Sunday 3 April 2022

Down but not out, in Britain… Play for Today Volume 3, BFI Blu-ray Box Set out on 11th April


Does your mind get clouded sometimes? All clouded up…


Adopts film trailer baritone: In a world in which social security is on the verge of collapse, centuries old religious bigotry defines our boundaries and government is undermined by self-seeking cynicism… and that’s just the first three plays on this vibrant new set that are as relevant today as they ever were.


I was just turned ten years old when the family watched Edna the Inebriate Woman and I still remember the reaction from my parents, the debate and the agreement that things were not right. Even as a child I knew what were called “tramps”, people, mostly men, who were wrapped in huge coats who’d walk from Liverpool up and down as far as Preston in one case, eking out a living, finding shelter where they could. It was part of the everyday and, whilst it seemed almost romantic to younger eyes, this play removed all idea of a life on the open road being anything other than hand-to-mouth rough.


With this play and others on the BFI’s stunning box sets, you wonder how much of a part the Play for Today series had on forming my opinions and politicizing the nation. Sure, a decade of such plays preceded the victory of Thatcher, but people were still more aware of society’s problems, just differing in their view of what needed to be done. The legacy of these plays is, perhaps, not a purely political one but in raising awareness and developing consensus around the faults in our society. That these persist, is undeniable and Brexit, no matter how misguided some of us may feel, was in many ways, an attempt to reach for a bigger solution to problems we all of us accept.


Patricia Hayes

Edna the Inebriate Woman by Jeremy Sandford


First broadcast 21st October 1971


Jeremy Sandford, who co-wrote Cathy Come Home (1966) with its director, Ken Loach, slept rough for two weeks in preparation for writing this play and at times it feels as though the dialogue has come straight from the road. The narrative is far from straightforward and we feel the same dislocation and confusion as Edna does as she searches for support and the home she has barely known. As Sandford later noted: “…the style of ‘Edna’ is intended to be impressionistic since I aimed to represent the world as seen through Edna’s disorientated perceptions…”


As Katie Crosson notes in her excellent booklet essay – the quality of these has been exemplary – the play is very didactive in addition to being authentic, funny and heart-wrenching, but Sandford had a point to make and an hour and a half was barely scratching the surface. Edna is an example, one of so many who fell through the cracks at a time when were less sophisticated, more judgemental, in the response to traumatic vagrancy. Then as with I am Daniel Blake in 2016, some critics probably felt the scenarios were “unrealistic” but having been through modern PIP assessments for my son, the bureaucracy of “care” is seemingly indifferent to actual fact.


What is without question is the sheer excellence of Patricia Hayes performance as Edna, making light of the grotesquery injecting fierceness and spirit into a character that would be hard to love. Edna is aggressive, constantly rude, often inebriated – drinking turpentine – and unreasonable in the face of authority and the terrifying certainty that she is, as she always has been, alone and unloved. Later in the play we find out what made her so and we can appreciate that she has to fight when there is simply no reason to trust. Edna is also funny and she is also wise, there is just a glimpse of the role she could play in helping others when she walks with Teresa (Kate Williams) a young woman on the start of a similar path.

 

Edna’s restless journey must forever continue though, flitting, as she says, always flitting and the play has a large cast reflecting the journey from roadside to battles for income support, a bed for the night and a system that presents prison as the better option. At one point Edna is put in a mental hospital where she is drugged and given involuntary electric shock treatment despite not having a mental illness… the things that could happen if not necessarily did happen. The dosshouse in Blackfriars Road, grim as it looks, was an actual dosshouse whilst Edna’s refuge at the Jesus Saves home, is an ideal of the kind of tolerant support she needed and even this is taken away as local residents’ complaints force it to close. Care in the community…

 

Sandford later chaired the National Homelessness Alliance and worked on many projects both on and off screen to tackle the issues of this play and, as Katie Crosson notes his legacy is measured not by Edna alone, but in his wider contribution to the causes. For this play alone, this box set is worth your time and money.


The band march down "Fenian Alley"

Just Another Saturday by Peter McDougall


First broadcast 13 March 1975


I was ordered to stand at the brother’s command, To receive the bright orange and blue...

 

To Glasgow and the continuing celebration of King William III’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690… I remember an Orange Day walk in Liverpool as a child, still England’s most Catholic city, the sectarian divide was real enough with separate schools if not strictly separated communities. It took me years, for instance, to realise that the King Billy painted in big white capitals on a wall in Walton near my grandparents, wasn’t just some local scally with a spray can. Far different in Glasgow though, where the first Catholic to play for Rangers wasn’t until 1989.


Football is the entre to this play’s sectarian divide as we open with seventeen-year-old John (John Morrison) waking up in his bedroom with a Rangers FC poster on the wall next to a No Surrender rosette. John is the “stick swinger”, the mace thrower who will lead Muirhill Flute Band who today will join with many others to celebrate the victory of the Dutch protestant king over the deposed catholic King James II of England and Ireland, VII of Scotland.


John’s nervous but sings the words of Orange Order songs as he prepares to join a ritual he does not entirely understand. Directed by John Mackenzie, there are superb scenes of the marches around which part of the play were filmed and with which the writer, Peter McDougall used to walk as a teenager like John. The two collaborated on The Elephants’ Graveyard (1976) and Just a Boys’ Game (1979), both of which have already been included on the BFI’s PFT box sets but this was McDougall’s first script and one that was deemed too incendiary in the early part of the decade.

 

The words presage the violence that will erupt during the march when the band leader Rab (Ken Hutchison) leads them through “Fenian Alley” and as the Irish flags hang angrily form windows the two sides come to blows. John is shaken and disgusted by what he sees, are these folk not as Scottish as he after all. Later he shares a drink with catholic mates including Paddy (Billy Connolly) when the brother of one of the injured Catholics comes looking for revenge. Will the cycle ever be broken?

 

The play packs a visceral punch and we only have to look across the water to see how easily hatred still stirs.

 

Adrienne Posta

Bar Mitzvah Boy by Jack Rosenthal


First broadcast 14 September 1976


Jack Rosenthal’s play is rich with characters from his Jewish heritage. It’s another clash of modern sensibilities versus centuries old tradition told with a lighter touch than Saturday, so much humour even as our hero Elliot – a superb turn from 14-year-old Jeremy Steyn – does the unthinkable. Director Michael Tuchner, brings out the best in an excellent cast and this just may be the best performance I’ve seen from Adrienne Posta who is so calmly centred as Elliot’s older sister and the smartest person in the room, hotel reception or the synagogue, where she allowed to attend at this point in time…

 

The pressure is on for Elliot as his, and more importantly, his parents’ big day approaches. He has to learn his speech and the recital from the Torah, but his mother Rita (Maria Charles) must get her hair right and his father Victor (Bernard Spear) lazily expects this right of passage to confirm his own manhood. This latter point is the problem for Elliot as not only is he not convinced that he is about to become as man, he’s not sure his role models are either… His grandfather Wax (Cyril Shaps) and potential brother-in-law, Harold (Jonathan Lynn, a legendary writer in his own right) are both overly sentimental and wimpish, especially when measured against the forceful women.

 

Dr Julia Wagner’s booklet essay explains the play’s impact in portraying Jewish culture and the skill of Tuchner’s direction and Rosenthal’s words in enabling the play to overcome potential stereotyping just as it creates a surprisingly intense family drama with only Lesley and Elliot keeping their heads in the Green’s sitting room as all around are losing theirs’.

 

Thora Hird not suffering fools...

The Mayor’s Charity by Henry Livings


First broadcast 29 November 1977

 

And so, to the legend that is Thora Hird in this heavily spiked comedy of Machiavellian local governmental manners. Livings’ script is a gift to Thora and the likes of Frank Windsor as the ambitious Ex-W/O Higham, Terence Rigby, the old school manipulator Mr Brabazon and Roy Kinnear as Roderick Major, the brother-in-law of Thora’s Olive major, the newly appointed mayor. Director Mike Newell moves the plot forward at speed and there’s a lot of detailed plotting, both in and around the play as Higham looks to sweep all before him by playing off different factions after being Olive’s choice as Mace Bearer, a master of ceremonies.

 

Some of the humour is broad, with a farcical French visit then a NSFW Scottish cabaret singer but there’s a serious point about local politics at a time of unrest in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. There’s a union dispute to deal with and petty politicking from people who ought to put their constituents first; as Higham cries out what about service?! Some folk are only in it for themselves whilst most feather their own nests… plus ca change eh Thora?

 

The Portrait of Nigel Havers...

Coming Out by James Andrew Hall


First broadcast 10 April 1979

 

“Nigel Havers… father was the attorney general at the time and was really upset that his son was appearing in this TV play which garnered all these headlines in the papers like 'Gay sex shocker' and things like that…” James Andrew Hall, Bournemouth Echo, 2017

  

Directed by Carol Wiseman, Coming Out is not quite the tentative closeted story you might expect form its vintage, the main characters are completely secure in their sexuality and the debate is more about whether that should be a matter of public record. Anton Rodgers plays Lewis Duncan, a hugely successful writer of very macho detective fiction who is living with his younger lover, Richie (Nigel Havers) just not in an open way. He doesn’t consider his sexual preference to be big news although is well aware that it might damage his marketability.

 

He writes a sensational magazine column under the pen name of Zippy Grimes, suggesting that homosexual encounters are more prevalent than society allows, he receives a flood of confessional letters from a pained populace still hiding its secrets. His publisher Harry (Hywel Bennett) is ecstatic and encourages him to meet with some of the respondents and reluctantly he does with a number of vignettes exposing the sadness of seventies repression. But he won’t revisit his Zippy persona…

 

Cue the dinner party from Hell with his painter friend Gunnar (Michael Byrne) and his belligerent other half Gerald (Richard Pearson) who relishes the chance to challenge Lewis’ complacency with all the means at his disposal not forgetting his own struggles having survived the era of illegality with the blackmail and suicides that went with it. There are home truths and a betrayal that will any of this change Lewis’ position?


Archie Pool, T-Bone Wilson and Trevor Thomas

A Hole in Babylon by Jim Hawkins and Horace Ové


First broadcast 29 November 1979

 

Last, but not least, is a play based on the 1975 Spaghetti House siege that took place in Knightsbridge, London. Three black gunmen attempted to rob the restaurant late at night after being tipped off that some £40,000 of takings would be on the premises. One of the workers escaped to alert the police leaving the men to hold the rest hostage from 28th September to 3rd October. During that time the event became politicised as the men claimed to be acting on behalf of Black Liberation organisations.

 

Directed by Horace Ové, from a script he co-wrote with Jim Hawkins, the play attempts to examine how the three men ended up in the raid as well as detailing the course of the hostage situation. T-Bone Wilson plays Frank Davies the leader of the group, an apparent recidivist offender who may well be more sinned against than sinning. Then there’s a university drop out with a dream to teach black kids, Bonsu Monroe (Trevor Thomas), and Wes Dick (Archie Pool) a would be poet.

 

Ové’s flashbacks of their lives was based on interviews conducted for over a year with the main protagonists and the black community of Ladbroke Grove especially. The result gives the men their due and, to the horror of The Daily Mail, cast doubt on the official version of events and the idea that the political elements were just an attempt to change the nature if the crime. Who can say for sure but there is so much room for doubt given the structural issues confronting men forced into this kind of risk?

 

In his booklet essay, film writer Kaleem Aftab, puts it more authoritatively than I can: By using Jamaican patois in the title, Babylon being not just the police but the white establishment, Ové knew what he was up against, and in many ways, still is.


Perhaps the hardest hitting of the BFI’s Play for Today volumes, you can pre-order Play for Today Volume 3 direct from the BFI shop, in person or online. It’s out on 11th April and is an absolute delight!


Rated: ***** and with much gratitude; these releases continue to be essential.

 



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