Plays from yesterday... Play for Today, BFI Blu-ray box set

“…why resurrect Play for Today? What could today’s television industry learn from it? Looking at the seven plays in this Volume One BFI set alone, what stands out is the natural diversity of their subject matter and their brave search for originality.” Marcus Prince, TV programmer for BFI Southbank

After watching through this new set I can confirm wholeheartedly that Mr Prince is not just whistling Dixie; these plays are strikingly vibrant even after all of these years and the quality of performance and writing stands the test of time both in terms of emotional and historical resonance. For some, like myself, these plays were watched and understood as a pre-teen but they were a shared family experience and hearing my parents discussing them is one of my earliest memories of critical appreciation.

I only directly remember one of the plays, Shakespeare or Bust (1973), probably because it was one of three featuring Brian Glover, Ray Mort and Douglas Livingstone as Art, Ern and Abe, three Leeds miners in search of cultural and other adventure. But I recognise the style of the plays as well as the performers especially Alison Steadman who is joint record holder for most PFT appearances on nine, most memorably as Abigail and Candice Marie, along with Nigel Hawthorne. Here she’s an expectant mother alongside Bernard Hill (just the seven appearances) and they show exactly why they have enjoyed such long careers on their way from Rochdale here to Essex and Port Talbot as well as Arundel's Isle.

Gemma Jones in The Lie

Perhaps the most a-typical is the first play, The Lie (1970) written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by Alan Bridges as part of an international co-production entitled The Largest Theatre in the World. It is more cinematic than the others as you might expect given the writer’s day job and typical of his concerns about relationships. This was the third play in season one and features Frank Finlay and Gemma Jones as Andrew and Anna Firth a professional couple in a sterile marriage, stifled by their careers and living all too comfortably in the fug of material wellbeing. After ten years of marriage they have two children, a nanny and sleep in separate bedrooms, but their balance is about to be upset as Andrew suffers at set back in his working life and turning back to fall on home comforts, discovers there’s far less warmth there than he thought.

Anna’s career is still on track and she has a long-standing secret lover, Ellis (John Carson) who himself is married. There’s an excruciating dinner party – avocado prawn starters all round – with Anna sat next to Ellis and Andrew with Ellis’ wife. The story is full of betrayals as you might expect from the four times married Bergman, but are lies better than revelations?

Frank Findlay, a lost soul swimming in a fish bowl?

There’s a striking cameo from Joss Ackland as Anna’s brother, a writer having a nervous breakdown and wearing make-up and nail varnish as he simmers away in hospital. Is he the author’s voice; driven to nervous exhaustion by being too honest to make the compromises that enable the others’ unhappiness? I wonder what becomes of him?

In Passage to England (1975) there are more deceptions and also the first sighting of the wonderful Colin Welland, writer and actor who in ten years would hoist his Oscar a lot and declare that the British were coming. Back in the seventies the adage was that British cinema was alive and well and on television and Play for Today surely played a major part in keeping things afloat prior to the cinematic revival heralded by Chariots of Fire.

Here Welland plays Onslow, captain of a small cargo boat, the very English Morris Dancer who, along with his partner Graham (Niall Padden) get an offer they could and should refuse from a young Ugandan Asian called Anand (Tariq Yunus); a bar of gold at bargain price if they smuggle him, his cousin Pramila (June Bolton) and sick uncle Dharam (Renu Setna) to England. The play balances a serious subject with a light-heartedness that serves to wrong foot the viewer even now with a nuanced discussion of the British and their empire.

Colin Welland was born in Liverpool

Written by Leon Griffiths the story is mostly set in the Amsterdam docks which director John Mackenzie uses to atmospheric effect much as he would do in The Long Good Friday; who doesn’t love a dock-side drama?

There’s more Welland, this time as writer of altogether more earnest and needfully complex tale of post-imperial national identity with Your Man from Six Counties (1976) in which a young Catholic boy Jimmy (Joseph Reynolds) goes to stay with his Uncle in the west of Ireland after his father is killed by a loyalist bomb in Northern Ireland.

Location is again an important part of the context and it looks very much as if all the shooting was done in situ from the hills and fields to cottages and pubs of County Sligo, you can even see flat-topped Benbulbin Mountain near Drumcliff, where W.B. Yeats is buried. There’s a very fine cast backgrounded with local faces that could only ever be Irish, with Donal McCann as Uncle Danny and a young Brenda Fricker (first Irish woman to win an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1989) as his wife Mollie. Young Jimmy is like a fish out of water, a city boy in the country, carrying a pet rook once rescued by his Dad, in a cage. Irish mythology may have it that these birds symbolise the souls of the dead yet, to local farmers, they’re a menace to be shot and hung out to dry.

Donal McCann and Brenda Fricker

Danny tries his best to bring Jimmy back to life and to put his father’s violent death behind him and yet the latter’s best friend Pat (Paul Antrim), a rebel in thought if not deed, wants to encourage the boy to hero worship his “martyred” father and to follow in his footsteps more forcefully than he has ever managed. Both Danny and Pat have something to learn about the boy and Mollie acts as the play’s moral heart trying to pull them together for the lad’s sake. Welland’s script allows so much room for interpretation especially as Katie Crosson observes in her booklet essay, “No two viewpoints are identical… “ meaning that there is no single straightforward narrative: you have to make your own mind up.

‘I want to have this baby and I want to see it being born and I want to feel it being born… and if you’re not interested in helping me why don’t you just sod off.’

Mike Stott’s Our Flesh and Blood (1977) is ostensibly more straightforward but is no less a deft thought-piece on contemporary masculinity as Bernard Blincoe (Bernard Hill) has to come to terms with his wife Jan (Dame Alison Steadman – if not yet, then soon…) and her desire for a baby on her terms. Bernard views this development with trepidation and his anxiety dreams turn into reality as Jan aims for a natural birth. At the hospital he gets a nervous young doctor, a reassuringly sassy sister (Diana Davies) and an old school consultant, Richard Briers on fine form and, amidst the comedic chaos finally catches up with Jan…  

Bernard Hill and Alison Steadman (who was also born in Liverpool)

The play has a lot to say about the role of the sexes at the time, men either pompously insistent or next to useless when the waters break, but this was not yet a country in which men routinely attended childbirth or in which couples were allowed too much of an opinion about how they were to have their baby. It’s a heart-warming glimpse of the future.

Back to Brian Glover on a barge to Stratford in Shakespeare or Bust (1973) for a mix of past and future as his earnest Art looks not just for the nation’s poetic truths but also comradeship and fairness. Peter Terson’s three heroes have working class pride and sense of self but also innocence as they happily punch above their weight on this aquatic road trip. They meet dropout boat dwellers who don’t share solidarity even as they’re happy to take Art’s coin, lock-keeper’s happy to mix with the man who turned their pub into a wine bar and follow an odd couple in a very posh boat; an older man with a yachting cap (Peter Honri) and his much younger boat dressing Hélène (Katya Wyeth). Abe reckons he stands a chance and the three sup their pints barely blinking in their awe-struck appreciation of this alien glamour.

Almost nothing knocks these lads back though and Art’s enthusiasm is infectious even if Ern can’t stop missing his wife and Abe just wants the one he can’t have. They relish every new turn as passionately as their drink and in the end are rewarded with surprises against the longest odds.

Ray Mort, Brian Glover and Douglas Livingstone

Back of Beyond (1974) is an altogether more mysterious affair with Rachel Roberts absolutely superb as the sad and mysterious Olwen; a woman hiding in solitude. Desmond Davis’s play is another to use locations to good effect, this time the Brecon Beacons and Llanelli-born Roberts looks like she grew up along with these hills.

There’s more mystery with John Bowen’s A Photograph (1977) featuring the great John Stride as pompous intellectual Michael Otway and Stephanie Turner as his long-suffering schoolteacher of a wife. There’s a great essay in the booklet from series producer/booklet commissioning editor Vic Pratt and this is further proof, if any were needed of Play for Today’s insistence on making its audience think.

Rachel Roberts yn ysmygu sigarét

Most of these plays have hardly been seen since first airing and the odd repeat. There were over 200 plays in the series and whilst some were wiped by a cost-conscious BBC, most survive and these seven provide not only proof of the quality and diversity but also a mouth-watering entrée to what we can only hope will be the start of more releases and screenings.

Play for Today: Volume 1 is released on 19^th November and can be ordered direct from the BFI website now! 

There’s a trailer available here but for many this is Christmas come early.

Fierce creatures… Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

 
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda.”

From reading Allan Sillitoe’s book on my pre-English O Level reading list onwards, I have always regarded Arthur Seaton to be the angriest of the angry young men. Here, after all, is a not unintelligent individual, a superior technician in the factory in which he works and who has the good sense to ultimately form balanced opinions and yet… if not out of control, he’s certainly full of the agitated need to fully express himself as and when he wants.

He just wants more, better than his parents got and their generation who fought in the Second World War and better than his workmates as they relax into compromise and the easy routines from which they never escape.

But can Arthur break the chain and escape his own future or is he doomed to make the same mistakes as everyone else?

Collective bargaining?

Produced by Tony Richardson and directed by Karel Reisz, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning formed one of British cinema’s most convincing adaptations of an Angry Young Novel, even if the Nottingham accents affected by the stars was a little askew… filtered through the native tones of Finney’s Salford,  Field’s Bolton, Robert’s Llanelli, Baker’s Manchester and Rossington’s Liverpool. Still at least it weren’t Received Pronunciation, by ‘eck! and, at least they were genuine regional accents from genuinely working class people.

Albert Finney – just 24 at the time, makes an excellent Arthur, coiled like a tightly wrung towel wrapped round his auntie’s mangle and always ready to give better than he gets. He doesn’t want to be told anything by anybody and actively courts enmity as a substitute for predictability.

Saturday night...

He still lives at home with his mam and dad (a TV zombie even with black and white and only two channels…) to whom he dutifully pays his weekly food and lodgings before going out and blowing the remains of his weekly wage on beer, girls and clothes.

Arthur’s one of the better paid workers at his engineering factory: he could work faster but that would only get them to increase his targets. He lives for the weekends and those slices of happiness in between one of which is Brenda (Rachel Roberts) the wife of one of his co-workers, the compliant and easy going Jack (Bryan Pringle).

We see Arthur and Brenda in the pub of a Friday night, the former engaged in a drinking competition with one of the locals: Arthur wins, but only long enough to collapse down stairs... Binge culture? It was invented a long time ago.

Arthur share some more reflective moments with his cousin Bert (Norman Rossington) as the two continue their childhood fascination with fishing but it’s only “half-time” in Arthur’s mission to wind-up almost everyone around him from co-workers to local busy-bodies.

Arthur's enemies...

At times he seems amoral such as when he tries to help a drunk who has smashed the windows of a funeral parlour, make his escape as the locals hold him waiting for the police. It seems an act worthy of some legal retribution but Arthur’s firmly on the side of the minority and of confounding expectations : “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not…” now, where have I heard that line recently?

But life’s about to get a whole lot more interesting all round…Arthur spots a beautiful lass called Doreen (Shirley Anne Field) and starts to court her, in spite of her mother’s resistance. She’s the real deal and as quick with a quip as Arthur is, she knows her own mind and isn’t intimidated by him.

But then Brenda reveals that she’s pregnant and there’s no way it’s Jack. Now we see the strength of Arthur’s mettle, he wants to do the right thing but this situation is too complicated for him. He enlists the aim of his favourite Auntie Ada – the force of nature that is Hylda Baker – but her “remedy” fails to work.

Things proceed with Doreen as Hylda gets desperate and then resolves to having the child, whatever the storm it’ll cause. Jack’s squaddie brother is in town with his mate, and the two of them exact bloody retribution on the wayward engineer: the rough justice he knows he’s had coming.

But life carries on… Arthur heals and is visited by a sympathetic Doreen to whom, surprisingly, he reveals the truth or most of it… for most of the film he’s been lying to most of the other characters and now he’s finding respect for Doreen.

He remains restless, worrying Bert as they fish, “I’ve never heard you like this…” but, whilst he can concede that Jack is soft but not that bad, he seems to have a more balanced view. He also knows his feelings for Doreen are more significant than anything he’s had to contend with.

The film finishes with the two discussing the future overlooking some smart new developments… it seems that marriage and lower middle class comforts await Mr Seaton, but he swears he hasn’t lost his spirit and we believe him… up to a point.

The power of this story and of this film is poorly served by my synopsis, Finney is a force of nature and his character is just as unsettling now as he was then: at least he wasn’t just purely selfish he knew what he was fighting for and against. His character is unpredictable, loutish and dishonest but through it all he has his own code of honour even if he reaches his limits with Brenda.

Rachel Roberts is every bit as good - her Brenda is besotted with Arthur but enough of a realist to know she can never have him. She played safe with Jack and he’ll not let her down.

Shirley Anne Field is sort of like a British Heddy Lamarr: sometimes it’s difficult to see her acting beyond her beauty. But the lass is from Bolton: she’s not as posh or as soft as she looks and she can act (consistently well and with range Heddy dear...). This was her breakthrough film even though she and Albert already had The Entertainer under their belts: “that was our screen test” she said in her interview before the recent BFI retrospective.

All contributed to make a landmark of British film that many feel stands the test of time better than some from this period. That it remains so powerfully resonant is down in no small part to this marvellous cast and their genuine touch of class.

I watched the BFI restoration which is available direct in a DVD/BluRay pack.  53 years old and still packing a punch: just be sure you don’t run into an Arthur Seaton next time you go down the pub.