still, he’s in his element - ‘We might be rough and ready fellers, but we’re staying at on of them hotels, y’know! I believe in the dignity of the working man, Fisherman!’ Only to be cut short when the Fisherman reels in a cod, and the sight of it sends Art to the bottom of the boat. Back at the guest house, Audrey and Brian worry about the continuing absence of the party. ‘They’ll be doing after-hours drinking in some backroom, smoking and playing cards and getting themselves excited.’ On the quayside, the three huddle together (‘I can’t remember nothing!’) with a brace of cod - all, presumably, caught by the Fisherman. ‘I wanna be in bed, warm and comfortable. And die.’ They finally repair to the guest house. In the process of getting the far-gone Abe to bed (with strategically placed chamber pot), the three end up sharing a bed through a mixture of illness and drunken delusion. ‘Any man needing the pot in the night give a call, and the other two must relinquish his hold on it forthwith!’ Still awake at four, Audrey won’t be beaten by the wayward trio. ‘I’m not letting them get at me through the Guild of Hoteliers! I’m serving three hardboiled eggs! If they’re not down by nine o’clock that cloth comes off!’ ‘We *are* the smiling service!’ observes Brian. On the dot of nine, they come down. ‘Is this fresh cream milk, straight from the cow?’ ‘It’s Co-op delivery.’ The boys’ dreams of smoked kippers are dashed. ‘Off, are they?’ ‘They were never on.’ Disappointed but still awed - ‘It’s an entrée dish, sausages, we’re in with the meat sauce!’ they only cool off when the tea fails to impress. ‘Maiden’s water!’ Homely pleasures finally win out over self-betterment, and they decide to repair to the seaside café for a pot of real tea and a back sandwich (’With one of the slices dipped’) and pausing only to leave a polite note on the back of a betting slip (‘Dear landlady, thank you for a pleasant evening and wonderful service, but you should serve *smoked* kippers for breakfast (over charcoal).’ they tiptoe out. Brian finds the note as Audrey suspiciously check the rooms (‘I wouldn’t put it past them if they had an orgy!’) and comes down with a farewell present, ‘the best of the catch’ wrapped in newspaper. ‘Are they being funny?’ ‘No love,’ replies Brian, ’but I think we are.’ Terson’s script, overflowing with brilliant observation and wonderfully circular, repetitive dialogue, is a joy from start to finish. In times when 'naturalism' in dialogue has been reduced to a mannered, sub-Pinter catalogue of pauses, 'erm's and floor-staring longeurs, it's a tonic to see fluent, rolling speech rhythms and quickfire crosstalk that never sounds written. The character of Art, in particular, with his unflappable confidence, eternal quest for social betterment and sauce-bottle erudition, is a work of art. It’s tempting to see the genesis of a hundred ‘gentle’ comedies in this slice of amiable class divide humour, but the strength Play for Today should be most noted for - the proper, first-hand experience of the writers and their ability to transfer a whole section of society in miniature onto the screen - is supremely evident here. The performances, especially Glover’s, are similarly pitch-perfect. Originally a radio play starring Wilfred Pickles, this understandably popular entry spawned with two further productions based on the same characters - Shakespeare or Bust (a working class take on Three Men In a Boat in Stratford-Upon-Avon, with the lads off on a barge to soak up some culture via the canal, and ending up in it) in 1973 and Three for the Fancy (where they plan to exhibit a rabbit, a mouse and a guinea pig at the Bradford Championship Show) in 1974. The stars were writers, too - Douglas Livingstone had already penned I Can't See My Little Willie and Everybody Say Cheese for the strand, and Glover would later contribute Keep an Eye on Albert and Thicker than Water.  

Nothing to lose - Joss Ackland talks to the worms as The Bankrupt, while Roddy McMillan and Fulton MacKay strike for socialism in Willie Rough.

The Reporters - w Arthur Hopcraft.  Two reporters on a provincial paper - young, idealistic Michael Kitchen on the way up, and embittered Robert Urquhart, on the way back down from a failed national daily - swap views.  

A Life is for Ever - w Tony Parker. Grim study of the plight of 'lifers' in prison, concentrating on a man serving thirty for the murder of a police officer. Controversial for a depiction of a gay encounter (remarkably tame by the standards of Scum et al.), though convincing enough for the Home Office to use it in prison officer training courses.  

Carson Country - w Dominic Behan. Working class protestant life in Ulster circa 1920, during the formation of Home Rule. With Sam Kydd and Harry Towb.  

Man Friday - w Adrian Mitchell. Robinson Crusoe retold from the native's point of view, with Colin Blakely and Ram John Holder. An interesting idea from poet Mitchell, but hamstrung as a play by being inexorably tied to its central conceit. A much more lavish, and far worse, production of this was released in the cinema a few years later, starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Roundtree, with unnecessary additions such as a talking parrot and a comedy flying machine-building sequence.  

Triple Exposure - w David Halliwell. Odd tale of a hippyish youth breaking into a middle-aged couple's house and their subsequent relationship with him, niftily told by cutting back and forth from each person's perspective on the events, so interior thoughts, dialogue and the appearance of characters and house alters with each change of perspective.  

Better than the Movies - w John Elliot. The discrepancy between media fantasy and mundane reality is made plain to Bryan Marshall on his birthday.  

The General's Day - w William Trevor. A battle of wills between ageing general Alastair Sim and cantankerous charlady Dandy Nichols. With Annette Crosbie.  

The Bankrupt - w David Mercer. Upper-middle-class businessman Ellis Cripper (Joss Ackland) returns to his father's country cottage, having been declared bankrupt after his John Bloom-esque package holiday company goes under. His father, a displaced Yorkshireman living in the rural retreat bought for him by Cripper (and now Cripper's only place to go) is bluff and dismissive of his son, especially when Cripper comes out with post-breakdown, combative riddles in lieu of conversation - declaring his intention to murder his father, commit suicide, then digging up and addressing worms from the garden. His sister and brother-in-law (Peter Cellier), who live nearby, take him under their wing and put up with his akward flights of obtuseness, and arrange a meeting with a friend of theirs, Angela (Sheila Allen), a biologist. Over a dislocated dinner conversation (with father in tow) Cripper manages to alienate his sister, and Cellier floors him with a punch. Angela, still apparently feeling some degree of sympathy, invites him back to her spacious house-cum-research lab, where a new start seems on the cards... This is a "difficult" (perhaps self-indulgently so) play from Mercer, who is no stranger to plays about mental illness (see also In Two Minds, and the film Morgan: a Suitable Case for Treatment). What jar perhaps the most are the inserted scenes, largely in studio limbo, of Cripper's dreams - inside a pentangle inscribed on the floor, Cripper is variously visited by his father (in posh suit and shades, and no longer speaking with his Yorkshire accent) and himself, naked, answering to the name of anyone from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde. The play begins and ends with the same scene - in Angela's house, Cripper, within the pentangle, summons all four other characters, ostensibly to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, but all remain silent at his protestations, blow out the candles surrounding him and, in the final moments, make a grab for him. Exactly what significance this has is unclear (Cripper stuck in a perpetual cycle of depression?) and critics took against it - Clive James accused Mercer of "double-crossing his own talent" with the "undergrad tricks" of the pentangle scenes, and it's a compelling point - Mercer's gift for dialogue in a realistic setting are well displayed here, with the potentially arid speech patterns of the moneyed middle aged drawn out into self-consciously baroque, elliptical verbal duels (especially the scene where Cripper challenges his GP to find something medically wrong with him) which have a firm grounding in the truth - real depressives really do talk and behave in this contrary, self-pitying, attention-seeking way. Arguably the pentangle scenes do little to add to the portrayal of Cripper's illness - the magnitude of his willful alienation is more than adequately conveyed by Joss Ackland's spunky backchat. The dreams, meanwhile, seem like writerly symbolism of the most obvious kind, and Mercer even hints at this artificiality in the text (Cellier: "The man dreams like a sodding film!" and to Cripper "The [bankruptcy] business has its symbolic side, wouldn't you say?" "Digs like that just bounce off me. They're just you pathetic way of trying to entertain yourself.") Perhaps this is a way of getting the whole business of Mercer, a writer writing a play about a depressive who imagines his life to be scripted and manipulated by others, to fold in on itself. If so, it's unsatisfactory. Whatever, the "real world" scenes are relishable, with a fine cast (Ackland and Allen in particular) getting the most out of some ripe exchanges of the sort that seem in danger of giving the middle-class-oriented Play for Today a good name.  

Comedy into tragedy - Rosemary Dunham and Bill Maynard in Kisses at Fifty, and Colin Welland in A Passage to England.

Just Your Luck - w Peter McDougall. Pregnant teenager Lesley Mackie romances sailor David Hayman on an oppressively sectarian Greenock council estate. McDougall's second Play for Today as written, but the first to be transmitted. 

The Bouncing Boy - w John McGrath. Norman Eshley and Patricia Brake (then pregnant for real) have a baby. She takes it far better than he does. With George A Cooper.  

1973

The Land of Green Ginger - w Alan Plater. Short but sharp musing from Plater on the uncertain future of '70s provincial communities in general, and his home town of Hull in particular. Hull girl Sally (Gwen Taylor) returns home from her job in London. On the train she bumps into a southern journalist out to cover the town, and on the way try and butter her up with his wry musings, to no avail ("You must be clever," she replies. "Takes a clever feller to talk rubbish like that.") Thus is the commonsense combative theme of the play laid out. In town, Sally drops in on her mum, just moved to high-rise estate ("Homes for heroes... that's what the planners say," says the cab driver en route. "Alcatraz, me brother calls it. If we can find the front door we'll be well away.") Typically for a town so reliant on the sea for employment, her mum's all alone in the flat, her dad being away in the Persian Gulf ("I sometimes think if folk want petrol that badly they can go and fetch it themselves.") Sally breaks the news that a new job offer is on the cards - she'll be going abroad in 18 months - which news her mum takes as stoically as she no doubt did the move to the high rise. Sally's real reason for the return, however, is to see old flame Mike, but she'll have to wait as, like her dad, he's out at sea - working on the trawlers. She goes to see Mike's mum - a pleasantly daffy, ebullient old lady, who lives in one of the few remaining old terrace streets ("Be knocking us all down before long.") Finally Mike (John Flanagan) rolls up - all affected drawl, chewing gum, jacket-over-shoulder northern swagger - in a new car "Good value for two-pound-ten." Their reunion is casually played out, to say the least. He doesn't bother stopping the car - he'll see her after the rugby. Sally goes to look for her old house, but finds instead a pile of rubble. Amongst the half-torn facades, an old man staggers past, drunk and tearful. it's an old friend of the family - "Uncle Jack". Finally, her "date" with Mike kicks off with a romantic spot of football spectating ("Get rid of it, yer big onion!") before a more promising traipse through the park. Sally suggests the Maritime museum, which sits uneasily with Mike ("You know what you can do with boats, don't yer?") After an evening on the town, Mike takes her to another building site - the Humber Bridge (due 1976). The supposed prosperity it'll bring is sarcastically eulogised. "Be like the Klondike round 'ere. We'll all make our fortunes, ten grand a year [...] I'll be Lord Mayor... and I'll pack in fishing." Mike's after a skipper's job ("If you're working in a lousy job you might as well be good at it.") - as it turns out the very job "Uncle Jack" had been turfed from, after the ultimate humiliation - coming home with no fish ("Never seen a feller cry? Never been on a trawler, 'ave yer?") Mike proposes to her in an off-hand way ("Knocking on thirty, time I settled down.") While she chews it over, he muses on his future ("I'll end up hanging round the fishouses with half me fingers gone doing odd jobs for a few quid a week.") Sally asks why he can't take a shore job, and the answer comes swift and clear - "Scared of the sea but I'm even more scared of the land." Eventually Sally decides life is - or at least should be - better elsewhere, and she's on the next train back to London with the journalist, both of them seemingly none the wiser about the town's future, or the location of its mythical "Land of Green Ginger" ("We didn't look hard enough"). In plot terms, it's a slight tale, but the focus is firmly on character - of Sally and Mike, and Hull itself. Punctuating the story are long montages of Hull life - the fish markets, high streets, pubs and clubs - backed by seafaring songs sung by The Watersons. It's all heavily atmospheric, and adds immeasurably to the sense of a place and a time with not long to go. Brian Parker's direction is perfectly paced, and was helped by copious visual Hull-savant notes from Plater, who appreciates the visual richness of film production as opposed to a studio play as well as writers like David Rudkin or John Bowen, and together they ensure the silent sequences say as much about the play's theme of (sarcastic quotes) "progress" as the dialogue. The dialogue is, of course, top drawer, both Sally and Mike guardedly sarcastic in their exchanges, yet somehow, at base, as honest as they can be in the face of a landscape that's changing increasingly rapidly, and way beyond their control - for Mike a probable dead end, for Sally an uncertain, possibly rootless, future. As Mike says, "they get away with it because we let 'em [...] because we don't know any better." While never assuming he does know better, Plater captures with acute empathy and little sentiment the plight of characters who, while far from weak in themselves, find themselves floundering on an outgoing tide of metropolitan-decreed "progress".  

A landscape changing out from under under our feet - Land of Green Ginger

Kisses at Fifty - w Colin Welland.  The Chariots of Fire scribe contributed several wry comedies of manners to the Play for Today slot, such as this story of a long-standing marriage falling apart when the husband, Bill Maynard, has a fling with a barmaid. Directed by Michael Apted.  

Highway Robbery - w Michael O'Neill/Jeremy Seabrook. John Collin fights the council when they plan to demolish his home to make way for a bypass. With June Brown and Alan Rothwell.  

A Song at Twilight - w Willis Hall. The Golden Gordon-ish tale of defiant football manager Colin Blakely (who 'once played for England') in terminal decline. Also with Peter Sallis. 

Only Make Believe - w Dennis Potter. Bit of a self-reflexive one, this - Keith Barron is a playwright who purposefully ruins his writing hand on an electric stove, and hires Georgina Hale to take notes. As he dictates, scenes from the play are acted out in between increasingly terse exchanges between the unashamedly misogynist Barron and Hale. The play in question turns out to be Potter's own Angels Are So Few from three years ago. Geoffrey Palmer is among the 'new' play's cast. As with Double Dare, this was allegedly based on a real-life situation involving Potter himself. As the reliance on old material and writing about writing suggests, it's not one his his best efforts, though Barron delivers the excellent line "Play for Today lasts just a bit longer than a packet of crisps and has the same sort of taste." 

For Sylvia or The Air Show - w John Burrows and John Harding. Burrow's and Harding's two-man show transferred from the Edinburgh Fringe, examining the myths surrounding British heroism, in particular the Battle of Britain.  

The Operation - w Roger Smith. George Lazenby stars as a suave, rich, moustachioed, soulless asset stripper in a perfect parody of the garishness of the Seventies, amazingly detached considering it was made within the period it satirises. Big business, corruption, bribery, blow-jobs and surburban swingers parties, all in lurid colour.  

Access to the Children - w William Trevor. Joss Ackland plays a reluctant divorcee, pondering chances of reuniting with his wife while taking his kids on a day trip to the zoo. Ackland later mused that his roles in the Play for Today strand always saw him as a man on the point of collapse - whether in drag (The Lie), talking to worms (The Bankrupt) or communing with other wildlife, as here. Sadly he stopped short of offering any possible reasons for this emotional typecasting.  

Hard Labour - w Mike Leigh. Liz After the no-budget success of his cinematic debut Bleak Moments, Leigh made an incursion onto television under the wing of series producer Tony Garnett. Shot on location in the Higher Broughton borough of Salford, a working class district that was home to Leigh in his formative years, the story centres on the lot of stoical middle-aged Catholic house-cleaner Mrs Thornley (Liz Smith), who leads a life bereft of cheer. Her day fluctuates between resignedly cleaning the windows and polishing the silverware of the upwardly mobile households in the district, notably the supercilious Stones (Vanessa Harris and Cyril ‘Sling Your Hook’ Varley), and dreading the arrival home of husband Jim (market trader and amateur actor Clifford ‘Kiss of Death‘ Kershaw), who works as a night watchman in a warehouse full of rubber ducks and similar ephemera, constantly upbraided and put down by his (far younger) superior colleague, and subsequently takes his frustrations out on his wife, with violent demands of dinner and drunken, brutal Saturday night sexual lunges. On the new nearby council estate, Mrs Thornley’s son Edward (Bernard Hill) and his prissy, nagging wife Veronica (Alison Steadman making her TV debut) mark time in the ‘new’ Broughton, a world of near-identical municipal housing (‘Every house is just that little bit different’, avers Veronica) and empty suburban routine. As with much of Leigh’s work, a synopsis of the plot makes the play seem rather aimless and uninspiring - save for two major events. Mrs Thornley’s daughter Ann is, after much soul-searching on both her and her mother’s part, persuaded to undergo an abortion with the help of charming local cabbie-cum-grocer Naseem (Ben Kingsley), and a subsequent, guilt-ridden trip to the confessional box brings from Mrs T the admission she doesn’t love people enough, followed by the cathartic confession that she no longer loves her husband at all - upon hearing which, the attending priest blithely gives her five Hail Marys, an Our Father and a Glory Be before returning to his newspaper. The lack of conventional plot, while arguably contributing to the shapeless, ‘vignette montage’ feel of the film, is entirely appropriate - neither circumstances nor personalities of the characters depicted here are going anywhere. The cast of characters is the chief pleasure here - Ben Kingsley’s terrific turn, Louis ‘Comedians’ Raynes’ larger than life rag and bone man, Steadman’s embryonic suburban harpy, and most of all Liz Smith’s amazing central performance, which does the most to hold the film together. Subsequent entries by Leigh would prove more popular, and more successfully integrate his actor-centric writing-rehearsal methods with a satisfactory story structure, but already in this early outing a unique voice is making itself heard.  

Man Above Men - w David Hare. Lawyers, defendants and even his own daughter all have it in for a maverick judge, Alexander Knox.  

Defiance in the face of the 'progressive' seventies from David Smith in Speech Day and Hilda Barry in The Piano.

Speech Day - w Barry Hines. Hines revisits the Yorkshire secondary school territory of Kes with this meandering look at the class politics dragged up by a prizegiving speech day. Ronnie Warboys (David 'Flaxton Boys' Smith) and fellow school-leavers from underachieving form 5G1 find themselves roped into various menial tasks in preparation for the 'prestigious' afternoon - mowing the lawn, shifting chairs, etc. This they carry out with heroically sarky reluctance. As the event draws near, battle lines are drawn up between the haves and have-nots - senior staff are separated from juniors (including a debuting Paul Copley as woodwork teacher), prizewinning pupils are slagged off in absentia on the bus by Ronnie and pals, and most telling of all, the mayor, a former steel factory compadre of janitor George (Bill 'Harry Cross' Dean) blanks him completely. The action cuts to flashbacks of Ronnie's hard home life - everyone else in the family works: his dad (Brian Glover) at the steelworks, brother Danny at the factory which looks like Ronnie's likely destiny, and mum sewing seams. Ronnie pops round to his Grandad's, to be regaled by some unreconstructed Old Socialism, while George tells him how the mayor sold out from his Labour roots for a spot of social climbing. The progressively liberal stance of the school (the head reads out Martin Luther King speeches, and there are "modern folk songs" instead of hymns) is shown up as the same old divisive guff, leaving kids like Ronnie, unqualified but, clearly from their winningly sharp dialogue, far from gormless, on the industrial scrap-heap.  

Steps Back - w David Halliwell. David Hill returns home to Brighouse with his new fiancee after being driven away 15 years earlier.  

Three's One - w Penelope Mortimer. Couple Hywel Bennett and Caroline Mortimer are rocked by the arrival of an old flame of Mortimer's. With Fulton MacKay.  

Edward G - Like the Filmstar - w John Harvey Flint. Robert Lang's dull life takes a turn for the dramatic after he reluctantly takes on the role of Santa at a children's Christmas party - while he regales the assembled kids with a tale, one child slips into a coma .  

Blooming Youth - w/d Les Blair. Two male students have to sort themselves out when a girl moves in with them. An improvised character piece, overseen by Blair and Tony Garnett.  

The Stretch - w Julia Jones. Rosalind Ayres finds she can cope on her own when her husband goes to prison for two years. When he gets out he finds it hard to accept the change.  

Making the Play - w Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham. Barbara Ferris and James Bolam are an estranged couple still trying to reconcile with each other by sending drafts of a co-written play to each other through the post.  

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont - w Elizabeth Taylor. Celia Johnson turns in an award-winning performance as the titular new tenant in a retirement home, desperately trying to keep up appearances.  

Her Majesty's Pleasure - w Jimmy O'Connor. life-sentenced prisoners with little hope of release busy themselves with activities, in particular a panto production of Goldilocks. With Bob Hoskins, Peter Firth, Derek Griffiths.  

Scottish nationalism given the naturalistic treatment in Just Another Saturday, and a more stylised agit-prop take with John McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil..

Jack Point - w Colin Welland. Old and young member of a Gilbert and Sullivan society get under each other's feet in the run-up to a special Jubilee production of the titular play.  

The Emergency Channel - w John Bowen. Richard Pasco lives out of a suitcase in Battersea and is tormented by his rapidly fading memory of his life and loves. With Patrick Stewart.  

Mummy and Daddy - w Douglas Livingstone. A retired couple begin to find life tough going after a year in a seaside bungalow bought for them by son Mike Savage.  

Private Practice - w Peter Hankin. Respectable snob Priscilla Morgan is unduly worried about a visit from her daughter's schoolfriend.  

Shutdown - w Tony Perrin. In a deserted Potteries factory, closed for the mass holiday excursions of Wakes Week, young electrician Freddie Fletcher arrives to put one over on two old hands.  

Baby Blues - w Nemone Lethbridge. Zena Walker finally has a baby after receiving specialist treatment for ten years - then the problems really start.  

Jingle Bells - w Arthur Hopcraft. Colin Farrell's various Christmas and Boxing Day gatherings with family and mates bring issues and problems to the surface.  

1974  

The Lonely Man's Lover - w Barry Collins. The arrival of a poet in a Yorkshire village arouses suspicion in local farmers, and sexual longing in farm girl Jan Francis. Music from The Oldham Tinkers.  

All Good Men - w Trevor Griffiths.  Highly politicised state-of-Labour entry, the first Play for Today from the sainted Trevor Griffiths. Bill Fraser plays Edward Waite, an ageing Lancastrian Labour grandee who served his apprenticeship during the General Strike, who displays many of the rhetorical turns and mannerisms of various real-life party members, most obviously a Wilsonian forever-unlit prop pipe, preparing for his imminent ennoblement into the House of Lords. He is shown being interviewed in the conservatory of his spacious Surrey home by documentary maker Richard Massingham (Ronald Pickup), a high-born, publicly educated and very suave character who runs through a list of prepared questions about his early life in deprived Beswick. That night, overcome by turbulent disinterred emories (rendered in a then-standard manner as snatches of audio flashback) Waite suffers a minor heart attack. On returning the next morning, Massingham comes face to face with Waite's daughter Maria (Frances De La Tour), a schoolteacher with little time for the old Winchester boy's inadvertently patronising attempts to converse with/interview her. Even more hostile is the son William (Jack Shepherd), a fiercely idealistic college lecturer who loudly takes apart both Massingham's method of programme-making and his father's political career over a fraught lunch. The following day - Waite's birthday - the quartet gather for celebrations, only for the talk to turn inevitably to party politics. William all but accuses his dad, and Labour, of achieving nothing in office (since the promised Socialist revolution was indefinitely postponed). Waite stands up for the party, presenting the case for practical politics and the voice of experience. Then William produces evidence from the University of Manchester files that show Waite repeatedly voted against the epochal strikes of '26. Waite, however, stands firm this time ("One day you may find yourself doing something really serious, like running a ministry, and then you'll see where dreams get you") and leaves. The next day Maria reveals to Waite she can't accompany him to Buckingham Palace to accept the peerage on principle, and William decides Massingham is the lesser of two evils,a nd hands him his research on his father. The final, slightly abstract, scene shows Waite, in close-up, being interrogated by Massingham on the strike vote question, when the sound cuts out and the camera pulls back to reveal Waite, alone in the conservatory, in his baronet's robes - a completely dishevelled figure. As a first television work, this was something of a baptism of fire for Griffiths - Play for Today script editor Ann Scott asked for something from him to fill the slot left by a rejected work from another writer - Griffiths was given one multi-room set, no film inserts, and six weeks to deliver the finished work. Further restrictions, ironically imposed by the three-day week brought on by present-day strike action, caused about 12 minutes to be forcibly trimmed from the usual 75 minute running time. Given these strictures, it's easier to forgive the occasional lapses into stereotypical "characters being mere mouthpieces for ideas" territory that is the bane of many lesser Play for Todays. The clash between pragmatic and idealistic Labour is, for the most part, grounded in convincing portrayals of a family torn apart by political and emotional tension.  

Two figures out of step with their times - John Le Mesurier's spy in Traitor and Bill Fraser's Old Labour Lord in All Good Men.

Easy Go - w Brian Clark.  A gang of Deptford street kids races against local dockers to retrieve a promising-looking abandoned barrel from the Thames. Devised by Clark and written with the help of the kids in the play - many of them in real life genuine 'totters'.  

Joe's Ark - w Dennis Potter.  A more subdued, even warm, turn from Potter, with Freddie Jones as a religious Welsh pet shop owner whose faith is tested when his daughter becomes terminally ill with bone cancer. Driven by a rather fatuous sermon at the local chapel to storm out, he tends his pets ruefully while she awaits the inevitable upstairs. The priest visits, attempting conciliatory words but failing miserably in the face of Joe's pessimism ("Nice bit o' Welsh lamb waiting for you at home? Shame to let it spoil, now.") A timid friend of Lucy's from Oxford visits, similarly ails to connect with the old man, or his daughter, who has no time for his bumbling declaration of infatuation. Finally Jones' wayward son (Dennis Waterman), a failing and resentment-filled touring comedian ("My mouth's turned into a permanent sneer" he tells his 'partner', who peps up his act with 'exotic dancing') arrives just too late to see his sister after Lucy's Oxford friend writes him a letter on her behest. As she dies, Joe and son are left together on the stair, and a sort of reconciliation is hinted at ("Let's go up and see her. Lovely she looks, now"). Perhaps expecting another close to the bone familial encounter a la Schmoedipus et al, critics lambasted the modest piece for its sentiment and lack of 'bite'. Potter himself has commented ambivalently on this work, claiming that the sentiment he consciously tried to expunge "kept creeping back in", and commenting that, in synopsis at least, the play does read "like the winning entry in a New Statesman competition parodying gloomy pretension". Such thoughts possibly led him to over-react the other way by writing the decidedly sentiment-free "dark sitcom" Brimstone and Treacle, in which a very similar situation - beautiful stricken young woman, parents losing faith, unwanted visitors - is played out in a very different way. 

Hot Fat - w Jack Rosenthal.  Comic drama of friendships and deals made and broken in a men's sauna.  

Headmaster - w John Challen.  Frank Windsor plays the titular head with an increasingly tenuous grip on his position in this first play submitted unsolicited by then college teacher Challen. The play was popular enough to merit a six-part series in 1977, written by Challen with Windsor and other cast members retained, shedding further light on the conflict between old and modern teaching methods, as well as the eternal jockeying for position amongst the staff.  

Adolescent demons in the excellent Penda's Fen.

Penda's Fen - w David Rudkin. Stephen Franklin (Spencer 'Timeslip' Banks) is the son of the Reverend J Franklin (John Atkinson), the parish parson of the small Malvern village of Pinvin. Shielded by location and upbringing from the urbanised modern world, Stephen has developed a worldview which naively encompasses a love for the English countryside, the music of local composer Edward Elgar, and a naive embracing of extreme right-wing ideas. In a school debate, he takes the side of a churchgoing couple who forced a ban of a television documentary called 'Who Was Jesus?' and launches into a bigoted harangue that earns the derision of his fellow pupils. He is an outcast at school, ridiculed in class for his precocious questions and humiliated in cadet training - laddish classmate Honeybone claims he does nothing 'for the house' and recommends boiling him in oil. The teacher, pausing only to quietly confiscate a (presumably pornographic) magazine from him, says nothing to refute the suggestion. At a parish meeting, he reviles the views of local television playwright Arne (Ian Hogg), who espouses left-wing views and warns of mysterious government projects taking place in the area, possibly under their very feet. As if to bear Hogg out a young man, out on the fen with friends, is mysteriously burned that night, his hospital bed comes under police guard and a cover-up story is fed to the local papers. Stephen then experiences a series of visions - a wet dream involving Honeybone to the strains of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius ends with Stephen turning on the light to find a demon squatting over him, which quickly vanishes. Skipping cadet class, he has a similar fleeting glimpse of a stone angel. While cycling along, a sudden glimpse of a demon causes him to crash his bike, and in his concussed state he dreams of attending a strange pagan ceremony in the grounds of a stately home, where young men and women in white, formal attire gladly queue up to have their hands chopped off by a worryingly friendly-looking old gentleman. He is brought back to consciousness by the local milkman, who backs off after a nerve-steadying embrace threatens to turn into something more erotic. Finally, sheltering from a storm in a barn, he finds the ghost of Elgar, who shares with him tragic anecdotes from his life - the well-meaning but distressing misuse of a song he wrote for his wife at a birthday party, and a gruesome account of a primitive operation on his stomach. Elgar tells him the identity of the secret tune which counterpoints his Enigma Variations, that music scholars have been searching for in vain. Finally he draws Stephen's eye to the beauty of the world - though he indicates the crumbling wall of the barn. Stephen's 18th birthday is marred by the news he is adopted, and his real parents are not of the 'Aryan' stock Stephen has been championing. As graduation from school nears, Honeybone and the boys bundle onto Stephen in the gym and tie a pink ribbon in his hair as a final humiliation. During a long and frank discussion with his father, Stephen discovers him to be far less hidebound than he thought (and than he himself is), and talk turns from the true, revolutionary nature of Christ to Penda, the ancient Mercian king who was among the last Britons to resist the spread of Christianity. 'The devil is the name new religions use to define the Gods of the old ones,' his father claims. Stealing into the church at night, Stephen plays Gerontius on the organ, and as the floor of the knave cracks beneath him, a voice - maybe Christ, maybe Penda - beckons to Stephen for help. On the Malverns, a strange couple approach Stephen claiming him to be their 'chosen one'. Stephen backs off, citing his confused sexuality and mixed race as barriers to any Messiah status, whereupon the couple ignite a photograph of him, which causes him to burn as the man on the fens did. Eventually, he summons King Penda to drive the couple away, and walks back down the hill to the village, and life. A highly popular play with a younger audience than Play for Today was used to, mainly due to its fantasy elements, it has since acquired a reputation as a cult piece of 'telefantasy' which, deserved though it is, belies its sophistication. While there's certainly no readily available explanation for everything that happens, it's certain that nothing occurs merely for the sake of it, for the sake of spectacle or cheap mystery that the fantasy genre so often relies on. What makes a potentially obscure and melodramatic play work so well is Alan Clarke's intelligent treatment of both the fantastic and realistic elements. His camera lets us in not only to the cloistered, stifling world of the village and school community (although there's no judgment against the village per se - 'The village works,' says Arne) but the fractured worldview of Stephen. Treatments of fantastic incidents are shorn of dramatic music (save Elgar) and sound effects - Stephen turning on the light to find a demon squatting over him in bed is presented matter-of-factly for a couple of seconds, then vanishes with as little fanfare as it appeared. Stephen's post-crash reverie of a pagan hand-dismembering ceremony takes place in total silence save for the rhythmic chop of the cleaver. There is, in Clarke's eye, nothing to distinguish this dream from the ceremonial humiliation meted out to Stephen by Honeybone and the boys later on, as Stephen defiantly stares out his tormentors in the same eerie silence. The photography by Michael 'Nuts in May' Williams works miracles on a BBC budget, capturing the Malvern landscape as well as Eastmancolor can, and augmenting it with deftly-employed artificial lighting where necessary. The special effects, while far from spectacular, are efficient, and Clarke's matter-of-fact introduction of them does much to increase their effectiveness. Not everything works here - the ending is an increasingly desperate mish-mash of too many bits of symbolic business, which has enabled self-styled 'scholars' of fantasy to rattle on at endless speculative length with impunity (a fact Rudkin may have been aware of, hence the Enigma Variations teaser), but in dramatic terms is a definite weakness. Not that a nice, loose-end-tying finale would have been appropriate, but the clumsy attempt to back out of a self-indulgent cul-de-sac lays bare the workings of the writer in a way Rudkin presumably did not intend - Stephen tells us, rather than shows us, how he has changed - and all but deflates the fine stuff that has taken place in the previous eighty minutes. There are also moments where the play's historical learning is rather clumsily inserted into the more poetic scenes, as if Rudkin was determined no-one could possibly take the play as merely the story of the sexual and spiritual awakening of a young man. Arne and the vicar, as the mouthpieces of the political and religious sides of Rudkin's argument, don't always retain their shape as characters, though Hogg turns in a fine performance as the taciturn, paranoid writer. Banks acquits himself well too, in a complicated and tough role that could easily have worked out as the least sympathetic juvenile lead in television history. What female roles there are fare less well - Stephen's mum does precious little and Arne's wife's confession to Stephen of their inability to have children is plain embarrassing in its gauche attempt at sketching a 'headstrong' female character. For all the subordination of character, lost plot strands and weight of ideological baggage, though, Rudkin and Clarke come through with a sensual feast of a play which offers a blueprint for an honest, non-sentimentalised view of England - an experience unique both to Play for Today and (despite lesser subsequent imitations more firmly mired in the fantasy genre) television in general, with a rural sense of place not usually seen in television plays to that point - Rudkin had insisted on a far more visually detailed script than was the norm at the time.  

Pidgeon - Hawk or Dove? - w Michael Sadler. After a school sports day humiliation, teacher Wallace Pidgeon (Jack Shephard) comes under pressure from all corners - his class, headmaster Iain Cuthbertson, his pork-trading father-in-law and 'child bride' Belinda Law.  

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil - w John McGrath.  The exploitation of the Scottish people, from 18th century crofters to the then highly topical wrangle over North Sea Oil, is explored via a heady mixture of documentary footage, interviews and a play within the play (of the same title) performed by an amateur theatrical troupe. Unashamedly socialist-nationalist, it caused controversy just as much for its iconoclastic form as its provocative content.  

Schmoedipus - w Dennis Potter. A charismatic young man (Tim Curry) enters the lives of a depressed woman and her dull, model train-obsessed husband, claiming to be their long-lost son, and practically seducing his 'mother'. Cabaret songs and train impressions abound as each of the characters lapses in and out of a desperate childishness. With a typical Potter twist in the ending, a version of this play was later filmed as Track 29. 

A Follower for Emily - w Brian Clark.  A couple in an old people's home develop a close friendship, and eventually marry.  

Old folks at home - A Follower for Emily.

Leeds - United! - w Colin Welland.  Welland delves into a favourite subject of Play for Today writers, industrial relations, with a look at a strike in a Leeds clothing factory which took place just a few years previously. With a cast of hundreds and a budget well into six figures, it was at the time the most lavishly produced single British drama (Kenith Trodd at the helm, Roy Battersby directing). Reviled on transmission by local press and unions for misrepresentation of both the area and the workforce, its sympathies clearly lie with the workers as people, torn between the exploitation of the bosses and the self-interest of the union leaders. 

Baby Love - w David Edgar.  Patti Love undergoes a traumatic stillbirth, steals a baby, is arrested and sentenced to - appropriately enough - nine months.  

Back of Beyond - w Julia Jones.  Lynne Jones develops a bond with Rachel Roberts, a reclusive widow in the Welsh mountains she delivers newspapers to.  

The Bevellers - w Roddy McMillan.  A day in the life of a basement bevelling (grinding the bevelled edges and decorative grooves into plate glass) workshop in Glasgow, through the eyes of fresh-from school apprentice Norrie, who has a rough introduction into a dying craft. The shop foreman Bob (played by writer and former apprentice beveller McMillan) takes him under his wing and enthuses about the hard but noble craft, but the other bevellers pose problems, in ascending order of psychosis - Joe, the junior; Peter prone to seizures (but "it's no' epilepse!"); Charlie, a weight-training obsessive, who keeps a ton lift in the corner of the shop, and periodically shows off by lifting it, then slamming it to the floor, causing the whole basement to shake; and worst of all The Rouger, known only by his job title, who perpetually winds everyone up past the point where it could be considered "a wee bit o' fun wi' ye". Two events finally convince Norrie to jack t in after the first day - the lunchtime arrival of Alex Freer, a ghostly, pallid alcoholic ex-beveller who advises him to quit while he can, for the sake of his physical and mental health; and an accidental glimpse of The Rouger, thinking the shop empty, trying it on with Charlie's woman. Caught spying, Norrie stands up for himself, and The Rouger lays off beating him up, for fear of being grassed up to the super-strong Charlie. It's an amazing, claustrophobic play, full of violence (plus the odd sweet moment, when they're all a-bevelling, the workers break into a sweet, sentimental song). As well as being a paean to and catalogue of the ins and outs of a dying craft (feedin' up, culet, rouging etc. are all explained), it's a compendium of baroque Glaswegian vernacular ("Ye hure-spun, bastrified, conscrapulated little prick!", "I've seen merr go in a haun-reared Abernethy fuckin' biscuit!", "It's blohooroble, so it is! Diabastric and blohooroble!") But specific totrade and location as it is, Norrie's initiations will be familiar to any former apprentice. Finally, the day falls apart - Peter has a severe fit while moving a big job, Charlie gashes his hand, and time is called early. Finally wound up once too often, Norrie blabs his lunchtime secret to everyone, but Charlie, having judged Norrie ("not one a' us"), takes the Rouger's side, and The Rouger punches him one in the stomach, which leaves him balled up on the floor, sobbing, as they all leave. A brilliant, bleak and uncompromising play, though not without its own kind of humour and warmth.  

Taking Leave - w Joyce Neary.  Soldier George Sweeney returns to his parents' in Ulster after six years' service, and finds they don't want him to carry on. With Brian Capron, Alison Steadman, Murray Head (who inevitably gets to sing) and Liz Smith.  

Fugitive - w Sean Walsh.  Franciscan friar Stephen Rea goes on the run from the order. Based on Walsh's real life experience. With David Kelly.  

Eleanor - w William Trevor.  Pauline Quirke is a bright, well-behaved but quiet schoolgirl who unaccountably goes missing. With Gillian Taylforth.