Drama out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today (2020) Movie Script

This programme contains some strong

language and some scenes which some

viewers may find upsetting

Right. This is Play For Today.

Slate one, take one, no less.

Interview with some old fart sitting

here. A play for today - just today.

Helps pass the time.

Something easy,

something undemanding.

Lasts just a bit longer

than a bag of crisps

and has the same sort of taste.

Play For Today -

a series of single dramas

broadcast by BBC Television

between 1970 and 1984,

years of crisis

when the consensus politics

of Britain's post-war

world began to unravel.

When industrial relations,

education and the health service

faced fundamental challenges.

When the country was struggling

with the end of empire,

and when the personal was

increasingly political.

Play For Today reflected

and responded to all this and more

in 300 dramas shown in primetime

to audiences numbered in millions.

What?

I never watch plays

on the telly anyway.

Not ever?

It's such a tiny little picture

and tiny little people

all boxed up together.

I can never get involved in it.

And half of them are so gloomy.

Ooh, my ideal audience!

Play For Today was contemporary,

often controversial,

and occasionally censored.

But it was also immensely varied,

colliding social

realism with comedy,

costume drama with fantasy,

personal visions with

state-of-the-nation overviews.

It was mischievous,

critical and challenging,

and unafraid to tackle taboos.

ON TV: Beautiful thing...

HE SWITCHES TV OFF

That is a straightforward

incitement of perversion

and immorality.

The BBC seems to have lost all sense

of responsibility and decorum.

That was sick. Really sick.

I was watching it, Richard.

What?

If you look at the whole body

of Play For Today as a whole,

the diversity, the integrity,

the range,

the freedom of expression,

the freedom of ideas,

the freedom of dramatic

and cinematic

and thematic exploration,

etc, is exemplary,

and must be an inspiration

for anybody that's thinking about,

you know, the nature of

what film or drama, um,

is or should be.

50 years after the series began,

this film is a celebration

of Play For Today.

As recalled by those

who made the series,

it celebrates many of

our best actors,

writers and directors,

and it celebrates how,

through more than

a decade of crisis,

Play For Today made exciting,

exceptional and enduring drama.

Before and after

the Second World War,

BBC television relied on plays

from the theatre

for most of its drama.

Then in the late 1950s,

the new commercial ITV network

started to commission

original scripts about life

in contemporary Britain.

Under producer Sydney Newman,

armchair theatre attracted

large audiences and critical praise,

and in 1963,

Newman was headhunted by the BBC.

Producer James MacTaggart

and story editor Tony Garnett

were charged by Sydney Newman

with making a series

of single dramas

about life in the mid 1960s.

And the brief was

to do contemporary drama

that rattled the cages

of the establishment.

What a brief.

Ken was one of

a handful of directors.

In fact, I think we worked Ken

harder than anybody else.

And during that

work period together,

we got closer and realised

that both politically

and aesthetically,

we had the same attitudes

and the same agenda.

We shared the same sense

of what good drama was,

and the aesthetics of it as well

to do with absolutely reflecting

the comedy and tragedy

and drama of everyday life,

but based on

a kind of clear political idea.

Here we go. Absolute quiet. Quiet!

CHATTER

Quiet! Quiet, you see?

There's never quiet in that studio,

for God's sake!

By 1965, it was clear that

the electronic studio

was a limitation to revealing

the contemporary fiction.

We wanted to do stories

from the streets.

We weren't interested, in the end,

in theatrical sets

in a studio like this

where you have three

big electronic cameras

poking into a piece of work

that had rehearsed like a play

and was performed like a play.

The form didn't...didn't allow us

to make drama

that had the smack

of contemporary life about it.

# Oh, oh, little girl

# Pretty little girl

# You're such a good little girl

# Why don't you let me

# Make you a bad girl... #

It was the time of

the French New Wave.

It was the time of

hand-held cameras, 16mm film,

which was lightweight.

So, we were in our late 20s,

cheeky, full of brass neck.

Up The Junction was

a series of short stories

and descriptive little events,

beautifully written by Nell Dunn.

And it took place

in South London in Battersea,

where she'd lived for a time.

And they were a group

of working class girls,

and their...their comedy

and their serious situations

they'd get in,

and their boyfriends.

And it was funny and racy

and raucous and full of music.

I knew I couldn't get that

in the studio.

In fact, Up The Junction had to be

made partly in the studio

with electronic cameras,

although much of it was shot

on the streets of South London.

# I want to be loved by you

# Lo-o-ved

# Scoo-boo-bi-do. #

RAUCOUS CHEERING AND CHATTER

Oh, look at that, Sylvie,

that old man in the gutter.

We better turn him over

in case he's our dad.

OVERLAPPING CHATTER

Hey, Sylvie, there's your husband.

Where do you think you're going,

all dressed up like

the Queen of Sheba?

What's that to you,

you fifth-rate ponce?

Always was one for the men,

weren't you?

Anything in trousers,

you'll have him.

You dirty sod,

I hope your guts drop out!

And because they did quite well,

that was the first film.

So, that point was then conceded -

we could do films.

We thought we were part of

the public discourse,

and we wanted people

to use their critical faculties

when they watched fiction that...

..that was similar to the way

they viewed the news.

The Wednesday Play ran for six years

and featured

a much wider range of drama

than just the social realism

of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett.

Then, in 1970, the sports department

claimed the midweek schedule,

and The Wednesday Play moved

to Thursdays under a different name.

We were inheriting

what they'd created

with The Wednesday Play,

so it was a very fortunate

position to be in.

That's to say there were

high audience expectations.

On the whole,

people did keep coming back

week after week after week,

not knowing what

they were going to get,

and that was part of the point.

There was a variety and a range

that was as wide as

you could make it.

# Open up your window,

let some air... #

The first Play For Today

was broadcast on BBC One

on Thursday, October 15th, 1970.

Between a dozen and 30 dramas

would be shown each year

under this title for

the next 14 weeks.

The brief was to produce

75 or 80-minute plays

about contemporary Britain

that was challenging,

which was code for controversial.

And you were very aware

of the stars of Wednesday Play.

You were aware of

Tony Garnett and Ken Loach,

the tradition of social realism.

In fact, one of the virtues

of Play For Today, I think,

was that it was far more various

than that.

There were far more different

kinds of play.

More than 200 writers

scripted plays for Today,

or had their work adapted.

The majority of the broadcasts

were commissioned

specially for television,

although there were also versions

of theatre plays,

novels and short stories.

The series was an opportunity

for new writers,

as well as a showcase for

the most prominent playwrights

of the time.

I realised that

it was still imagination

and people's fantasies,

people's wishes, people's pains,

people's anguish that really was

the stuff and substance

for what we could write about,

and television has

that peculiar power

when it is dealing with

what people actually dread,

think, want, are joyful about.

# Can't you take a dare?

# I double-dare you

# To kiss me and then... #

I always feel that it brought out...

..the sincerity in writers.

I think that was true

of Dennis Potter.

When Dennis Potter wrote

for the wide audience,

he was thinking, as I was thinking,

"My mother's going to watch this.

"My dentist is going to watch this.

"My cousin's going to watch this.

"The world is going to watch this."

It's pointless trying to show off

how clever you are.

What...? Where does that get you,

with that audience?

The more prestigious Plays For Today

were often shot on film

away from Television Centre,

but the organisation

and the economics of the BBC

meant that most Plays For Today

were recorded in studios

with multiple electronic cameras.

BBC Television Centre was

built round these vast studios

which serviced series, serials,

plays and entertainment,

and everything else.

So, it was a very tight,

tightly controlled amount

of people and facilities.

We were given total freedom

on the one hand,

and an extremely rigid

requirement on the other.

Studio production was far more

cost-effective than filming,

and budgets often dictated that

studio plays had to be mounted

with limited resources.

I don't know that there was

anybody given the choice

who would say they would

rather work in the studio.

I can't quite think

that that would be so.

But there were a lot of people

who thought - and I thought -

that there were very great things

you could do in a studio.

# Sir Atwood, Sir Atwood

Two by two

# You at the start must turn

and follow through

# The drums shall play

and the whistle shall blow

# Sir Atwood, Sir Atwood said

You must go! #

"They have sharpened their tongues

like a serpent.

"Adders' poison is onto their lips."

David. Psalm 140.

FLIES BUZZING

Lord, who's led thy servants to

this desert of the fallen world...

..look upon my family

with thy kindly grace.

May my faith be for them

thy pillar of cloud by day.

Thy pillar of fire by night.

I look at some of the studio

productions that I did,

and I think the directors

have done incredibly well

to create worlds.

I mean, in some cases,

very small worlds.

Someone's nicked the top.

It's there.

It's very dangerous, that is.

If someone should light a

match over here... Gotcha!

What the hell?!

What are you doing,

you bloody fool?! Watch it.

What's your name? My name?

What's his name?

What's your name?

You ask me my name?

I've only been here five years.

Oddly, I don't feel cramped

when I watch them.

There's so much going on

and they're so well designed

and well photographed.

For the studio pieces,

you're looking for sustained...

..dialogue.

But it was writers centred in

a way that film-making isn't.

The understanding that

the writer was central

was also a credo held

by senior figures

in the BBC's management.

The creative impulse

in most of British broadcasting

comes from a producer

or a director - or both -

working with a commentator

or a reporter

who may themselves be writers,

or, and very frequently,

with a writer as such.

Many people contribute -

designers, cameramen,

all sorts of people -

but the main creative thrust

is there.

Next week's play is

The After Dinner Joke,

a comedy concerning

a young woman's adventures

in the world of

big business charity,

starring Paula Wilcox.

That's Play For Today,

next Tuesday evening at 9.25.

On occasions,

Play For Today's work with a writer

demanded a radical alternative

to both conventional

studio production

and film-making.

I was desperate to do anything

Caryl would agree to write,

and I do think that

I had read an article

in the Financial Times

about charity.

So, I said to Caryl,

"Well, what about this?"

So, probably I think

what happened is it just came in,

and obviously it was wonderful.

A wonderful satire.

But equally, obviously,

it was set all over the world,

and completely undoable,

you know, as a sort of

naturalistic Play For Today.

But I think we thought, "OK,

let's think about blue screen,"

as it then was.

Green screen nowadays.

What I want to know from you,

Mr Mayor,

is where in your town are

the people with the money

so that I can get it off them.

Won't find it easy.

They're all conservatives.

They don't play golf with me,

you know. Where do they live?

Up here on this hill by the park.

Ooh.

And down here?

Between the high street

and the canal

is what we call "the old town".

Ah, the slums.

Uh, the redevelopment area.

It was certainly...

It was an era when

it was much more fun

to be breaking the rules

and taking chances

than just doing the same old.

None of us were in the business

of doing the same old.

So, we just worked out how to do it,

and it remains an oddity

to this day.

Many of the most distinctive

Plays For Today

came from BBC Pebble Mill

in Birmingham,

where David Rose ran

English Regions Drama.

London drama does tremendous work,

but here was another

outlet and inlet.

Writers could come and talk to us,

as well as us seeking them out.

And, in fact, Huw Wheldon,

who was our managing director

at the time,

said, "Boyo,

there's one thing to do.

"Find new writers and nurture them."

He wasn't politically motivated

in the way that Tony Garnett

always admitted he was.

He had a broader palette.

But nevertheless, he wanted

to challenge the audience.

He wanted to come up

with something new and different.

The basic thing about David

was he trusted the artist,

and that, you know,

it's rare, isn't it?

And actually, the first

Plays For Day that Birmingham did

were comedies written

by Peter Terson.

And the second one,

which was my favourite,

Shakespeare Or Bust,

the three miners were called

Art, Abe and Ern,

and Art turned out to be

a fan of Shakespeare,

and the three miners went

for a week on a barge

to Stratford-upon-Avon.

And when they got

to Stratford-upon-Avon...

HE LAUGHS

..they queued up

with great excitement

for a production

of Antony And Cleopatra,

but they hadn't booked seats.

They couldn't get in.

You what?

Not a seat?

No, house full.

But we've made a pilgrimage

from Leeds.

Yes, well, that gentleman

has made his from Japan,

but that still doesn't make

a seat available.

It was absolutely joyous.

They go across to the barge,

and, of course,

the actors playing Antony

and Cleopatra appear on the bridge.

Oh, this is great.

Have you come far? A pilgrimage.

The birthplace of The Bard.

You'd be better of going to

the birthplace of Karl Marx.

Well, you've come up in regal style.

"The poop was beaten gold.

"Purple the sails,

and so perfumed

"the winds were lovesick with them.

"The oars were silver..."

"The oars were silver,

"and to the tune of flutes

kept stroke and made the water

"that they beat to follow after

as amorous of their strokes."

Oh-ho! That sounded good!

Hey... Wait on a bit.

You're not...

You're not in it, are you?

You're not actors?

"Pastoral, historical,

tragical, comical.

"Historical tragical,

comical, pastoral.

"We are the only men."

HE LAUGHS

Hey, lads! They're actors!

What's your names, then, kiddos?

This is Janet. I'm Richard.

Well, I'm Art, and this is Ern, Abe.

We come from Leeds.

Gentlemen, welcome to Stratford.

So, there's a wonderful celebration,

but it is about Shakespeare

and the working class.

But it embraced life.

It opened to life in a way

that perhaps some of the drama

coming out of...of London

in Play For Today

limited life in some ways.

Not the greatest ones,

but did...did take views.

Now, if the business

of movies is pleasure...

..the business

of literature and drama

in the final analysis...is truth.

It can provide pleasure,

of course,

and delight and insight,

but its main concern is

the exploration of truth.

The truth of a news bulletin

is the degree

to which it accurately describes

an event that has taken place.

The truth of the play

is not so different.

It's the degree to which

it accurately describes

a world conceived inwardly.

It's the degree to which that world,

inwardly conceived,

has been accurately embodied forth.

The degree to which

it is not meretricious.

The degree to which

it hangs together

as a single object,

cutting no corners,

cheating no-one,

including the author.

When Play For Today began in 1970,

after a period of

relative industrial peace,

British politics was again

dominated by disputes

between workers and employers.

The politics of

the workplace was central

to a number of early dramas,

often told from the series

dominant left liberal perspective.

A documentary style

social realist study

of a strike betrayed

by union leaders,

was among the most powerful.

There hadn't been a strike here

for 100 years,

and the union enjoyed

the protection of a closed shop

where contributions were

automatically deducted

from the workers' pay packets

and meetings were as rare

as a sunny day on a wet weekend.

Then it happened.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

And the first place was

our lads in the sheet works.

They walked out at half past 11

over some minor discrepancy

in the payslip,

which was something that they'd been

complaining about for weeks.

But it just seemed to snowball,

like suddenly it burst like a

carbuncle that had been a festering.

Confrontational class-based politics

featured elsewhere in

the early Plays For Today.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

A reconstruction of events

in Cornwall in 1913

pitched workers in the clay pits

against a special police force

brought in to help break a strike.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

The key analysis that society

is based on class conflict

and that the ruling class exploits

and the working class is exploited,

and the struggle between

the oppressor and the oppressed,

the imperialists

and the colonised...

..that holds.

That was the politics that we got,

we were welcomed

and were drawn into,

and pleased to be so.

You probably remember in 1970,

the tremendous clothing strike

when 30,000 clothing workers

in the area of Leeds

and throughout Yorkshire,

and to some extent

in the North East,

came out on an unofficial strike

for a shilling an hour.

The strike lasted for five weeks.

It was something completely new.

Or at least new

in the clothing industry.

The most ambitious and

arguably the most radical

of the workplace Plays For Today

was based on

a recent strike in Leeds,

where the workers had come close

to winning all their demands.

WORKERS SING

You know, we didn't want to

substitute propaganda for quality,

and we wanted to do drama.

When we did drama, we did drama.

But I think none of us ever did

what we were accused of many times.

You know, propagandist, or

left-wing, you know, tub-thumping.

We really didn't do that.

Our characters lived,

and, you know, and...

..our stories...

were there to be scrutinised.

You know, "Are these just

being manipulated,

"or do they have internal life?"

And I really was, I know,

inspired by the Eisenstein,

Pontecorvo,

you know, Pabst sense of film.

And, uh...

..Eisenstein had been

extremely important to me

when I was first trying

to get my feet on the ground

in film-making,

just cos there was no film school

or course on film-making.

CLAMOURING

Well, I must say,

I wish it was as easy to deal

with all the employees as that.

So, it seemed to me that

if the film...

..if we were going

to deliver a film,

you've got to sort of...

not explicate it,

but you've got to illuminate

what happened, you know?

What do you think you're doing?

I'm drawing up a statement

for the press.

They stampeded that vote, Joe.

Harry Gridley in his mob.

You know that, and you let him.

I could sense the mood

in the meeting, Maggie.

We didn't stand a chance.

Why didn't you get up

and say something?

Well, why didn't you?

You know as well as I do,

politics is the art

of the attainable.

And I was involved in inner politics

that was absolutely clear that

you have to go further.

You have to organise, you know,

that strength and turn it into

a proper instrument, and so on.

Invision comes tonight from Leeds,

a city that provided the backdrop

to the highly controversial

Play For Today Leeds United,

shown on BBC One last night.

Today, Leeds has been talking

about little else.

The critics on the whole

enjoyed the play.

Even the right-wing national press

was full of praise this morning.

So I got away with Leeds United,

and then I got

just a couple of half-hour

studio plays after that.

And I reached a point by 1975

where I was...

I'd been just out of work,

you know, and there wasn't

anything coming in.

And I heard from other people

that people had wanted me to do

stuff, but they were warned off.

By '76, I was one of

several people -

and Roy Battersby was another,

and Tony, in a different way,

was another -

were being fingered by the unseen,

sinister forces

of people, from whatever

intelligence unit it was,

had to lean on the BBC and say,

"Watch these people.

They're trying to cause trouble."

Routine political vetting by MI5

of applicants to the BBC

started in the mid 1930s.

As late as 1984, the BBC was being

advised by the security

services to refuse employment

to those found to have been a member

of the Communist Party,

the Socialist Workers Party,

or the Workers Revolutionary Party.

I was told by somebody who worked

in personnel that we, you know,

we all had our personnel files

and that, if you were suspicious,

you were a troublemaker

or wherever it was, you had...

There was, in order not to put

anything in writing,

they had a Christmas tree

in the top right-hand corner

of your file.

Apparently, I had five!

LAUGHS

So you sort of knew.

And of course, it...it worked.

I mean, I was blacklisted

and I'm not making... I...

I made my own choices

about politics,

and I'm not... The struggle,

you know,

the class society is the

class society and, er...

I'm sorry, because I know I would

have...I would have continued

directing and that would have

been good, I think, you know.

As it was,

I had to kind of fight my way back.

When Play For Today began,

the Second World War had ended

only 25 years before.

The 1945 to '51 Labour government,

committed to renewal

and reform, had been out of power

for less than two decades.

Certainly the writers who I was

working with and my friends

and the world, the universe

that I occupied was a universe

that believed in the promise

of the '45 government.

That's what informed our work

and our work in the theatre.

So that extended into television.

But, of course, the writers

that I commissioned - writers

like Trevor Griffiths,

like Ian McEwan -

were writers who were associated

with policies of the left.

But they're all too good writers

to think that

simply putting left polemic on

television

was either valuable or

influential.

Another great act,

the administration of 1945 to '51.

Now there, surely, if nowhere else.

I make no mention of my own part,

but look at the record

some time objectively.

If I may borrow a very overused

word from you for a moment.

Now, look, we said we must

have full employment

and we had it for the first time

in history outside of wars.

We said we must control

the commanding heights of industry.

So we took coal, the railways,

transport, gas, electricity, iron

and steel into public ownership.

We said we must have a say

in how the country was financed

so we nationalised the

Bank of England.

And underpinning all this,

we created a caring society

where a person was entitled

to a good education, to health

service, national assistance

and pensions as of right.

The extended welfare state, created

by the 1945 Labour government,

was engaged with and examined

in plays for today

about the health service,

about education,

and about the effects

of urban planning.

Important, too, was a sense

of the post-war betrayal

of the true tenets of socialism.

A real social revolution

would have committed itself

to be irreversible destruction

of capitalism and the social order

formed and maintained by it.

A real social revolution

would have affected the major

redistribution of wealth in favour

of the labouring masses. A real

social revolution

would have smashed the bourgeois

state apparatus

and begun the creation of

a people's state.

Writers set out to understand

the defeat

of the potential of 1945

and to delve back into the war

years to examine the myths

that had accrued over three decades.

Licking Hitler was an attempt

to, as it were, diagnose

what had happened in the Second

World War, and why we were telling

ourselves lies about what had

happened in the Second World War.

And when I met Sefton Delmer,

who had run black propaganda

during the Second World War,

I had been absolutely astonished

to find that there was a filthy,

lying, deliberately misleading

operation in which the enemy

was to be tricked

by lies being told by the British.

The game is we're a radio station

broadcasting to Germany. Yes.

My job is to script the broadcasts,

your job is to interpret them.

I see.

Interpret them? Propaganda.

Yes.

It was about the fact

that this black propaganda unit

belied the myth that the Second

World War had been fought

in this uniquely clean way,

which is what every British film

had said, more or less

from 1945 until Licking Hitler.

BIRDS TWEET

At the heart of the film is the

intense, abusive yet intimate

relationship between the upper

class unworldly Anna Seaton

and the brilliant working-class

Scot Archie Maclean.

And in the end, Archie tells

a lie and she has to go.

She has to leave. He tells a lie

about her

and she gets sacked from the group.

And there is this wonderful

speech right at the end.

It's kind of voiceover about

the English and lies.

The narrator dispassionately

recounts what happened to each

of the characters in the years

after the war, including Archie,

who had gone on to make social

realist films that sentimentalised

memories of his harsh childhood.

I thought the British probably,

you know, had a gift for lying

and it seemed to me so clear

that the establishment,

having to justify its continued

existence once the empire had gone,

could only justify its extraordinary

self-importance through lying.

Anna enjoyed a career in advertising

and was a researcher

for the Labour Party before largely

withdrawing from society.

After seeing one of Archie's films,

she wrote to him for the first

time since 1942.

It is only now that I fully

understand the events that passed

between us so many years ago.

You must allow for my ignorance.

I was born into a class

and at a time that protected me

from even a trance acquaintance

with the world.

But since that first day at

Wendlesham,

I have been trying to learn,

trying to keep faith with the shame

and anger I saw in you.

In retrospect, what you sensed

then has become blindingly clear

to the rest of us.

That whereas we knew exactly

what we were fighting against,

none of us had the whisper

of an idea

as to what we were fighting for.

Over the years, I have been watching

the steady impoverishment

of people's ideals, their loss

of faith.

The line, the daily inveterate line.

The 30-year-old deep, corrosive

national habit of lying.

And I have remembered you.

I have remembered the one lie

you told...to make me go away.

And now, at last, I've come

to understand why you told it.

I loved you then,

and I love you now.

For 30 years, you have been

the beat of my heart.

Please, please,

tell me it is the same for you.

He never replied.

And obviously, you know, it has not

been very pleasant in the last

ten years to see the habit of lying,

with ideas of empire returning

again and British independence

and lies about the Second World War

returning again.

We are back with the myth.

Television drama has always

had close links with both

the film industry and the theatre.

Nearly 30 plays for today

were adaptations of scripts

written for the stage, including

one of the best remembered of all.

Hello, Beverly. Hi!

Oh, what a lovely dress. Thanks!

Were we meant to wear long?

No, no, it's just informal,

you know.

This is my husband, Tony.

How do you do? Pleased to meet you.

How'd you do? He's got a firm

handshake, hasn't he?

Yes. Fantastic.

Like to come through? Thanks.

Abigail's Party is a story

outside the play for today's story,

really, because it was a stage play.

Mike Leigh made a sequence

of brilliant films for

Play For Today, including

the story of Candice-Marie

and Keith camping in Dorset.

A tale of a bashful mortician's

assistant, Trevor, and a chronicle

of class divisions among

the employees at a brokerage firm.

But with his then wife,

Alison Steadman,

he also created a hugely successful

comedy for Hampstead Theatre.

Alison Steadman's pregnancy ruled

out a transfer to the West End,

so Margaret Matheson suggested

taking it into a studio

for Play For Today.

Absolutely out of the question.

It is a play, it's a theatre play.

It does not belong on television.

I'm a film-maker.

I don't want to do anything

in the studio.

And I was talked into it. Everybody

said, "You're mad. Let's do it."

Laurence, would you put

a record on for us, please?

Yes, surely.

What would we like to hear?

Demis Roussos. No, Beverly!

We don't want to listen to that fat

Greek caterwauling all night.

I certainly didn't imagine

it was going to

become an iconic piece of work.

Frankly, successful as it was

and much as everybody loves it,

I can't watch it.

It's a technical, visual mess.

But, of course, nobody's

concerned about that.

What they're concerned with is

the resonance of the performances.

And here were actors who were

so solid in it that they just gave

these amazing performances

in front of five cameras.

SLOW, ROMANTIC MUSIC PLAYS

You don't mind me mauling

your husband, do you, Ange?

No! You go ahead.

Go on, dance with Laurence.

No, I can't.

Course you can. Get up and dance!

Don't worry, Ange, you'll be

quite safe with Laurence.

He won't rape you.

Do you want to dance?

Abigail's Party's precisely

pitched satirical portrait

of the aspirational materialism

of the middle classes, has attracted

as many brickbats as bouquets.

I'm not very good at...

Writing as a critic, Dennis Potter

described the play

as a prolonged jeer,

twitching with genuine hatred.

Do you want to dance with us?

No, thank you.

I don't think it's relevant for me

or any other dramatist or

film-maker

to be concerned in a conscious,

manipulative way

about whether you have to make

the audience sympathise

with a character or find the

character abhorrent.

I mean, you know, we put the world,

put life, put people on the screen

without slogans, and the audience

has to decide

what he or she or they

want to make of it, really.

Play For Today also showcased

a radically different approach

to adapting a theatre show

for the small screen.

Shot across the Scottish Highlands,

The Cheviot, The Stag

And The Black, Black Oil

brought together 7:84's

touring show in a village hall

with costume drama reconstructions

and documentary film of

recent events.

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la...

# As the rain on the hillside

comes in from the sea

# La, La, La, La, La, La...

# All the blessings of life

were eight hours from me

# La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...

# So, if you'd abandon

your own misery

# You'd open the door

to the oil industry

# There's money a barrel of oil

in the sea

# All waiting for drilling

and piping to me...#

For the film,

director, John McKenzie,

reconstructed as a

location-shot drama,

key moments in 200 and more

years of exploitation

of the Highlands

by the English aristocracy.

He wove these together,

with the play being performed

to a Highland audience

to create a compelling tale

of capital, the Clearances

and Cheviot sheep.

And as the play spoke

of continuing exploitation,

now by American oil interests

and the Conservative government

down South,

Mackenzie intercut contemporary

news footage.

# Conoco, Aramco, Shell, Esso,

# Texaco, British

Petroleum-yum-yum-yum-yum

# Conoco, Aramco, Shell, Esso,

# Texaco, British Petroleum

# Conoco, Aramco, Shell, Esso,

# Texaco, British

Petroleum-yum-yum-yum-yum

# Conoco, Aramco, Shell, Esso,

# Texaco, British Petroleum

# There's job and there's prospects

# So, please, have no fears

# There's a building of oil rigs

# And houses and piers

# There's a boom time a-coming

# Let's celebrate! Cheers! #

Well, the Highlands will be my

lands in just four or five years.

The 1970s were years of crisis,

not just for the country,

but for the mainstream

British cinema industry.

With dwindling audiences,

competition from television

and cuts to state funding.

The truth is, was, that

time that you couldn't...

There was no indigenous

serious British cinema.

I mean, there was an industry.

mostly used by the Americans

or to make very, very

commercial product.

But, serious indigenous

cinema was impossible.

And the aphorism

that came out of that moment

was the British film industry

is alive and well

and living in television.

Drama films were being

made elsewhere in television,

but Play for Today was an especially

congenial context

for leading talents,

including Alan Clark,

who consistently pushed the

boundaries of the possible.

For Penda's Fen, he brilliantly

realised a deeply disturbing dream.

KNOCKING ON WOOD

The cliche that Play for Today

would be every week

about some depressing aspect

of everything that was worst

about British society

was just completely untrue.

And you'd have a poet

like David Rudkin,

doing a play like Penda's Fen,

which was just wild, crazy

and not in any known genre

and formerly very experimental,

far more experimental than anything

that was going on

in the British cinema.

It was about a sixth-former,

which sounds like, you know,

death for a drama and his problems

with his sexuality,

but also with his love of music and

also his intellectual growth.

And it was set, again, because

we were a regional drama,

it was set against the Malvern Hills

and Elgar's music.

You have to be born in us.

Then you become pure light.

No. No!

I am nothing pure!

Nothing pure.

My race is mixed.

My sex is mixed.

I am woman and man.

Light with darkness.

Mixed!

Mixed.

I am nothing special, nothing,

nothing pure!

I am mud and flame!

If we can't have him,

darkness must not.

OMINOUS MUSIC

Concerned with history and myth,

Christianity and

romantic literature,

politics and gender and landscape...

Penda!

..Penda's Fen is perhaps

the most extraordinary

and fantastical of all

Plays for Today.

There, you have seen your true

dark enemies of England.

Sick father and mother, who would

have us children forever.

King Penda.

With Play for Today expected to be

contemporary and controversial,

censorship skirmishes

were inevitable

and a number of dramas overstepped

the BBC boundaries of good taste

and the politically permissible.

Two completed dramas

were banned outright,

although both have subsequently

been screened by the BBC.

If you are a nervous type

out there,

switch over or off

for some calmer air.

But you have to be smug

or very frail,

to believe that no man

has a horn or tail.

People would say and people still

say, "Well, why did they ban it?

And I would say, say the same

thing now.

Well, it's about a young man, who,

incidentally, is the Devil,

who cons his way into a rather

sad suburban front room,

where they're looking after

their daughter,

who's been in a motor accident,

and he fucks her back to life.

You still want to know

why it was banned?

Shh!

SHE GROANS

Cheque book in bureau,

eh, Pattie?

SHE MOANS

Jewellery in bedroom.

SHE GROANS LOUDLY

Shh! Keep still now.

Keep the gold Krugerrands in the

chest of drawers.

SHE MOANS

Cashpoint card, check card, credit

card, oh, it all mounts up, baby.

Now, why don't people accept evil

when they're offered it?

Still, you do.

No choice, eh?

WHISPERING: No noise, now.

No noise.

SHE GROANS

Evil, I wish to demonstrate,

often speaks in sentimental

religiose sanctimonious terms.

I think that is the characteristic

religious approach

of shallow-minded people

of our time,

so that religion is a yucky,

unctuous thing,

which you don't actually want

to know about,

and I simply wanted to demonstrate

that that was the way,

quote, the devil, unquote,

the sense of evil

would actually be addressing us.

I mean, it broke taboos in a most,

most extraordinary way,

and in the most defiant and loving

and self-destructive way,

but like so much of what Dennis did,

in the self destruction

was his salvation

and the message was always,

you know,

that the pennies may come

from heaven.

Today, the BBC itself has been

in the news,

as you've probably read

in the papers.

Alasdair Milne, BBC Television's

managing director,

and Bill Cotton, the controller

of BBC One,

have banned a play, already filmed

at a cost of £120,000.

It was originally to have been

transmitted last November.

The play's author, Roy Minton,

disagrees with the ban,

so does Margaret Matheson,

its producer,

who took the unusual step

of defying the BBC

and showing a copy to Fleet Street's

television critics, last Friday.

On my first day,

on the fifth floor of the BBC

as the producer of Play for Today,

I was sitting in the office

thinking,

"Gosh, OK, here are the slots.

What now?".

Along comes Alan Clarke and

gives me the script of Scum

and asked me to read it.

The play itself, and we obviously

can't show you an extract,

is called Scum.

Set in a borstal, it's

described by its author,

as hard, violent and disturbing.

Carlin, the main

character, is allowed

to dominate the other inmates

by the borstal officers.

It's their way of ruling, and they

reward him with special privileges.

It was a fantastic

piece of writing

and certainly a story

that should be told

in the sense of, if borstal

was really like that,

then the more people that know,

the better.

You know, can we live with ourselves

if we treat children like that?

You know, it was tough to make.

It was made...

It was filmed in Redhill,

in a former old folks' home,

which was a pretty grim building

and I mean, obviously adapted by us

to be more like a prison.

The exact order of events

I don't remember,

but we soon found

ourselves talking to Alistair Milne,

and we were asked to make cuts,

which...

..with a view to ensuring

that the film was transmitted.

We agreed to make certain cuts.

There's a scene,

in which Carlin swings...

billiard balls in a sock

and we were to remove the moment

of impact.

Carry on.

Which you can debate forever,

whether it's...

OK, that was an easy

enough cut to make.

There is a rape in the greenhouse...

What do you want?

..and we shortened its duration.

I'll tell you what we want.

SHOUTING

And there were two suicides,

and, in a sense, this was

probably the biggest edit.

We took out one of the suicides.

This was to satisfy...

..their... You know,

Alisdair, and the rest...

Their view that there were

too many incidents,

crammed in too short a space of

time for it to be credible.

You know, in other words, the

nature of dramatic fiction.

Wakey-wakey, Davis.

Right, Davis. Governor's report.

Back in your rooms! Come on, back in

your rooms. Put 'em in there!

Bang them up, Mr Greaves!

Move it, Archer!

Eat!

Eat or it goes in the bins!

So, we made those cuts,

but the meetings with Alasdair...

..continued, and...

..eventually, the decision was made

that it would not be shown.

EAT!

Carlin.

Carlin, eat!

THUMPING

Carlin.

Carlin!

Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!

But that wasn't made public.

And at that point,

I arranged for

invited press critics to see it,

in the Coronet Theatre

in Wardour Street.

And then, you know, kind of the shit

hit the fan, really.

Alisdair Milne.

Why did you ban the play?

On two counts, really.

First, that it is an extraordinarily

violent piece.

and probably one of the

most violent we've ever made,

and violence can be dealt

with in many ways,

and can be handled in terms

of dramatic expression,

in many ways also.

That troubled me a great

deal when I first saw it,

but more importantly,

I think, is the point

that Peter made in his article

this morning, actually.

The question I asked at the start,

of what truth

is this a dramatic expression?

Alan Clarke, it's been said that

the reason that Scum was banned,

was because it was an inaccurate

picture of a borstal,

a distortion of what a borstal is

like. What would you say to that?

Well, I don't deny that completely,

cos it was...

..just well known now that it was

based on about 80 interviews,

put together, written as a play.

It is a play.

It is not a documentary.

It's been such a lot of, I think,

rubbish talked about,

what's a drama? What's a drama?

Drama, documentaries and things

like that.

The thing is, documentary

is people...

..is one in which people

portray themselves.

And the drama is one

in which actors are paid to portray

other people, Scum was the latter.

BLOWS WHISTLE

By rights, I should have been fired,

but that didn't happen.

In fact, I think my kind of street

cred went up a lot and the BBC...

..didn't, didn't take me on

because there

were other productions still...

..in the works.

MUSIC: A Message To You Rudy

by The Specials

A reckoning with the end

of the British Empire was central

to the politics of the 1970s.

Debates about immigration and race

informed a number of key

Plays For Today,

including David Edgar's Destiny -

a wide ranging study

of the dangers of racism.

It was a very strong piece of work

which went right to the heart

of a debate that was raging

at the time about immigration.

And so to have a play

that so articulately examined

the origins and the state,

if you like, of the nation...

..on that subject...

..seemed that's what

Play For Today was for.

NEHRU: At the stroke

of the midnight hour

when the world sleeps,

India will awake

to life and freedom.

Destiny begins in India on the eve

of independence, before chronicling

the events of a Birmingham

by-election in 1977

in which the candidate

for the Fascist Nation Forward Party

makes a strong showing.

The campaign is shaped in part by

an industrial dispute at a factory

where immigrant workers

are a majority.

One of the union organisers

has a chilling warning

for those who are not prepared

to express their solidarity

with their Asian colleagues.

Cos first it'll be

the blacks and Asians,

then the Jews and Irish.

Now, this isn't in these

speeches - this is true.

And then, it'll be the unions.

Oh, make no mistake.

The Labour Party, that will go.

The others, too.

All in the interests of the nation,

and to save the nation...

..they'll destroyed the nation.

All of it, except themselves.

And if we let them...

..we've got ourselves to blame.

Our fault.

We turned our back.

When they said you've got

to look at life outside London

and you've got to look at

contemporary Britain stuff,

you could not turn a blind eye

to the fact that our cities

had changed, particularly

Birmingham, but lots of them.

And television drama

was not reflecting that.

Despite the vibrancy of black

and Asian theatre in the 1970s,

Play For Today

offered relatively few major roles

for non-white actors,

just as was also the case

in television drama more broadly.

Nor were there many black

or Asian writers or creatives.

Of the 300 dramas in 14 years

of the series,

only three - or just 1% -

were even part-scripted

by non-white writers.

Barry Reckord's In The Beautiful

Caribbean was one of the early

Plays For Today

that was wiped after transmission.

Both of the other two were directed

by Horace Ove, who also co-wrote

The Garland and A Hole In Babylon.

It seems that the only opportunity

a black director has to make

a film

is always to deal with racism.

You know, when the white director

has a wider canvas, he can go make

a film about anything.

And I think black directors

would like that same opportunity.

A Hole In Babylon is based

on the events of what became known

as the Spaghetti House siege

in 1975, when three black men

attempted to rob the managers

of a group of restaurants.

The film links the crime with a

profound racial discrimination

faced by black communities and shows

how the men understood their actions

as, in part,

a form of black protest.

Come on, brah, let's be realistic.

You got a better plan?

Well, it's a lot of money,

all right.

But no guns.

Are you mad?

Why are you so worried about guns?

They kill people.

When the white man took

your great grandfather

from Africa to make him a slave,

what did he use?

The gun.

When he came to our land,

what did he use? The gun!

How do Smith and Vorster keep

control over southern Africa?

With a gun. When the white man use

the gun against us, they call

it law and order.

When we pick up a gun to take

back what he stole from us,

they call it terrorism.

We don't have to behave like them.

Then stay asleep!

When we did these things,

we wanted them to be good drama.

We didn't want them just to be

positive images,

cause drama's

not about positive images.

Most drama's about extremely

complex and difficult people.

And this whole story is really

about the Asian community,

first generation, second generation,

in Birmingham

and why Horace was the

right person to do this script,

because he'd go out on the street

and he'd have the actors,

the other cast,

and if he saw something strange

happening up in...yeah,

he'd involve them in that.

A divorced Muslim man marries

a second wife who has joined

him from India.

And in the end, she gets

deported because of being...

She didn't have all the papers,

which is very moving.

I wish... I wish you'd realise

what the hell you're putting

that poor woman through.

She's... Her marriage in doubt

and pregnant.

She'll be isolated by most

of the people in her village.

It's going to affect her state

of mind, not to mention

her unborn child.

Well, I'm sorry. The decision

doesn't lie in my hands.

Well, why can't we see the person

who make the decisions?

We have done everything possible

in the past one month.

Our MP has written

to the Home Secretary.

We've picketed outside

the Home Office.

We have done everything possible.

We have sent petition

after petition.

Our lawyer has tried to explain

how the whole

misunderstanding took place.

Look, stop wasting your time

and mine.

I'm sorry. Time's up now,

she can't stay any longer.

Come on.

SHE SOBS

While he was working on Play

For Today, Peter Ansorge also

produced Empire Road, the first

British television series

to be scripted, acted and directed

predominantly by black artists.

I got this call from a decent

producer of, of,

of Plays For Today, quite good.

And he said, "I've read about

this Empire Road thing."

"Yeah." "And you're absolutely going

to regret this for the whole

"of your life. He said,

"We talked about doing this once

"and we realised

it was not possible.

"First of all, you don't

have the actors, any black actor

"in this country's terrible.

"They won't turn up on time

for rehearsals and the audience

"will hate it.

You will regret this."

Now, he phoned me up...

HE LAUGHS

..just to say that.

And it's puzzled me throughout my

life. Why?

That was more symptomatic.

And it's to do with the

fact that they'd never worked

with some like Horace.

MUSIC: Alternative Ulster

by Stiff Little Fingers

The endgame of Empire was also

played out across the Irish Sea

with British troops

deployed in Northern Ireland

after August 1969.

The conflict was important

in some 20 Plays For Today.

I got extremely fascinated with

Northern Ireland

by being involved with,

there was a minor piece that was one

of the early Plays For Today.

But I just happened to go to County

Cork for a couple of weeks

on location

and got a feeling of Ireland.

And there was Colin Welland, whose

relatives lived in County Mayo

three or four miles from the border.

And there was a perfect story,

which was a little bit dependent

on the story of Kes, which Colin had

been a cast member of

about a boy whose parents

are killed in Belfast and

who is relocated to an even more

dangerous part of Southern Ireland.

And that gave me an appetite

for borders, for the imaginative

resources of that, and also

for its sheer political fascination

with the current political turmoil.

So it was something that just,

it just preoccupied me intensely

for several years.

The dominant theme of the

Plays For Today set in Ireland

is the human toll of The Troubles.

And this takes precedence

over attempts to reach

a political understanding.

In Shadows On Our Skin,

Joe, a boy from a Catholic family

befriends an English schoolteacher,

Kathleen.

Joe's world is shaped by his

alcoholic father's past

with the IRA and by a city in which

violent conflict

is an everyday occurrence.

Eventually, Joe betrays a secret

entrusted to him by Kathleen,

which leads to her being attacked

by Joe's jealous

Republican brother.

You're going away?

I'm only bringing

my clothes and books.

Don't want anything else.

Thrown out all the clothes

I was wearing last night.

If I had the money, I'd throw out

everything I owned yesterday.

You shouldn't have come!

I wanted to go away from here

hating everybody very much.

Please don't go.

Come here...

I always meant to give you that.

HORN BEEPS

That's my taxi.

Is it all my fault?

Don't suppose it was.

One day...

One day it'll all be different.

The British Army is also a constant

presence in one of the first dramas

to be shot on the streets

of Belfast -

a tale of two young women navigating

the challenges of the city

during one wintry day and night.

One of the strengths of Stuart

Parker and John Bruce's film

is its vivid sense of everyday

living and loving in the midst

of the conflict.

The Troubles in Belfast also framed

the acclaimed Billy trilogy

by Graham Reid, made for BBC

Northern Ireland in the final years

of Play For Today.

The dramas explored tensions

and violence in a Protestant

working class family.

Come on, Dad.

Leave it for the night.

You go on up to bed and

I'll bring you up some tea.

Shove your tea up your arse!

You're always on his side.

He's in the wrong,

but you won't admit it.

No. It's always my fault.

Tell him! Why didn't you

tell him he's in the wrong?

Me in the wrong? What are you

moaning about you drunken eejit?

You haven't been up to

see my ma' for over a week!

Your ma'?!

You and her and your ma'!

I wish the whole bloody

lot of you had cancer.

I wish you were all bloody dying.

I go out to work every day.

Your ma' never knew what it was

like to have a broken pane. No.

But she knew what it's like to have

a broken jaw and a broken nose.

I'm warning you!

I'm bloody warning you.

Why wouldn't you let her

run off with her insurance man?

Oh, for goodness' sake, Billy!

He was a better bloody man than you!

Least he appreciated her.

But you couldn't take that.

Well, she loved him.

She despised you, but she loved him!

Billy's father's attack on him

is intercut with a fight from years

before when he discovered

his wife's infidelity

with a travelling salesman.

I'll kill him!

BILLY GROANS

Bastard!

You ever heard lift your hand to me

again, I'll break your bloody leg!

CHILDREN CRY

Get up!

Get out this

house before I bloody kill you!

DOOR SHUTS

CHILDREN CRY

SHOUTING CONTINUES INDOORS

HE GROANS

MUSIC: Tainted Love

by Soft Cell

# Sometimes I feel

I've got to...run away

# I've got to... #

Throughout the 1970s, questions

of sexuality and gender, once seen

as essentially personal matters,

were increasingly understood

as political concerns.

Play For Today responded

with a handful of dramas

about gay lives and a portrait of

a young adult recognising

they are transgender in the language

of the time, transsexual.

I have known transsexuals reach

50 without understanding.

I've seen them die without

understanding.

Steven is young!

If you care, let him be happy,

let him do it.

Operations?

After the hormone treatment,

he'll get...

He will be so changed physically

that...

..I'm sure the

operation will be a mere detail.

Mother, it means I can start.

I've got something to

look forward to.

Ha, sure!

And as feminism became increasingly

central to the lives

of British women and of some men

Play For Today presented

Drama out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today (2020) - full transcript