Brassneck - w Howard Brenton/David Hare. Up from London to the east midlands town of Stanton with a van load of parachute silk, cockney draper Alfred Bagley (Paul Dawkins) quickly makes his mark on the local council scene, ingratiating himself with councillors, and gaining entry to the local Masonic lodge. Slowly but surely working the milieu of Tory, Labour and hard-left councillors and businessmen, he acquires a few slum properties before setting up a building firm, drafting his pompous yet hapless nephew Roderick up from Ealing, with family in tow, to head up the firm. Tory councillor and estate agent James Avon, likewise in the trade with his son Clive as chief architect, is dealt with in a meeting where Bagley boldly lays down his new business method - acquire a list of tenders for any job, then get his son to submit a lower one, clinch the job, and if events on site just happen to push costs back up, so be it. Shocked, Avon swears Bagley can never get away with such a scheme, but Roderick's son Sidney (Roger Lloyd-Pack) arrives with handy blackmail evidence of Avon's son's dishonourable war record, and it seems Bagley's final enemy has been neutered. Roderick's daughter Lucy (Susan Penhaligon) gets hitched to the son of a shortbread magnate in a riotous, drunken and catastrophic wedding cunningly held on the day of Elizabeth II's coronation. In front of family and local grandees (including former hardline socialist Tom Browne (David Daker), now Lord Mayor) Bagley gives a speech which quickly veers from standard father-of-bride cliche into a frank and disturbing life story, including a free admission of cannibalism in the trenches during the Great War, and ends up with a solemn declaration of nihilistic brutality. Then, during a bizarre cake-cutting ceremony, Bagley collapses and dies. Fast forward to the end of the Bagley empire, when the great and good meet in a pavilion after a cricket match against the police force, to chew the fat and lament the fact their various weaknesses have left them all chasing after Roderick Bagley for wealth and influence. Tom Browne, now Bagley's head of PR and a major Labour party player, introduces cabinet minister Raymond Finch, who it transpires has been given control of Bagley's Hong Kong interests, once again leaving an Avon - Clive this time - licking his wounds. Clive responds desperately by flinging horse dung at Finch, but the alienation of powerful ally is nothing compared to the news of the inevitable - the collapse of the shoddily-run Bagley building empire, and Roderick's personal bankruptcy. There follows a disastrous trial which sees Roderick name and shame just about everyone he's ever dealt with, blackmailed or bribed, though Browne promises to schmooze everyone he can, up to and including the fraud squad, to keep the extent of corruption under wraps. Finally, in the present (ie mid-'70s) the disparate parties, now all out of pocket and down on their luck, meet up at Sidney's seedy strip club to celebrate Roderick's release on parole. He's not present, however - he's been bussed off by his sons to a home in Hastings. Sidney regales Browne, Avon et al. with his latest plan to revive the empire - Chinese heroin. "The perfect product, totally artificial [...] creating its own market, 100% consumer identification, if there's a glut the demand goes up, if there's a famine the demand goes up, an endless spiral of need and profit [...] the dying and would-be dead are its market. It's a winner". Originally staged by Richard Eyre as the first Nottingham Playhouse production under his tenure, the play has its roots firmly in the agitprop collaborations of Brenton, Hare and Tony Bicat's Portable Theatre Company of the early '70s, with all the associated weaknesses. Characterisation is pushed to the back to make way for a series of types and symbols - all the better to display the play's heavily didactic denunciation of both untrammelled capitalism and the people on both sides of the political spectrum who voluntarily allow it to steam ahead unhindered, but at the same time risking a shrillness and hysteria that dates the play in places. (Though it's never a humourless piece - the ludicrous Masonic initiation and deranged wedding reception are brimming with farcical invention, and Roderick's children first appear in short trousers and sailor suits, with no other attempt to make them look young.) It's reminiscent of such legendarily unsubtle Portable Theatre fare as the six-way collaboration Lay By, a play taken from a tabloid headline, written in crayon on sheets of wallpaper, which ended with the main protagonists being butchered and made into jam (The final stage direction to the original play had the ground swallowing the Bagleys and co up). Some changes are made - the cricket pavilion was an outdoor hunt meeting onstage, which was presumably deemed too tricky to shoot on the obviously tight budget. Indeed, the ramshackle quality of the piece - mainly studio-bound, with a few location inserts, and punctuated with interstitial dates and archive footage - works against the play for much of the time. Director Mike Newell also has a hard time condensing the masses of character and incident into 75 minutes - some scenes fly past so perfunctorily it's hard to take every significant exchange and event in. The difference between this production and Hare's later work in the strand - measured, thoughtful, ambiguous character-driven pieces such as Licking Hitler and Dreams of Leaving - is immense. What it most resembles, in PfT terms, is another Nottingham production, Trevor Griffiths' Comedians, which is as heavily symbolic and didactic as Brassneck, yet manages to work as a story, full of believable characters rather than masks, on top of that (Griffiths had collaborated with B&H in the early days, and his Country makes a much better stab at examining the inner lives of capitalist empire builders). But for all its on-the-nose message wielding, the authors' sheer crazed delight in ripping apart their target - their brassneck, in fact - makes for a highly enjoyable, if flawed, chunk of polemic.  

From post-war reconstruction to post-modern decadence - Brasssneck's stae of the nation address.

The Floater - w Peter Prince. Comic study of a court case awaiting hearing, with Richard Beckinsale as a solicitor's clerk acting for his sick wife, Nigel Hawthorne, David Dixon, Carmen Silvera and Floella Benjamin.  

Days of Hope - w Jim Allen. Not strictly a Play for Today, though it was shown in the same slot, but we include it here as it's by the great Jim Allen. Four social dramas following political events through a family in a northern village, particularly brothers-in-law Paul Copley and Nikolas Simmonds. - 1916: Joining Up, concerning the differing reactions to the young brothers' desire to fight in the trenches; 1921, with the rise of Bolshevism providing a background to the miners' strike; 1924, with socialism on the rise after Ramsay MacDonald's election victory; and 1926, set against the General Strike. At the series' outset Phillip (Simmonds), a Christian Socialist and conscientious objector, is arrested and sent to the trenches. Meanwhile Ben (Copley), who joined up enthusiastically, is posted first to Ireland to quell unrest, then in '21 to deal with the miners' lockout. These unidealistic experiences push him into the Communist party. meanwhile, Philip has returned home and become a Labour MP under MacDonald, but again youthful ideals are shattered when he discovers the government's decidedly Tory-esque plans for liquidating an imminent general strike. The scene is set for the final episode, a more straightforward historical account of the government and unions’ betrayal of the striking workers. A hefty, epic, series (directed by Ken Loach), this encapsulates Allen’s constant theme of the betrayal of the working man by organised politics, and reaches far beyond the usual period drama in terms of contemporary relevance.  

By Common Consent - w Paul Thompson. A "bourgeois fantasy" about an imaginary fascist regime, performed by members of the National Youth theatre. 

Plaintiffs and Defendants - w Simon Gray. Peter (Alan Bates), a divorce lawyer in the thick of middle age, wakes up in the bed-sit of his graphic designer mistress Joanna (Georgina Hale), after another of their crafty lunchtime trysts. Back home, his university lecturer wife Hilary (Rosemary McHale) gives him the third degree over his whereabouts, as indolent son Jeremy wanders disinterestedly through. At work he presides over the messy alimony case of a Mrs Sawsbury, while his pupil and sometime squash partner Sallust (Simon Callow) looks on. Things begin to fall apart when Joanna starts to want more than a ‘lunchtime doss-down’, and admits following Peter about. He leaves, but she volubly freaks out, and he’s forced to rush back into the room. Round the house of old school chum Charles (Dinsdale Landen), he confesses the distaste he feels towards the whole souring affair (“Making love to somebody you can’t stand but who’s infatuated with you makes you believe you have a soul. Otherwise why do you feel so rotten?”) All the while he smokes and slurps scotch - two vices it transpires Charles, happily married to Alison with an ever-increasing family, has quit. He’s gone vegetarian, too. (“Christ, Charlie!”) In bed, Peter and Hilary discuss the couple’s new macrobiotic lifestyle, and Hilary mentions a “grubby public school dorm affair” between Peter and Charles in passing, and looks forward to a future of Sunday lunches and monthly dinners “until something happens to change them, a death probably“. All the while their sex life dwindles, and mysterious calls from public booths arouse Hilary’s suspicion. Another shambolic session with Mrs Sawsbury is interrupted by Josh, a friend of Joanna’s, worried about her well-being (“You’re the third man in a row to go wrong on her.”) A frank chat with Joanna proves no help - her cry of “I love you!” makes Peter wince. A late-night fight between Peter and Hilary over his perceived hostility to the monosyllabic Jeremy (who has nothing to say on matters cinematic other than a vague “it was all right”) ends in phone call from a hospital, which thankfully proves to be from Charlie, Alison having given birth to a son. At Joanna’s, Peter attempts to make a break as cleanly as possible, but a definite end to the affair is left hanging. More relaxed than before, he enjoys a game of squash with Sallust, and afterwards they begin talking to each other properly for the first time. This is cut short when Sallust collapses in the changing rooms, and dies. Charles - who resumed smoking in the hospital waiting room - says to the shell-shocked Peter, “The worst is to come, I suppose. The death of friends, all the deaths in waiting, including our own. But it’s the death of children that haunts me.” He asks Peter what Sallust was like. “Just a pupil. I patronised him a bit, ignored him quite often […] he was all right.” A typically wry, despondent play from Gray, which ends on a simultaneous note of middle-aged despair and cautious optimism (will the death of Sallust turn Peter back toward his own son, and family?) It seems, in isolation, a rather straightforward piece for Play for Today, but the following week’s play casts a whole different light on things…  

Two sides of Alan Bates in Simon Gray's interlocking duo, Plaintiffs and Defendants and Two Sundays.

Two Sundays - w Simon Gray. A companion piece to the previous week’s Plaintiffs and Defendants. Peter (Dinsdale Landen) and Hilary (Georgina Hale) wake up, facing the prospect of a long drive to the house of Charles (Alan Bates) and Alison (Rosemary Martin) for Sunday lunch. After a floundering attempt to integrate their recalcitrant son Jeremy with Charles’ sizeable brood, the men retire to Charles’s study, to discuss their jobs (Peter works in Publishing, Charles teaching art), and past affairs - one being Peter’s torrid affair with a disturbed girl, the other being, circuitously reached, a public school infatuation between the two men, which, it transpires, has informed the bulk of Charles’s first novel, the manuscript of which he’s brought for Peter’s consideration. This uneasy digging up of past incidents is intercut with scenes from the boys’ schooldays, showing the growing, yet necessarily suppressed, affection between asthmatic, music-loving Charles and cricket ace Peter. Transition from past to present is brilliantly handled by Gray, and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, via a matching shot technique which is neither over-clever nor intrusive. The two boys caught skulking in the music room by a master opening the door cuts swiftly to the men in the study as Alison strides in. Similarly, Charles’s handing over of the manuscript is mirrored by the young Charles, having just recited a poem to Peter, explaining that Peter is the poem’s subject, resulting in some violent denial from the latter. It all cuts seamlessly together, so that, after a few initial scene-setting shots to orient the viewer to the technique, the narrative can flit back and forth in time with no slackening in pace, thus giving the past a closeness to the present which is wholly appropriate. Links with the previous play are at once obvious and obscure - the names remain the same, but occupations, actors and families have been swapped about. In a nice touch, the housemaster who gives the boys the trad public school lecture on “special friendships” (“you should reflect that too much too intense friendship can lead to too many complications for a chap who wants an uncluttered life”) is played by Simon Callow, who, as Bates’ pupil in the previous play inadvertently gave a different kind of life lesson. Other little clues are fun to track - in Plaintiffs, Bates absent-mindedly scans a picture of the public school cricket team he used to play in, while the “affair” mentioned in Sundays could refer to Joanna in Plaintiffs, except now she’s referred to as an Australian. But Gray never lets these amusements override the two plays’ central theme of middle-aged torpor and bitterness, at the mercy of an inescapable future (the death in Plaintiffs) and, here, an equally inescapable past.  

Moss - w Bernard Kops. Warren Mitchell is a Jewish East End miser who changes his outlook when his only real love, son Sthephen Grief, dies. 

84 Charing Cross Road  - w Hugh Whitemore/Helene Hanff. Frank Finlay owns the titular bookshop in this famous tale of a real bookshop proprietor's long-term Transatlantic intellectual correspondence and friendship with Hanff, as made famous in the 1986 Anthony Hopkins film version.  

Keep an Eye on Albert - w Brian Glover. Weight-lifting pigeon fancier David Daker neglects wife Susan Tracy, so when suave mate Derrick O'Connor arrives home from the Merchant Navy, she inevitably goes after him. 

Children of the Sun - w Michael O'Neill and Jeremy Seabrook. The passengers caught up in an airline hijack drama sweat it out, among them Georgina Hale and Geoffrey Hinsliff. 

After the Solo - w John Challen. Bleak tale of an awkward young boy whose brief success as a chorister is scuppered by puberty. Leonard Rossiter played his domineering father. 

Through the Night - w Trevor Griffiths. Harrowing and immensely popular look at NHS hospital life from the patient's point of wiew, written by Griffiths after reading a diary of his wife's traumatic time in a hospital being operated on for breast cancer, and later finding out the hard way that her breast had been removed. Alison Steadman plays the bewildered and frightened inpatient Christine Potts, who, from the dispassionate opening examination at the hands of various ice-cold medics (plus the stubble-growing, rather more human trainee Dr Pearce, played by Jack 'All Good Men' Shepherd) to the endless purgatory of the hospital ward, situated next to the cantankerous and violently ill Mrs Scully (Anne Dyson). Her husband (Dave Hill) and mother briefly visit, but can't offer anything more than helpless support. Finally Christine is driven to lock herself in a toilet cubicle, and it takes the slightly half-cut Pearce, all homely charm and dodgy Bogart impressions, to put her more at her ease. In his rooms, he puts to her the other side of the argument, that hospital staff find they have to function in that distant, patronising manner as they for the most part couldn't tolerate the job any other way, a survival tactic, but an admission of failiure that ignores the patient as a person ("We're all missing the mark, Mrs Potts, and we need to be told"). In the end, the night before Christine leaves, Mrs Scully and sundry other patients share a stoically celebratory bottle of smuggled gin. What set this play apart from so many others, apart from the uncompromising and then scarcely aired subject matter, and the keenly observed shocking little details (like the pathologist swiftly and excitedly carting away the tumour for research minutes after the operation) is the production. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg originally wanted to film the entire play on location (and therefore necessarily on expensive film) in a real hospital, but bugetary restraints would not allow. Detesting the aesthetic mish-mash of the suggested compromise of studio shoot with filmed inserts (the format for most television plays at the time which involved location work), Lindsay-Hogg swung the other way and had every part of the hospital set, from ward to theatre to reception, built for a completely video-bound production. The gamble payed off, as the harsh, too-bright, clinical feel of hospital wards is perfectly conveyed by the penetrating glare of the video camera. In fact, as the play was conceived partly as an answer to the doctors-and-nurses-as-heroes soap opera Angels, which was similarly video-bound (as, interestingly, the likes of Casualty remain to this day - medical drama, at least in Britain, being just about the only drama over thirty minutes in length still routinely shot on untreated video, perhaps for this very aesthetic reason), formulating the answer in kind was arguably the only option. Within this apparently constraining shoot, however, many telling shots were achieved. Christine is often shown in isolation from the medics, either in the distance for the preliminary examination, or in shots of the ward round, taken from the PoV of the bed-bound Christine, and also sharing her aural semi-comprehension of the hushed jargon exchanged evasively by the doctors at the foot of the bed. Eleven million viewers saw this play, and it sparked a round of debate about hospital practice (with particular regard to the then still largely taboo subject of mastectomy) in national newspapers. Griffiths has long regarded it as his most successful play. Also featuring Anna Wing and Richard Wilson. 

A Passage to England - w Leon Griffiths. A superficially light-hearted tale of Asians attempting illegal immigration from Amsterdam to British shores on a fishing vessel. Starring Colin Welland.  

Rumpole of the Bailey - w John Mortimer. The original outing for Mortimer's bellicose bailiff, staunchly representing a young black defendant in the face of institutional racism from the police and judiciary in a rather more serious and political story than would become the norm when the first series (turned down by the Beeb, accepted by Thames) aired in 1978.  

No Angels - medi-soap camerawork subverted in Through the Night.

The Evacuees - w Jack Rosenthal. Jack Rosenthal may not be a highly experimental dramatist, or one who tackles The Big Issues head on, but the three plays he wrote for the Play For Today strand over this period are some of the finest examples of the genre, as well as being the most popular with audiences, critics and award committees. Directed ably by Alan Parker, The Evacuees was the first, a special presentation, and a relative epic in scope. In Manchester's Cheetham Hill district prior to the outbreak of World War II, Jewish brothers Danny and Neville are uprooted from their family, headed by mother Sarah (played by Rosenthal's wife, Maureen Lipman, who would rehash the character, with pernicketty elements of Rita from Bar Mitzvan Boy added, for her infamous British Telecom adverts) to be biletted with the Grahams, a frosty middle-class gentile couple in Blackpool. The trauma of being away from the comforts of home and peacetime quickly descend upon the luckless pair, and after being attacked by a gang of kids on the beach for their alien accents, attempt a comically doomed escape on rollerskates wth similarly homesick classmate Zuckerman, before finally telling all to their mother when she visits, via a message in a game of "silly stories" which Sarah ends up reading out in front of a horrified Mrs Graham. Sarah takes the boys back home, leaving a sad (and, it turns out, forever childless) Mrs. G to mourn their departure. "Safely" back in Manchester, the boys encounter another evacuee, this time displaced to Manchester from London, and react to his funny accent in the only way they know how - with a punch in the stomach. Presented with a minimum of directorial fuss (a few panoramic shots and the passage of the war marked with Chamberlain and Churchill on the wireless, plus the food-hoarding antics of their uber-Yiddishe granny) and perfect attention to period detail in all departments, this straightforward but solid story won both a BAFTA and an Emmy.  

1976  

The Other Woman - w Watson Gould. 'Angry young lesbian artist' Jane Lapotaire isrupts the lives of upper class lover Lynne Frederick and middle-aged alcoholic Michael Gambon, in a decidedly billious piece of polemic.  

Nuts in May (aka The Plastic Tadpole) - w Mike Leigh. Alison Steadman and Roger Sloman are wishy-washy veggie peacenick Candice-Marie and self-important town hall bureaucrat Keith, a pair of lisping middle-class types getting back to nature (to an extent - Keith brings a shedload of camping equipment, and rules are layed down 'for the enjoyment of everyone') by pitching their tent at a camping site. All goes well in that gently comical Leigh way, with plenty of cups of tea, cold showers and visits to slate quarries, until the arrival of a couple of Brummie 'rockers' upsets the balance.  

Doran's Box - w Eric Coltart. Bewildering, minimalist tale of an institute conducting experiments on volunteers in "reduced living conditions" - ie. locking them in tiny rooms. Peter Eyre, David Hargreaves and Tony Robinson are among the staff watching over their subjects' delusional fantasies and hallucinations.  

Packman's Barn - w Alick Rowe. John Barrett returns to his remote hill farm after 20 years to deal with some unfinished business, and finds himself once again in conflict with the locals.  

A Story to Frighten the Children - w John Hopkins. Jon Laurimore and Geoffrey Palmer are police investigating a brutal murder on a high-rise estate, but finding fear of crime and hatred of the police preventing witnesses from coming forward. A TV news crew arrive on the scene, and start getting better results with their investigations. Directed by Herbert Wise, who brings a horrific intensity to the opening depiction of the crime, in which Susan Littler is stalked across the estate at night, murdered, and then raped.  

The Happy Hunting Ground - w Tom Hadaway. Neil Phillips is a young trawlerman working his way up the fishing hierarchy in various encounters in a harbour.  

Two classics from Mike Leigh - Nuts in May and Abigail's Party.

Jumping Bean Bag - w Robin Chapman. A crumbling (and presumably minor, judging from the size of the hall) public school toward the end of term, and a cheerless and painfully clumsy production of The Bacchae shudders to its conclusion in front of an audience of assembled parents and headmaster Robin Bailey. Five 'hippie' students, however, plan to liven things up. Lurking behind a curtain at the back of the hall, and lighting up joints, Ozzy Freemantle (David 'Ford Prefect' Dixon), Snare Phillips (Denis Lawson) and co. startle the blue rinsers by launching into Steel Ball Wind, a rickety pub-glam confection that turns heads (particularly of previously bored parent and ad exec Tim Curry) and earns their expulsion from school (Dixon sees the stern bailey off with a cool 'Keep on truckin', sir!') This matters not to Ozzy, as the lads are no longer public schoolboys but Slag Bag, set to take the country by storm. Patrick (Curry) takes them under his wing after a bedtime epiphany about the 'Dionysian' properties of rock, and soon they're playing a church youth club to a completely indifferent audience (including a young Linda Robson) as Patrick and the local vicar look on from above and discuss the class divide (as one girl comments, 'comprehensive boys are so much more... comprehending'). After another drug-fuelled epiphany of Ozzy's while watching Snare and his girl copulate wildly inside a sealed sleeping bag in Patrick's flat, the band make it to the big time - well, The Ritzy in Chiswick. Clad in Greek togas and gold tinsel wigs, the band urge the screaming teenybopper audience on to 'new heights of screwball abandon', during which one unfortunate girl is killed in the David Cassidy-like crush. In court, the female justice finds them guilty of causing affray and gives them six months suspended, but Ozzy is already penning a raunchy song, Lady Judge, based on the experience. Distraught after a meeting with the dead girl's father, sensitive Snare quits the band for Oxford. The prosecuting counsel, however, approaches the remaining lads with a proposition - a gig at his daughter's birthday party. During this marquee-set affair, with Ozzy in an elaborate gold lame centaur number, the girl's mother becomes overwhelmed by the hypnotic power of the band's latest composition Snake Madness ("Beast gladness!") and strips off, having to be hosed down by husband and prudish son. Finally, straying too close to the wind, Ozzy lands in court again, and prison this time, over the libellous content of Lady Judge. Snare, in a similar 'prison' of cloistered academic study, fantasises one final reunion gig between the two in the old school hall. Fade out on Ozzy's undimmed wild eyes. However you look at this time capsule curio, it's undeniably memorable stuff. Made around the same time as Rock Follies, it uses the same mixture of proto-pop-video fantasy sequence and disillusioned reality, and while Robin Chapman's finger isn't exactly on the cultural pulse (a cross-dressing mythological Bay City Rollers isn't exactly the mid-'70s music scene distilled) making the boys upper class is a comedic masterstroke. Dixon's mixture of fey RADA-speak and transatlantic jive is spot on for the character, and the lingering close-ups of his mad eyes are always good value. Lawson is perhaps weaker as the 'sensitive' band member, overdoing the button-down recrimination and nervousness. Alan Cooke, who did a fine job on The Right Prospectus (qv), really lets his hair down with spiralling psychedelic graphics (an early sequence wherein Ozzy has a wet dream about a dressing room invasion must be a first for television), CSO-ed dance sequences, dramatic freeze-frames and the like, which sometimes look unbearably clunky (at least with hindsight) but do succeed in keeping the production moving, even if, as with the youth club scene, there's necessarily nothing much happening. Stephen Deutsch's songs, sometimes drowned out by an iffy sound mix but firmly wise to the genre, tap a similar vein somewhere between knowing kitsch and pure daftness. Just like Slag bag themselves, this play is a tricky one to judge, shifting as it does between Ozzy's unflappable, if sometimes embarrassing, exuberance and Snare's self-conscious worries that the band have made rock 'n' roll 'rubbishy'. In that way, perhaps Jumping Bean Bag sums up the musical spirit of the time rather better than it may superficially seem to do.  

Clay, Smeddum and Greenden - w Bill Craig. Trilogy of one-act plays adapted from short stories by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, all dealing with the way the Scottish land affects rural relationships - a farmer's neglect of his terminally ill wife in favour of tending his land; a staunch matriarch coping with her unruly brood; and a woman from the city finding married life in the hills intolerable. All stories feature Fulton MacKay and Bill Fraser.  

Love Letters on Blue Paper - w Arnold Wesker. Elizabeth Spriggs tries to revive her marriage to obsessive trade union organizer Patrick Troughton with the titular love letters, posted from the pillar box outside their front door.  

Willie Rough - w Bill Bryden. Story of the beginnings of revolutionary socialism, set amongst the shipyards of greenock during the first half of the First World War. The titular Rough (James Grant) walks 15 miles from Johnstone in search of a start in the shipyards, and is advised to head for the nearest pub. There he meets various locals, including the redoubtable Pat Gatens, and cantankerous, one-legged Boer War veteran Hughie (Fulton MacKay), who initiate him in the ways of bribery regarding shipyard foreman Jake (Roddy MacMillan). Willie attends regular workers' meetings held by left-wing firebrands, and subsequently rises to rank of shop steward, determined to negotiate a two-bob raise for all. But the war looms, and Willie, a staunch anti-imperialist, clashes in the pub with co-workers on the way to the front, egged on by Hughie, who leads them in a drunken raid on a germanic-sounding optician's shop. Determined to hold fast for the good of the workers, Wllie calls a strike, which quickly spreads along the Clyde. Hardship overtakes all the workers' families - in one moving scene, Willie pays respects to Pat's deceased infant daughter, the tiny casket standing in the corner of the front room. Charlie McGrath, a socialist even more hardline than Willie, gives him the courage to hold fast in the face of poverty, but the escalating war makes nothing easier. Hughie dies after selflessly joining in a riot with strike-breakers, and eventually Willie and Charlie are jailed after Charlie publishes an article by Willie questioning the workers' need to go to the front. On release, Willie returns to the yard - now operating again - to find Pat and Jake have compromised in the face of the insurmountable opposition brought on by the worsening war (ironically this compromise brings the longed-for two bob rise at last). A strong and didactic play, which broke new ground when staged at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre (with largely the same rep company as MacMillan's The Bevellers - qv), although large parts now play like socialist tracts broken up into over-expository dialogue. What tends to last now is the feel for local period detail - the atmosphere of the impossibly tiny and crowded James Watt Bar, of the shipyards - and details like the half-crown-in-matchbox method Willie bribes Jake with, and the performances, especially Mackay's are exemplary.  

Tiptoe Through the Tulips - w Beryl Bainbridge. Two 'singles', Rosemary Leach and Michael Gambon, are 'introduced' to each other by well-meaning friends, but the encounter doesn't go the way they intended. With Joan Hickson. 

The Peddler - w EA Whitehead. John Hurt plays a salesman of anti-depressants and other drugs, whose wife discovers his affair with a female doctor.  

Three's a crowd - Early Struggles and Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

Early Struggles - w Peter Prince. Pop Musician Paul Nicholas is left literally holding the baby when his wife walks out. With Tom Conti, Amanda Barrie, and music from Gonzales.  

Double Dare - w Dennis Potter. Another self-reflexive musing on authorship, manipulation and the fiction/reality border from Potter, parachuted into the gap left by the cancellation of Brimstone and Treacle. Inspiration-starved playwright Alan Dobie (made up in a very Pottereque image) spends an afternoon in a hotel with actress Kika Markham taking the role of a call-girl, as "research" for his new play. After a few drinks, fantasy and reality inevitably overlap, as Markham's double, in a red wig, appears in the hotel as a real life call-girl who is eventually smothered to death by an impotent, sex-starved businessman, a crime which Dobie hears, horrified, through the wall of his adjoining room, and narrates (invents?) to the "real" Markham. The final scene shows Markham in Dobie's room, apparently strangled (presumably by Dobie). Fantasy and reality have clearly ruptured their borders with lethal consequences. Kika Markham had, earlier, been summoned to see Potter to help with just such a case of writer's block. Shot entirely on film in a specially-constructed set in the old Ealing studios.  

The House of Bernarda Alba - w Federico Garcia Lorca. Adaptation of a short story by the famed Spanish poet and author, of the conflict between a young woman and her smothering mother when she gets engaged to a rich playboy. 

Bar Mitzvah Boy - w Jack Rosenthal. Rosenthal's tremendously popular, BAFTA-winning Jewish coming of age comedy is very much in the light drama tradition rather than the weightier stomping ground of the usual Play for Today, though there's plenty of substance beneath the wry tale of Willesden schoolboy Elliot Green's pre-ceremonial purgatory at the hands of his Jewish-with-a-capital-Jew family. Types (there's enough insight in the writing to keep the just the right side of stereotypes) abound - Victor, Elliot's stoic, cabby dad and nominal head of the household; hardcore Yiddishe grandad, always ready with a benignly bland pronouncement to settle any conflict ("Listen. The way I look at it... there's two sides to every story!") and, very much in charge, mum Rita, self-appointed queen of the household and eternal bag of nerves in a frightningly baroque hairdo. More sympathetic to Elliot is big sister Lesley (played by Adrienne Posta), but even she's lumbered with an archetypally boobish, eager-to-please drip of a boyfriend, Harold. With the Sabbath looming ever closer, and the various factions of the family winding each other up something chronic (using all the Jewish verbal tics Rosenthal can pile on - repetition, sarcasm, dud jokes, exasperated complaints directed into thin air, and a liberal sprinkling of yiddish) Elliot retreeats into his room, and himself, rehearsing his spech and Torah lesson. Come the big day, in front of a packed synagogue, is the marvellous scene where Elliot is called up, walks forward, and continues walking across the building and out the back door, to shock and bemusement all round. While the family come to terms with his defection - by, of course, winding themselves up even further, while Rita lays almost paralysed with grief - Lesley tracks down Elliot and, in the only genuine piece of communication that takes place in the whole play, gets to hear not only of his nerves but his disillusion with the rest of his family (Lesley: "Dad did it, grandad, Harold..." "Elliot: "They're not men, Lesley. That's the whole point. If that's being a man, I don't want to be one, do I?") Plucking up courage for a return to the family home (with an ineffectually shrugging Rabbi now installed) Elliot gives a tactfully altered version of his reasons for pegging it, not mentioning in so many words why he didn't feel he could compare to his Dad et al. as a man, allowing them to fill in the gaps in his argument for themselves, as they promptly do (Victor: "Elliot. Barm-pot. To you I seem like a God. A hero. It's only natural... We're not all that wonderful. We've all got faults. little ones, maybe. But we've got them.") In a heartwarming finale, the Rabbi decides that, as Elliot had recited the Talmud from memory (in a playground, with Lesley as witness) he is a man after all. the final scene, at the reception that evening, sees Elliot deliver a speech lauding his family members, a speech we heard him recite early on, now repeated and dripping with dramatic irony. It's a lightly emotional piece, but Rosenthal's sure grasp of character never lets it descend into sentimentality. The story has been ripped off several times (most clumsily by the sickly, preachy American cartoon series Hey Arnold) but never told with as much warmth, geuine understanding and wit as the original. Emess.  

Two slices of Jewish London life - Moss and Bar Mitzvah Boy.

Elephants' Graveyard - w Pete McDougall. Jon Morrison, supposedly gainfully employed as far as his family are concerned, instead takes off to the Scottish hillsides every day, and eventually meets Billy Connolly, who has been pulling the exact same trick. They hang around together for a day, talking their way through their mutual alienation from the world of employment. A long time friend of McDougall, Connolly got his first lead role on recommendation of the author.  

Housewives' Choice - w Roy Kendall. Trouble arises when Frances de la Tour hires Sharon Duce as a nanny. With Bernard Hill.  

Yer Man from Six Counties - w Colin Welland. Young boy Joseph Reynolds loses his dad in an IRA bomb blast and moves out to his uncle's remote farm in the west of Ireland, but finds the place scant refuge from the Troubles.  

Buffet - w Rhys Adrian. Tony Britton is a businessman hounded by the failing economy and his increasingly hazardous extra-marital affair, getting slowly drunk at a corporate buffet. A victim of the 'last turkey in the shop' syndrome that afflicted strands such as Play for Today, this play had to be produced on a shoestring, big productions such as Bar Mitzvah Boy having eaten substantial chunks of the season's budget. Hence various locations are faked in studio, with a mix of Colour Separation Overlay onto static backgrounds, and highly unrealistic astroturfed sets - a bizarre and distracting treatment. With Amanda Barrie, Nigel Hawthorne, Robin Bailey and Phyllida Law.  

Brimstone and Treacle - w Dennis Potter. The notorious banned tale of a charismatic stranger (Michael Kitchen) who may be, or may just believe himself to be, the Devil, blithely insinuating his way into the unhappy lives of bigoted nostalgic Denholm Elliott and his long-suffering but optimistic wife, who are tied down to caring for their paralysed daughter Pattie, until Kitchen - to put it bluntly - rapes her out of her disability. A brief sequence at the end shows the daughter's hysterical reaction to catching her dad in flagrante with an old school friend precipitating the car accident that paralysed her. Decried for all the knee-jerk reasons, but there is something distasteful about Potter self-consciously using the twin taboos of rape and disability (with some relish - the daughter's incoherent noises were painstakingly scripted) to make some rather dry intellectual comments on prejudice. The daughter's condition is, admittedly, a neat encapsulation/reversal of Potter's own psoriatic arthropathy, a crippling physical condition that gave rise to very real fears that he would lose the ability to write for good. Pattie's mental imprisonment is cause for much morbid contemplation from Elliott, who speaks for the author when he claims being able to hear and comprehend everything, but not communicate back, as his greatest fear. But for all this possible empathy, a symbol is a symbol, and the "Potter can't write women" brigade have much to bolster their case here - Pattie is possibly the ultimate Potter victim, and her mother is a rather dimly optimistic stereotype, whose gullibility is mocked openly by Kitchen with copious eye-rolling and mugging to the audience behind her back. Elliott's character is only slightly more rounded, only rarely breaking out of his role as a typically bigoted (he's recently joined the NF), hidebound representative of that demon of the middle class left: lower middle-class suburbia. The crudeness here does give rise to some amusing, Pinter-like conversations, and a sledgehammer attack on Mrs Bates' bovine, Sunday Best form of Christianity gets a few arch laughs. And the whole thing is, in the end, a sitcom. As well as his unflinching eye contact and sinister/childlike demeanour, Kitchen's character shows his otherworldliness with brief glances and asides to camera - we're in vicar/trousers territory in an instant. Likewise, Elliott and wife do much mugging and farcical gesturing in their turn. There's even the odd moment of queasy comic relief to be had from Pattie's inarticulate interjections, though her convulsions are more often spotlit to shocking effect. The trademark Potter epiphany takes place during a drunken celebration of Martin's acceptance into the household - Mr Bates is goaded into revealing the empty thinking behind his right-wing views, and renounces his NF membership; Mrs B finally stands up to her husband, and of course Pattie is "reawakened" from her symbolic mental limbo - although the final shots imply that now the suppression of Mr B's affair must be dealt with by the family, without Martin, who escapes to accost another stranger in the street, and begin again. A very odd play, but not a bad one (the three plays Potter would make independently for ITV in 1980, especially the near self-parodic Rain on the Roof, are probably front-runners for that dubious honour). In reaction to the sentimentality he perceived in Joe's Ark, DP goes out in the other direction, slotting the highly personal alongside the intellectual, the morbid alongside the farcical, with little or no attempt to stitch the two sides together. This flawed and far from subtle tale was unscreened in its BBC form until 1987, although an inferior film, with Sting in the Kitchen role, was made in '82.  

Dennis Potter at his sharpest - Michael Kitchen invites himself to tea in Brimstone and Treacle, and Kika Markham becomes embroiled in a lethal game in Double Dare.

1977  

Love on a Gunboat - w Malcolm Bradbury. Brummie couple Stephen Moore and Barbara Flynn court during the Suez crisis. 20 years later, against the backdrop of a country in deep recession, Moore mirrors the national mood, as an angry old man.  

The Kiss of Death - w Mike Leigh. Shy and sarcastic teenage Oldham undertaker’s assistant Trevor (David Threlfall) knocks about with drinking pal Ronnie (John Wheatley) and his girlfriend Sandra (Angela ‘WHo’s Who’ Curran). The superficial world of pubs and disco nights out contrasts with Trevor’s serious experiences at work under Mr Garside (Clifford ‘Hard Labour’ Kershaw) - a grim business deflected, badly, with off-colour jokes. Sandra’s friend, forthright, gum-chewing, slightly tarty shoe shop assistant Linda (Kay Adshead) takes a shine to Trevor, but his defensive reticence (and, worse, his abject refusal to dance) makes the courtship an excruciating ballet of non-sequiturs and dropped glances, especially in a five minute seduction scene in which, after much procrastination, Trevor clumsily grapples Linda into a clinch, then falls into a giggling fit after she suggests he accompany her upstairs. In a final, downbeat scene, Trevor drives a bride to a church in the undertaker’s saloon (serving a creepy double purpose), and he and Ronnie take off in it, driving out of Oldham, into the Pennines and away from the small town claustrophobia. The moribund atmosphere of the place is of course echoed in the constant brushes with the dead and dying. Linda’s elderly neighbour collapses in their presence, and Trevor skilfully handles the situation to avoid a tragedy, though still can’t resist the occasional weak gag along the way. All face-saving jokery falls by the wayside, however, when he comes face to face with a cot death victim in the mortuary. This moment of unstinting cold reality (the camera does not shy away from showing the body) affects Trevor, but - this being a Mike Leigh film - it doesn’t magically change his character (‘for the better’, as it would in so many other pat dramas), merely reinforce his defensive barricades against a world that increasingly scares and excludes him. What’s essentially a character sketch of Trevor is given ‘life’ by the meticulous performances of Threlfall and Adshead and, in a first for Leigh, the film is effectively scored by Carl Davis.  

Our Flesh and Blood - w Mike Stott. Maternity comedy with Bernard Hill and Alison Steadman expecting their first baby, and opting for the then-modish 'natural' childbirth method. Also featuring Richard Briers.  

Do as I Say - w Charles Wood. Angela Down is a rape victim whom no-one will take seriously. 

Spend, Spend, Spend! - w Jack Rosenthal. Another BAFTA-winning tour de force from Rosenthal, with a cleverly-turned retelling of tragic sixties pools winners and hapless tabloid fodder Keith and Vivian Nicholson (played by John Duttine and Susan Littler). Opening with the pair drunk and bewildered at the cheque-handing ceremony ("You've got brandy on your fly!") the narrative makes deft dovetailing movements to cover the story of Vivian's truly wretched Castleford childhood - all poverty, coal-hoarding and a violent, drunken bastard of a dad - and the newly-minted pair's gradual descent into drunkenness and depression. In the former, a symbolic nail varnish kit, nicked from Woolies and considered by Vivian "the beautifullest thing I've ever seen" is burned by her dad when she hides it from him up the chimney. Multiple pregnancies and a loveless marriage to a prat called Matthew is interrupted by an affair with Keith, living over the way with his domineering, posessive granny (Liz Smith). Both with someone to hide it from, they begin a comically furtive stop-start affair, culminating in "the greatest sexual happening in the history of Castleford" under a bridge, the result of which - a daughter - precipitates Keith's rapid departure from the scene. Reluctantly returning, and fathering another, sickly, child (plus, it turns out, one with another woman while he was away), they finally marry and settle down. In the other half of the narrative, initial joy at being able to drive back to their house in chauffeured splendour is cut down by tabloid hacks and begging letters. A confrontation with Viv's parents begins full of bonhomie (Viv and her mum share a tender, and, it's implied, exrtremely rare, moment togeahter) until Keith drops the bombshell that Viv's dad isn't getting his hands on a penny, upon which he reverts to type, smashing up the kitchen. Moving into a (slightly) posher neighbourhood, Viv and Keith, with nothing to work for, sit about, host raucous parties, get drunk, drive about in flash cars while drunk, and shout at each other and the neighbours. In a brilliant piece of dramatic irony, the climax to the two threads - Keith in the past hearing his score draws mount up one by one over the radio, and Viv later on hearing from the police of Keith's involvement in one drunken car crash too many - are intercut with consummate skill. The coda takes in Viv's life on her own, and it's so incredibly bleak - bankruptcy, a job working as a stripper, one thirteen week marriage to another voilent case, her dad's death, another one-week marriage, a fifth marriage to an epilieptic drug addict who dies, convulsing in her arms - Rosenthal wisely treats it as a series of sketch-like scenes, linked by the wonderful narration Vivian's been providing throughout the programme, somehow bitterly cynical and hopelessly naive in equal measure. As a study of how extreme circumstances can never, in the end, be grown out of, and as a masterclass in storytelling to boot, this unpretentious and never less than compassionate play ranks among the very greatest entries in the Play for Today canon.  

A Photograph - w John Bowen. More urban country conflict from the author of Robin Redbreast. John Stride's comfortable life as a Radio Three arts presenter is turned upside down by a photograph, and by trying to find the sender inadvertantly signs his own death warrant by coming into conflict with a family of gypsies. The presence of wily matriarch Mrs Vigo from Robin Redbreast provides continuity with the earlier play, and Bowen penned a two-part instalment of LWT's Sunday Night Thriller in 1981 called Dark Secret, in which Anne Stallybrass plays a former scientist running a Cotswold restaurant, employing a similarly rustic woman as kitchen help, who turns out to have the same surname.  

Northern lights - Bobby Knutt and pals in The Price of Coal, and Keep and Eye on Albert.

The Price of Coal - w Barry Hines. Two linked plays about life in a colliery community, directed by Ken Loach and featuring a quartet of northern club comedians in starring roles - Bobby Knutt, Duggie Brown, Jackie Shinn and Stan 'Seth Armstrong' Richards. Meet the People is a comic piece taking in the build-up to a visit by Prince Charles to the fictional Milton colliery near Sheffield. The pit managers schedule much repainting of buildings, planting of trees and grassing of the unsightly muckstack, while the miners, led by Knutt as Sid Storey, debate the rights and wrongs of splashing out so much for a royal visit. A pivotal scene in a working men's club has Sid squaring up to a pit deputy over attitudes to royalty - Sid, as dissidents in Play for Today so often find, gets labelled a communist, but his real concern is that the workers and the village are having their interests put after national prestige. In a revealing shot, the miners liberate a garden umbrella from the club to shelter under the downpour, and beckon all and sundry in the street under it as they march home. More farcical mishaps - the grass seed is washed off the muckstack, a royal equerry briefs the board on etiquette ("You look dead like the Duke of Edinburgh!") and a brick propping open a broken window is painted over - lead up to the visit itself, with much cheering and waving of flags, and while Sid and pals work the coal seam as usual, Sid's youngest, Mark, takes advantage of the day off school to go fishing. Some nice exchanges of dialogue, much brilliantly-observed banter between the miners ("We're wandering round 'ere like second-hand arseholes"), and plenty of topical digs at the silver jubilee, make this a neat little story. The second play, Back to Reality, however, which was suggested by Hines' producer Tony Garnett, overshadows it, in many senses. Opening on the same milieu a month after the visit, Sid delights cricket nut Mark with a pair of tickets to see the test match at Headingly, before leaving for work with his eldest, Tony. At the pit, managers debate the ins and outs of various outstanding bits of pit maintenance. At the coal face, Sid's ripping team are hard at work, bantering and sarking away as usual, when a sudden explosion obliterates everything. The shock is really profound, as the relatively gentle pacing suddenly erupts in a flurry of dust, snatched glimpses of bodies, and shouts. Back on the surface, management discover the blast, and set about alerting local rescue teams, while pondering the tricky problem of when, and what, to tell relatives. Tony, stricken by the news, rushes home to tell his mum and siblings, then goes back to the pit to help with the rescue effort. In the manager's office, a grimly silent "waiting room" for the relatives is set up, with tea and sarnies from the Salvation Army. Underground, rescue teams find the work hard going, and the first casualties are dragged out. Albert (Richards) has died, it transpires. On surface, the relatives support each other, the NUM chiefs argue with the managers about the cause (an unsupervised electrical apprentice, we learn, is the likely cause) and the ancient safety practices of the pit. Sid Storey, for a mercy, survives but is badly injured. It's a fantastic piece of writing from Hines, and directing from Loach. The suddenness with which a disaster can strike is as assuredly put across as the strong ties that bind family, friends and the entire community. A moving story, and a fascinating window on a way of life on the way out then, and all but vanished now. 

Gotcha! - w Barrie Keeffe. Central, and best remembered, play in Gimme Shelter, Keeffe's trilogy of related single-act dramas set in or around a storage shed on the playing field of a comprehensive school. Two teachers - Lynne, a well-meaning female teacher and Ton, a hard-man games teacher (Gareth 'Blake' Thomas) are caught in flagrante by a disillusioned pupil, who's just left school with no O-Levels and a stinking report, in the storeroom. Said pupil gets the headmaster in, then holds them hostage by holding a lit cigarette over the petrol tank of his motorbike (which he'd smuggled into the storeroom) for some sadistic table-turning revenge. Smart commentary on the dehumanising education system by ex-teacher and future Long Good Friday scripter Keeffe. None of the teachers, to their embarrassment, can recall the kid's name, and he refuses to tell them. They try abuse, reasoning and eventually empathy with him, but he's adamant that the comprehensive school system is a joke - "just like the secondary but bigger". Eventually, with night drawing in and police surrounding the hut, Lynne gets really talking to him and they start to dance, then Ton sees his chance and wrestles the Kid to the ground (not Lynne's intention at all). The siege is at an end and, to Lynne's horror, Ton administers a massive kicking to the kid. A repeat showing was cancelled after protests from Mary Whitehouse about the 'imitable acts' of the boy protagonist. Incidentally, the two plays framing this in the original trilogy, Gem and Getaway, concerned a would-be militant accountant, Kev, and his loose collection of mates. In Gem, they hang about by the storeroom refusing to take part in a corporate cricket match as a gesture of defiance against the "dehumanising" corporate world. In Getaway, set a year later, Kev has given in and is ready to play in the match. He meets the kid from Gotcha!, who's now got a job as a groundsman at the school. Recognising him from the papers, he becomes excited and blathers on about the example the kid has set to potential dissidents, but the kid just treats him as an idiot, and walks off.  

Campion's Interview - w Brian Clark. Another education-themed one-act play, shown on the same night as Gotcha! Comprehensive head Julian Curry finds himself defending his pupils during a grilling from the Local Education Authority.  

A Choice of Evils - w Jim Allen. Unusual move into historical drama from Allen, but still true to his Trotskyite roots and belief in basing drama on solid fact. Taking as its starting point the infamous incident where Italian partisans at the end of WWII shot 33 SS paratroopers, and Nazi occupying forces retaliated by summarily executing ten times as many innocent Italian citizens to set an example, Allen weighs up the iniquities of three totalitarian systems involved - The Nazi regime, Stalin's empire to which the partisans pledged loyalty, and the Catholic church under Pope Pius XII, which turned a blind eye to both this incident and the Holocaust. Stephen Murray is Cardinal Volponi, eager to intercede with the conclave over the release of Marxist priest Trevor Peacock, who must choose between a death sentence and the repudiation of his left-wing principles. Murray attempts to moderate Peacock's views by telling him of the evils of Stalin's plans for eastern Europe, but Peacock in turn accuses Murray of being corrupted by careerism and compromise. All the while the Pope remains impossibly aloof and serene, seemingly oblivious (or indifferent) to the plight of the world. A typically uncompromising work which had languished unproduced since 1971 before Margaret Matheson picked it up for the strand.  

The Country Party - w Brian Clark. Sequel to 1975's The Saturday Party. Peter Barkworth has recovered from his redundancy, and now owns a country restaurant. When his daughter decides to spring a surprise party on him at the establishment, events begin to take a familiar turn. With Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.  

Crying in the wilderness - Stronger than the Sun.

Stronger Than the Sun - w Stephen Poliakoff. Nuclear power catastrophe drama with plant worker Francesca Annis obsessively liberating a consignment of plutonium from a power station, before succumbing to its radioactivity, washing her face with it in the bath, and eventually being taken out of her house in a radiation tent, clearly bound for death. Support from Tom Bell and Mark Wing-Davey.  

Come the Revolution - w Robin Chapman. Plumber's mates become embroiled in plans for a workers' revolt in Manchester.  

Abigail's Party - w Mike Leigh. Along with Scum, one of the few Play for Todays to have made a sizeable impact into popular culture. Alison Steadman gets grotesquely down to Donna Summer before hosting the half-hearted suburban drinks do from hell, revealing the proto-Thatcherite anti-social mores of the newly-minted suburban middle classes in the process. With Tim Stern as Beverley's anti-social husband Laurence (whose weak heart condition eventually gets the better of him in the final confrontation) and meek Janine Duvitski as Ange (with thick husband Tone in tow). Add nervous teacher Sue - escaping from the titular party her daughter is holding next door - and a pentagon of mutual loathing and incomprehension is drawn among the Dralon. Something of a cult these days, rep companies up and down the land recreate it in minute detail - rare is the production, it seems, in which the leading actress will dare to move away from Steadman's original swooping Essex intonation, or the decor away from the original MFI shelving/Tretchikoff painting/ice-and-slice chic. It's a bit of an odd state of affairs, all told, that what began as a series of improvisations (the way Leigh always works with his actors) has become set in stone, as it were. This can tend to give the whole thing a seventies-in-aspic air that trivialises it if you're not careful. OK, the performances tend to grotesque characterisation, but the central thrust - of the dimmer-yet-forceful lower middle classes steamrollering the more reserved, thoughtful types on their way up, and disintegrating their own lives in the process - is more important than the oft-quoted Roussos specifics. Since these references litter the dialogue, and any major update would doubtless fail to match the wit of the original, this remains a problem for the play when seen today. Fortunately it doesn't take much of a mental leap to notice the Beverleys and Laurences still very much extant today.  

'Grittiness' comes to Grange Hill - Gareth Thomas in Gotcha! and Ray Winstone in Scum.

Oy Vay Maria - w Mary O'Malley. A planned mixed marriage brings problems for Catholic Cheryl Hall and Jewish Robert Whelan. With Linda Robson. 

Nipper - w Barrie Keeffe. 13 year old John Fowler, with a dead father and a mum more interested in getting her end away than his welfare, takes to crime.  

One Day at a Time - w Denis Conran. A look at the lives of people in an Alcoholics Anonymous group.  

The Mayor's Charity - w Henry Livings. Mayor Thora Hird causes a stir when she appoints Ex-Warrant Officer Frank Windsor as her mace bearer. With Roy Kinnear as her husband.  

Catchpenny Twist - w Stewart Parker. 'A charade in two acts' from the always-reliable Stewart Parker (his first televised work) making a wry, poignant farce out of the Northern Ireland situation. Three English and music teachers in a Belfast school - Martyn Semple (Catholic, easygoing), Roy Fletcher (protestant, careworn) and Monagh Calhoon (something of a muse for the lads, romantically involved, on and off, with Roy) find themselves made redundant after an après-end-of-term show celebration in a classroom with a bottle of champagne and an impromptu rendition of The Stripper is witnessed by the stentorian headmaster. Freshly benefit-bound, Monagh heads for Dublin to pursue a singing career, while Martyn and Roy toy with songwriting. Martyn's path crosses with another ex-teacher and old flame Marie Kyle, who left the profession in the early 1970s to become a fervent campaigner for Sinn Fein. Marie offers the boys thirty quid a throw to churn out street ballads for freshly-slain Catholic freedom fighters. The boys, desperate to keep as well away from politics as possible but needing the money, knock up some doggerel and chords for the occasion. Then, along with the usual rejection letters from record labels, two bullets arrive in the post. One of their other gigs - doing musical numbers and gags for a Protestant drinking club as a favour to Roy's cousin - has been reported in the local press, and now they have a reputation as double agents. Fleeing the north, they hitch up with Monagh in a dreary Dublin club, performing as 'Monagh Lisa' under the aegis of the supercilious Mrs Barker. The pair carry on bashing out love songs, as Monagh's agent gets her tempting gigs in a women's prison. Then, with a record deal finally materialising, things really start to look up, though a farcical celebration with an uncooked chicken bodes ill for the future. While Roy, initially the pessimist of the duo, becomes joyously enthused by the new opportunities, Martyn turns thoughtful, doubtful even, about the relevance of churning out Eurovision-style pop songs. Meanwhile, Monagh starts visibly disintegrating under pressure from prison gigs, fraught recording sessions and, unknown to the lads, has been having an affair with a documentary maker who is embroiled in cross-party negotiations. Finally, the really big break arrives - penning Ireland's entry for that year's... Ettelbruck Song Contest. Not quite the big one, but the lads are overjoyed nonetheless. The night before, a party with a Dublin publisher, Monagh's agent, and a music press hack results in drunken indiscretions about those death threats, and a plastered Monagh finally cracking up outside, and telling the boys that Playfair (the broadcaster) has been shot dead while filming a street battle. Not in the best of states, the trio flunk the contest (off camera) and disconsolately sit in the airport waiting for the flight back home, ripping open 'good luck' telegrams. A parcel sent to them turns out to be a letterbomb, leading to the bizarre final shot of the boys scrabbling around on the floor, bloodied, while Monagh absently sings their song entry, 'Crybaby'. Parker handles the discrepancy between the seriousness of the subject matter and the inherent daftness of the showbiz lower echelons with ease - the two boys are shown to have swapped the real farce of Irish politics for the fabricated one of writing jingles for frozen poultry without making too heavy-handed a statement. And, as Roy and Martyn move to Dublin, to London and to Ettelbruck, it's clear there's really no escape from Belfast - the harder they try to get out, the more they dig themselves in. Add to that the often inspired cross-talk between the main characters, some nifty 'cheesy' songs, amusing turns from a corny 't'ick Oirishman' pub comedian and previous Ettelbruck winner Willy Zero performing The Zig-Zag Song, and perfectly-judged 'tragic farce' is the result.  

Charades - w Antonia Fraser. Below and above stairs relations in a Scottish manor house, presided over by Martin Jarvis.  

The Thin End of the Wedge - w Sean McCarthy. Tensions flare during a prolonged power cut. With Miriam Margolyes.  

Scum - w Roy Minton. Kept from the air for fifteen years for alleged sensationalism, this documentary-style tale of despair, violence, assault and power games in a young offender's institute has entered pop cultural parlance (the greenhouse rape, the snooker attack etc.) despite being rarely seen, especially in the original TV form - in fact, a recent screening of the original showed that many of the most often-quoted moments of the piece were only brought to the fore in the film version. Among the cast - Ray Winstone, David Threlfall, Phil Daniels and Danny John-Jules. Directed, as was the cinema remake (with much of the original cast), by Alan Clarke. The original scores over its more superficially memorable predecessor in its far more muted effect - less violent, more claustrophobic. Whereas the standout character of Archer (the shoeless, overbright 'holy fool') was slightly over-arch in Mick Ford's film protrayal, here Threlfall, in Botham shaggy mane and 'tache, gives a much more realistically dour reading. On the other hand, many scenesin the original are played at the wrong place, and lack the atmosphere of the film. Both versions, however, escape a guv'nor's report and stand on their own merits.  

1978  

Scully's New Year's Eve - w Alan Bleasdale. The first TV glimpse of Bleasdale's alienated, down-at-heel scouse youth Franny Scully, as he invites his mates to gatecrash his mum's new year's eve party, which Bleasdale had developed in stories for Radio Merseyside, as played by Andrew Schofield. Became a series for Granada television. John Junkin and Janine Duvitski also featured.  

Violent cases - Licking Hitler and Dinner at the Sporting Club.

Licking Hitler - w David Hare. In 1941, in a remote country house near Wendelsham, somewhere in southern England, nineteen-year-old upper class girl Anna Seaton (Kate Nelligan) arrives to start work as a translator of radio propaganda broadcasts aimed at breaking German spirit. Other staff at the stately home include upper class officer Will Langley, down-to-earth secretary Eileen Graham (Brenda Fricker) and, taking charge of the content, Glaswegian ex-journalist turned pretend Nazi Archie MacLean (Bill Patterson), who has a class-related chip on his shoulder a mile wide, an immense amount of ambition, a worrying fascination with Goebbels, and a chronic drink problem. Inevitably drawn to the well-bred, under-age Anna, he bursts drunkenly into her room on the first night, but collapses out cold before anything happens - the next day refusing to acknowledge the incident. As the broadcasts, read out by two Germans (one a dissident, one from a nearby internment camp) sitting at microphones at opposite ends of a billiard table, progress (along with the war, and the start of the Russian campaign) Anna’s fascination for Archie overcomes her fear and repulsion, and in an amazingly tense and terse scene, they make ‘love’ (‘The Scot makes love wi’ a broken bottle an a great deal o’ screamin’!’) Tending to the resulting bruises the next day, she remains tight-lipped, and clearly, innocently in awe of this bit of Clydeside rough. But, having conquered, Archie shows no further interest in her, and a few stilted weeks’ worth of non-dialogue later, Langley summarily dismisses Anna for, in Archie’s words, trying (‘unsuccessfully’) to sleep with him. Anna can’t believe it (‘It’s not true!’ ‘I don’t care if it’s true - you’ve unbalanced one of our most gifted writers. That is unforgivable.’) Propaganda has come home to roost. The same night, in the final German broadcast, Archie gets to live out a fantasy of the ‘proper’ warfare he claims he’d rather be doing by staging - with relish - a mock assassination of one of the broadcasters. A BAFTA winner, and rightly so, this is a deceptively simple film from Hare (who also directed) - a cross-class, cross-age anti-romance to which only wartime circumstances could give rise, filled with detail of the period that’s a step up from being mere ’period detail’ - the dinner scene, where a gong is sounded and the staff sit around a grand table to be served up powdered mash and luncheon meat, ’carved’ by Archie, is amusing, but also points up MacLean’s assumed position at the head of a new hierarchy every bit as stifling as the one observed by the country house’s recently-vacated occupants. Anna, initially unable to even make a cup of tea (but taken under the wing of the mumsy Eileen, who later has to leave when news of her brother’s death comes through) is right at the bottom, an unworldly posh girl in a hermetic macho microcosm of the war, tragically unable through her upbringing to manage to raise a voice of opposition until it’s too late. Nelligan’s frightened, minimal performance in this role is a match for Patterson’s more meaty, shouty turn, equal parts hateful disillusion and solid determination, but Hare gets the goods from every cast member. Firmly past his ’Marxist’ origins, Hare makes sure there are no easy moral lessons glibly flung out of the screen here, and as a result the political and social commentary seeps into the personal story rather than sitting flatly on top, ’like basking sharks’ as Dennis Potter once (unfairly) remarked when reviewing Trevor Griffiths’s All Good Men (qv). One tiny quibble is the final montage, a documentary-style ‘where are they now?’ look at how the protagonists’ lives panned out - Archie made sentimental films about the Glasgow tenements before going to Hollywood, Anna went into advertising, got married, divorced, slept around in the ‘60s and retreated to rural Wales. It breaks the hermetic world of the wartime country house, and although it does give her the last word, after years of experience, in a letter to Archie, it still seems slightly tacked-on. But this is only a tiny drop in the extremely high standards of the rest of the play, which is easily one of the best examples of non-polemical political drama in the entire Play for Today strand. 

Red Shift - w Alan Garner. The author of The Owl Service adapts his own obscure, semi-mystical novel detailing the lives of three boys living in the same part of Wales - one in the present day, one in the seventeenth century, one during the Roman occupation - their existences linked by common circumstance and the appearance of a stone axehead. A treatment of the 'British Gothic' tradition along similar lines to David Rudkin's Penda's Fen. 

The Spongers - opened with a last-minute gag at the expense of Her Maj, but (right) the finale is no joke.

The Spongers - w Jim Allen. Single mother Christine Hargreaves struggles with mounting debt and callous social workers in this highly polemical and unremittingly bleak diatribe against government and public judgments of those living on welfare as 'spongers', which caused something of a stir (though not quite on Cathy levels) when it was broadcast, not least for the opening shot (deftly inserted by director Roland Joffe at the last possible moment before transmission) of outsize cut-outs of the Queen and Prince Philip, over which the title is cheekily superimposed. The background is a familiar one to just about anyone over 30 - the run-up to the silver jubilee, with pageants and street parties planned all over (the cut0outs are manhandled into a huge union flag hoarding by workers, overseen by the pipe-smoking labour councillor ("You've got the Queen upside down! Bloody communists!"). The opening scene couldn't be harsher or more abrupt, however, as Pauline (Hargreaves) deals with bailiffs pricing up her furniture in lieu of rent arrears she can't afford. Her eldest of three children, Paula, suffers from Down's Syndrome, which makes the turmoil all the more difficult to bear. The bailiff, for his part, goes about his job in the same officious, emotionally detached manner all the officials in the play exhibit (necessary as a survival tactic). One doesn't, however - Pauline's social worker, a trainee who is later dropped by her superior from Pauline's case for becoming "emotionally involved". Pauline runs the gamut of obstructive social services, from the DHSS office (in authentically grim cubicles with grilles) through to a frosty appeals tribunal with her dad, who delivers an impassioned plea on the increasingly deflated Pauline's behalf to a stony-faced team of officers, including a shifty-eyed Roger Sloman. Local community worker Sullivan Bernard Hill) tries to persuade Pauline to keep fighting ("Don't blame yourself") when Paula is moved from a relatively happy care home to a hostel unequipped to deal with her. Her doctor predicts her condition will worsen, so Hill's character rounds on the local head councillor, who dismisses him as an emotional "long-haired" lefty, as opposed to the "practical" socialists like him who do the "real work" (the council have been seen in meetings earlier reluctantly agreeing to cuts in all departments). Despite a few brief respites in the downward spiral - the jubilee celebrations do indeed provide a brief respite for all - Pauline has clearly given up. Finally, after getting a prescription of anti-depressants, she laces the bedtime hot chocolate of her children and herself. The final scene the next morning shows Sullivan racing up to her home, to find ambulancemen wheeling out covered stretchers of varying sizes. Locals crowd round "She had no right to do that. She should've stuck it out like the rest of us" but Sullivan can only stand about, helpless. It's one of the most powerful dramas the BBC, or anyone, have shown, and as such presents the strongest possible case for the "naturalism" that many Play for Today writers were determined to get away from. The ensemble playing is brilliantly done, with interruptions and improvised stutters giving a documentary feel that, while grossly overused (even misused) these days, is wholly convincing here. Joffe's camerawork is uniformly flat - either huge hand-held close-ups bring us right into the action, or telephoto long shots distance us, as in the final scene, like a news report. It's entirely the right thing to do - the shabby reality of life at "the bottom of the pile" is presented as a constant, a prison the characters can never escape from with tricksy flashbacks or flights of technical reverie. Allen planned a two-part follow up, The Commune, set in the same location - Middleton, Manchester's impoverished Langley Estate, which was to provide a more hopeful outlook for the community than Pauline's story, featuring the residents taking control of the running of the estate over from the local authorities. Sadly, due to problems between the project's developers, Kenith Trodd's PfH Productions, and London Weekend Television over the spiralling budgets of a trilogy of Dennis Potter plays, this fascinating-sounding working class epic was shelved.  

Destiny - w David Edgar. Adapted from his epic RSC stage production (the original draft of which ran to five hours in length), Edgar’s anatomy of the rise of British fascism in the ‘60s and ‘70s takes elements from his early work in agitprop theatre, and expands them into a more complex, epic form of social realism to make a rare, concerted attempt to explore the reasons behind, rather than simply demonise, the fascist mindset. It begins in India during the final moments of the Raj, but centres around a picket by Asian factory workers in the fictional West Midlands borough of Taddley. A terse encounter between three military men in India - bluff-but-agreeable Colonel Chandler, and the rather more hard-nosed Major Rolfe and Sergeant Turner - berate, to varying degrees, manservant Khera. Then, moving forward through the ‘60s to the present day, we see the various fortunes of these men on their return to England - the Colonel becomes Tory MP for Taddley, and on his death his nephew Peter Crosby is to stand for election in the same seat, his politics very much of the Heathite, progressive conservative school. Rolfe, meanwhile, his defeated rival for Tory candidacy, is far more to the right in his views, and feels both socialism and wet Toryism have betrayed the lower-middle classes (“The NCOs”). Both have dealings with mysterious banker Frank Kershaw, “whose many commercial concerns are too numerous to mention”. Turner, for his part, sets up a small antiques shop, which has to close when a (Jewish) businessman informs him a large conglomerate has bought up the entire street, to make way for a precinct “geared towards the younger end. Boutiques, hair stylists, soda fountains, drive-in legal aid facilities, antique emporia, self-service massage parlours, that sort of thing”. Then we eavesdrop on a clandestine meeting in an upstairs pub room, where two well-spoken men, David Maxwell and Richard Cleaver, invite a wealthy Canadian businessman to a social gathering which turns out to be a ritualistic birthday/remembrance celebration for Adolf Hitler. News of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech filter through, though, and the businessman sees the way clear for this cult to hide its symbolic trappings and go ‘overground’. Finally, we see Khera, now a shop steward at the Baron Castings foundry, seeking an overtime ban for his predominantly Asian union members, and the first stirrings of industrial rebellion. From there, the disparate stories proceed apace. Turner, stung into action by his bad fortune, becomes chairman of local pressure group the Taddley Patriotic League. At a town hall meeting, he introduces Maxwell, now general secretary of the distinctly National Front-esque Nation Forward movement, who, after hearing the race-based grievances from middle class housewives and factory workers alike, makes a rousing ‘whites unite’ speech, and proposes Turner as a Nation Forward candidate for the bye-election. Khera meets Labour candidate Bob Clifton, who promises full support. At NF headquarters, Cleaver berates Maxwell over the content of some propaganda leaflets - not the rather deranged rants from Turner linking immigrants with ‘parasitic worms’, but Maxwell’s lines castigating multi-national corporations and businesses as the prime causes of immigration, a stance too close to Marxism for Cleaver to tolerate. Crosby turns up to remonstrate against the NF’s anti-Asian rhetoric, and is given short shrift. Back at NF HQ, Turner is being coached out of his awkwardness, but another spat between Cleaver and Maxwell results in the latter being kicked out of the party. An NF party meeting is sabotaged by Marxist hecklers, and descends into a riot. Nation Forward turn up at the picket line with a foundry worker who attempts to break the line, and violence inevitably results. One of the Asian factory workers is arrested and threatened with deportation. Khera pleads with Clifton to help, but on the eve of the bye-election the moderate Labour man gets cold feet. Crosby wins the seat by a thousand votes, with Turner coming a close third. In the closing scene, Turner and Cleaver woo merchant bankers for further funding - Kershaw, and Rolfe, whose company Turner suddenly recognises as the people who forced him out of business in the first place. Far from representing the voice of the dispossessed petit-bourgeois, Nation Forward is climbing into bed with the very corporations that are truly the cause of the "little man's" alienation. Shell-shocked, dispossessed, Turner seems to be on the verge of leaving the NF (possibly?) as the play ends. A labyrinthine, complex work with many things to say about the causes of and contradictions within organised fascism, what it undoubtedly has in scope and moral imagination it rather lacks in terms of rounded characterisation, although a great cast, headed by Colin Jeavons, Nigel Hawthorne, Iain Cuthbertson and Saeed Jaffrey, and touches of humanity and humour (and lashings of Rudyard Kipling - at one pint turned into a right-wing protest song) mean the drama of the piece is never engulfed by the ideas. Attacked at the time for both overdoing the NF/Nazi link and portraying right wing causes in too favourable a light, it is really that rare thing - a partisan drama about racism and race which never lets the sentimentalism of the protagonists seep into the narrator’s voice and undermine an intelligent, thoughtful story. Although Edgar was (and still is) a firm believer in left-wing egalitarianism, he was no idealist about the power of mass media to transmit complex political ideas (unlike, say, Trevor Griffiths) and maintained that the play's impact remained greatest among the relative handful who saw the stage production, rather than the four million or so television viewers. 

Our Day Out - w Willy Russell. A Liverpudlian school "progress" class's coach outing to Conway Castle in North Wales, the zoo, the beach and the fair, brings out anarchic behaviour in pupils and teachers alike. Filmed entirely on location, it takes on the mantle of Grange Hill the Musical, with frequent weird little diversions into song, particularly from the kids as a kind of sarky Greek chorus (including "Oh, the penny chews are ten pence in this caff...", "A straight line is a wonderful thing to behold", and the teacher-baiting Mersey Tunnel Song). Plenty of chances for the kids to upstage the adults with behind-the-back larking about, much discussion between the hardline Briggs and softer Miss Kay about the value of educating the "no hopers", and a softening of Briggs' carapace after a clifftop confrontation with one of the schoolgirls about her bleak prospects. With Alun Armstrong and Elizabeth Estensen as teachers, Robert Gillespie as the headmaster, and Peter Tilbury. 

The After-Dinner Joke - w Caryl Churchill. A study of the complexities of charity work and the contradictions in charitable acts from Churchill, performed in a style more like late period, Terry Jones-helmed Monty Python than your standard Play for Today template. Paula Wilcox plays Selby, a secretary at Richard Vernon's company who moves into the charity division as she wants to "do good." She ends up running the charity arm of the company with the affable-but-clueless Vernon and the no-nonsense, businesslike Clive Merrison, trying to devise publicity campaigns which are simultaneously hard-hitting and inoffensive, instigating various charitable projects which are scuppered by local and international politics, and eventually travelling to a hurricane-stricken country and ending up being captured by a guerilla army. Interspersed are loads of little quickfire scenes - local politicians are targets for a charity pie-fling, and argue about who was the most popular target; a thief commits various misdeeds and is angry when Selby won't accept the money; a sheikh buys M&S; a snake-obsessed mayor argues about politics; a pop star mouths hypocritical platitudes, and tons more - over sixty scenes in total. It's good stuff too, from slapstick and silent film parodies to spoof ads, broadcasts and running jokes. There's even a catchphrase - "Isn't that a bit political?" Best of all, though, are the main scenes between Wilcox, Vernon and Merrison, with the three talking themselves round in circles, Yes Minister-style. Ironically, as one of the main themes is the futility of hand-out charity in the Third World, this comic-polemic sketch style was later purloined for sketches in Comic Relief Nights.  

The Legion Hall Bombing - w Caryl Churchill. Dramatisation of the trial of Willie Gallagher, accused and convicted of bombing the Strabane British Legion Hall in 1976. Originally scheduled as a special showing to be followed by a discussion, the latter was dropped, the play itself postponed many times, and only finally shown with several cuts made to the opening and closing narration, which, the BBC felt, were too critical of the jury-less Diplock court system. Churchill and director Roland Joffe removed their names from the credits in protest when it was finally shown.  

Nina - w Jehane Markham. Soviet doctor Eleanor Bron, in despair at having to 'treat' dissidents locked up by the state in psychiatric hospitals, follows lover Jack Shephard to London when his exit pass comes through from the Soviet authorities. Based on the true story of Marina Voikhanskaya.  

Victims of Apartheid - w Tom Clarke. Black South African exile John Kani has trouble adapting to London life, in a play which swings from comedy (the differences between the oppressive regime and the UK) and pathos (the depressing similarities).  

A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts - w John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. A comic look at popular notions of disability and "rights" from Good Life scripters Esmonde and Larbey. In a Hounslow terrace, Ray Collis (Ray Brooks) is woken by his wife (Judy Cornwell) to investigate a supposed burglar in the house. Finding a "crouching figure", Brooks lashes out with a conveniently placed Zulu knobkerrie (an unwanted present) only to find his felled victim is dwarf Tiny Hackett (Rusty 'Britain's Bounciest Weather' Goffe). After confrontations with ambulancemen and sarky police officer Karl Howman, Brooks goes to work (an electrical components factory) to find word has got out about his confrontation, though not the size issue, and his mates, including Mike, an intellectual-basher and admirer of strength, inveterate joker Terry and nostalgic old Spud, feteing their formerly quiet colleague as a hero. Unfortunately a snooping neighbour has witnessed the crucial detail, and the next morning the local rag reveals all. Stan, Ray's long-term work colleague and friend of the family, is round immediately to offer advice about potential "ramifications", but the talk turns sour with both him and Ray's wife, as Ray finds himself suddenly having to defend his actions. At work, Ray's mates paint a yellow stripe on his coat and royally take the piss. Ray's boss, a blithe Christian charity type who makes a show of employing what he calls "unfortunates", calls him in and takes him to task. Someone from accounts slaps him on the back and, to Ray's disgust, hands him a National Front leaflet. At the magistrate's court, Ray finds himself alone with Hackett's mum, and after much awkwardness finds the root of Tiny's problems - he was dropped from a pantomime dwarf line-up and, alternative avenues of employment closed, turned to breaking and entering. In court, charges against Ray are dropped and Hackett gets off on probation, and Ray's boss, having defended Ray, announces he will offer Hackett work - in Ray's department. A shaken Ray goes home to find more strife from the missus and Stan, she berating him for being spineless, and in her anger letting slip that she's been relying on someone else for certain "manly duties". Horrified, Ray clocks Stan's guilty expression. Stan fakes a heart attack, pathetically, and Ray's wife demands Ray take a stand and thump him. "No, you hit him!" demands Ray, and leaves for work. At the factory, with Hackett on site, the atmos is tense, though Ray has a new-found confidence of sorts. During a tea break, Mike finds his lighter has gone missing, and suspicion falls on the "new boy". Mike goes up to Ray and asks him to do something. "No, you do something, replies Ray, then, when Mike flounders, "Tricky, isn't it?" What could have become a dull proto-anti-PC piece is leavened not only by E&L's humour and ear for bland suburban dialogue, but a sense of genuine, if thwarted, humanity present in almost every character - Ray's unfulfilled and domineering wife, Stan the upbeat confidante who turns out to be full of crap - it's even hinted that Ray's boss only employs "unfortunates" for the lower pay they demand. And Ray himself is not so much an anti-hero as a non-hero - he let his life fall apart long before Hackett broke his window. This well-rounded approach is what made E&L's sitcoms, from Ever Decreasing Circles through The Other One to even the much-derided Good Life (which had much more to it than its suburban twee image gives credit for) so superior. Where many more "serious" Play for Todays are content to move cipher characters around to illustrate a simplistic social hypothesis, this overtly light comedy actually explores the situation it sets up in detail, taking in all the "ramifications". 

A pair of plays from the "issues" season - Ray Brooks faces up to his actions in A Touch of the Tiny Hacketts, and a provincial daily reveals its true colours in One Bummer Newsday.

Dinner at the Sporting Club - w Leon Griffiths. Small-time London boxing promoter Dinny Matthews (John Thaw) is disillusioned. He has seven fighters, "all tryers", but none of them share his ambitions - "They get enough money for a down-payment on a bungalow out in Ongar and they're satisfied." He wants glory, not small-time club fights with an after-match dinner in a dingy neon canteen where you can't tell whether the fish is plaice or haddock. One of his fighters, Glaswegian John Duncan (Billy McColl), is picked out to be a sub at The Wellington dinner club. Though by no means the best on Dinny's books, he is the whitest, and it turns out the patrons don't want to see the featherweight champion being beaten up by a "chocolate boy" (Dinny's protest - "Elton's not chocolate. He's more coffee, like John Conteh.") The night before, Dinny's colleague Cyril (Jonathan 'Yes, Minister' Lynn) remonstrates with wife Maureen Lipman about the true sporting nature of the club - she pooh-poohs his claim to be a 'sportsman', he redefines the term with reference to the netwroking aspect, and the backhanders ("I'm talking about business - stuff for the deep freeze!") In the club bar, Dinny meets Neville (Ken Campbell) a gauche, rather superficial type who only seems interested in the presence of minor celebs (his mantra - "We had Alan Ball in the other night!") and takes an interest in The Scotch Lad, but only for betting purposes. In the dressing rooms, with yammering, anecdote-regurgitating trainer George, Dinny tends to John's cut eye with a nail varnish-like substance and fills him in on the bout ("You're on between the pudding and the coffee"). Then he nips up to a suite commandeered by bulk frozen food magnate Ray Little (Tony Caunter), wherein Cyril, Neville, Ray's bank manager and two hookers hang languidly about. Dinny, faintly repulsed by all this grim small-time decadence, neverthless stays to get a promise of a two grand sponsorship deal from Little. Then comes the fight. As the diners all about eat pudding, shout, chat, and fall asleep, John makes good initial progress against the East Acton champion, but a crafty headbutt in the second round reopens the eye gash, and the ref stops the fight in the sixth, the champ's reign intact. Little withdraws the sponsorship offer, leading Dinny to pin him angrily against the suite's bar. Outside the club, all the positivity of training has evaporated, and he levels with the still-ambitious John ("There's five hundred pro-fighters in the country - there's more certified lunatics [...] You're champion of nothing. You'll get work [...] you won't make any dough [...] that's the trouble with this game - full of bloody romantics.") After this singular speech of cruel kindness, they part ways for good. A strightforward story of misplaced hope, this, combined with fantastically seedy visuals from director Brian Gibson. The wafer-thin glamour of the club and its 'sportsmen' is contantly peeled back to reveal the underlying shabbiness. It's a short walk from the chrome and glass of the bar to the concrete and steel of the club's bowels. Frilled shirts are pulled aside to reveal sweaty fat stomachs. And the well-boozed, silver service diners are, of course, only yards away from two working class lads knocking each other's brains out - the entire sport in microcosm. This play is also interesting as a pointer to the future - writer Leon Griffiths' small but perfectly-formed output of original TV scripts, starting in the mid-'60s with Wednesday Play The Voices in the Park, and sitcom A Slight Case Of..., which starred Roy Kinnear as a shifty, silver-tongued businessman, would culminate in 1979 with the creation of Minder, a genre series that broke down boundaries between outright comedy and 'straight' drama. ...Sporting Club sees many of Minder's trademarks forming, in less overtly comic form - the cross-purposes banter, the depiction of seediness without either pouring on the moral judgement or shying away from the reality for comic effect, and most importantly the sense of constant disappointment in life, brilliantly exemplified by Thaw in his final talk with McColl outside The Wellington. There's no bitterness here, as you might expect from Play for Today's popular stereotype, no semi-articulate railing against fate or society, just the sort of reaction real people would produce. They don't go and get drunk and smash up the place, or beat the wife up, then collapse into a sobbing heap in the corner. They walk home. Quietly, not exactly stoically, but attempting to gather all the dignity they can still muster on the way. A superficial look at this play might conclude there's not much drama going on here. What there aren't are histrionics. In the unspoken, the unconfessed, the undone, there's drama here in spades. 

Donal and Sally - w James Duthie. Gerrard Kelly and Sylvestra le Touzel star in an across-the-divides Scottish teenage romance. With Gregor Fisher.  

Sorry... - w Vaclav Havel. Two linked plays, Audience and Private View, by the dissident Czech writer, with Michael Crawford as a brewery worker whose incendiary writing puts him in trouble with the government.  

Butterflies Don't Count - w Wally K Daly. A test of faith for young priest Kenneth Cranham.  

Soldiers Talking, Cleanly - w Mike Stott. Bob Mason plays the author in an autobiographical depiction of life in the British Army in Germany. With Julie Walters, Bernard Hill, Bill Nighy and Stephen Moore.  

One Bummer Newsday - w Andy McSmith. A light but well-turned satire from journalist (currently political editor for the Independent) McSmith. Set mostly in the open-plan newsroom of he Gazette, a provincial daily in an unspecified North East England town, the play tracks the activities of reporters desperately scraping around for stuff to fill their rag on a painfully slow news day. Under the watchful but far from respect-commanding eye of news editor Frank Benyon, John Hansen (moustachioed, bolshy, fond of a drink), Peter Postgate (middle-aged, cynical, sleepwalking through the day) and Mary Cattell (may have a thing for Hansen, indignant at poor treatment meted out to female staff), haplessly ring round the magistrates' court, fire brigade etc., trying to root out anything that could merit a couple of paras on page five. Benyon doles out awful stories for them to follow up - a cherry shortage in Jersey, "are bald men less sexy?" etc. - and they grudgingly accept them with barely disguised contempt (it later emerges Kenyon was a mediocrity in his reporting days, too) and bitter sarcastic humour. Given a London-centric poverty rport to follow up, Hansen scours the town for a local angle, and interviews penurious widow Mrs Baker, who graphically demonstrates her money-saving bathtime tip (fill two buckets with water from kettle, stand in front of fire with one foot in each, sponge self down). Convinced a local poverty story is a sure-fire front pager, he returns to type up his findings, in between helping tyro hack Jimmy Gaunt tart up his desultory obscene phone call story with acres of tortuous journalese and bad punning. Returning from the pub in the evening, he finds his story has been held over (while Gaunt's puntastic fluff is lauded with much praise), and confronts the night editor, asserting that the paper's right-wing editorial line is the reason behind the spiking, though his principled stand quickly crumbles under the weight of his own resigned apathy, and the paper goes out as is. As well as being a neat, straightforward "journalism in miniature" parable, what distinguishes this play is the ear for tart and embittered dialogue, and the sturdiness of the various grubby and downtrodden types that populate the newsroom. Matthew Kelly appears as a junior journo, rather unfortunately covering a scare story on paedophilia.  

1979  

The Out of Town Boys - w Ron Hutchinson. Joe Lynch is the self-made head of a building firm in trouble during a topping-out ceremony for a new office block. With Anthony Sher and Colin Jeavons.  

Vampires - w Dixie Williams. Real-life brothers Peter and Paul Moran play two kids hunting imaginary vampires around Merseyside, until flights of imagination take things as step too far.  

The Chief Mourner - w John Elliot. A man is strangely reluctant to help police when his wife is murdered.  

Waterloo Sunset - w Barrie Keeffe. The author of Gotcha and self-styled writer of plays aimed at "people who wouldn't be seen dead in a theatre" comes up trumps again with a delirious look at racial disharmony. A young man and his elderly relative (Queenie Watts) lives on a London housing estate which has recently become predominantly West Indian. The pivotal scene involves the old dear blacking up with cocoa in order to fit in with them, but they take it the wrong way and she has to leave, being driven away to a home in a taxi. Also starring Robbie Coltrane and Floella Benjamin. 

Queenie Watts south of the river in Waterloo Sunset.

Blue Remembered Hills - w Dennis Potter. A wartime countryside idyll (closely modelled, of course, on Potter's Forest of Dean domain) is populated by seven-year-old children playing in the sun who are, in a slight return of the childhood flashbacks in Potter's Stand Up, Nigel Barton, played by "mature" actors. Colin Welland, doing Spitfire impressions in outsize shorts, squares up to Michael Elphick, local hard nut (but only "number two" in the village, the star being Wallace Wilson, never seen but often referred to in hushed tones) in a brilliantly observed push-and-shove verbal sparring contest ("Shut thee chops!"). Eventually they're joined by John (Robin 'Poldark' Ellis) and his stuttering, meek brother Raymond (John Bird), and contrive to trap and kill a squirrel. Meanwhile in a barn, pretty Angela (Helen Mirren) and plain Audrey (Janine Duvitski) play "house" with the ultra-shy and rather backward Donald (Colin Jeavons) who reveals much of his home life by swearing and shouting as the "daddy", before the game breaks up into a vicious round of teasing by the girls. It transpires "Donald Duck's" dad is a PoW in Japan, and his mother beats him often, and possibly sleeps around (one of the children heard his mother say "them sheets could tell some stories", so it's assumed she's a bed-wetter). Leaving Donald alone, rocking and muttering in the barn, the girls join up with the boys - now fully into "who's the hardest" contests, with John and Peter at loggerheads. The girls take sides with relish, but a showdown is interrupted by a siren from the nearby PoW camp, and the children run into the forest, assuming an "Eyetie" PoW has escaped. After winding each other up with fear something chronic, they return to the barn, thinking the PoW might be in there, but it's Donald, who's been obsessively trying to start a fire with some matches, and has finally succeeded. The kids, out for another tease, trap him in the barn until they see the smoke, and too late open the door to see Donald engulfed. They all disappear into the long grass, bewildered, sobbing, as the sentimental AE Housman poem from which the play takes its name is heard. Easily Potter's most popular single play, and it's not hard to see why - as well as the recognition factor of that finely-observed childhood dialogue, the central conceit is inspirationally simple, unlike many of Potter's previous deliberate, complex, almost diagrammatic rearrangements of reality and fantasy, past and present. And though bleak in the end, there's a lot of warmth here that even Potter identified, admitting that somewhere within him there might be a much more wholesome writer than his audience - even he himself - is led to believe. But credit too must go to the acting ensemble, who make the constant switches from whimsical innocence to malignant vindictiveness perfectly believable, under the assured direction of Brian Gibson.  

Who's Who - w Mike Leigh. A departure from Mike Leigh, centring on the social mores among a firm of stockbrokers. Obsequious junior partner Alan (Richard Kane) is the main focus – a pathetically insecure creep obsessed with status, both class-based (he idolises the royals) and celebrity (he collects oleaginously solicited signed photographs of everyone from Russell Harty to Petula Clark, Dr Christiaan Barnard to fingerless pianist ‘Rhythmic Roberto’). Two of the posher brokers, slobbish Giles (Adam Norton) and uptight Nigel (Simon ‘Imitation Game’ Chandler), live together in an Odd Couple-esque relationship of mutual dislike. A dinner party they throw for two girlfriends, loud Samantha (Catherine Hall) and timid Caroline (Felicity ‘Shooting the Chandelier’ Dean) plus another office colleague, predatory Anthony (Graham Seed). The dinner descends into a loud orgy of half-baked chat (‘the punk thing’ is oafishly discussed), clumsy seduction and boozy incoherence. Senior partner Francis (Jeffrey Wickham) discusses the financial woes of Lord and Lady Crouchurst (David ‘Country’ Neville and Richenda ‘Nuts in May’ Carey), who offer up insufferably plumy non-sequiturs and hopelessly complicated organisational news respectively, in a round robin of escalating obtuseness and confusion. Alan, who crawls to everyone in the office save young, sarcastic Kevin (Phil ‘Quadrophenia’ Davis), annoys his eccentric, cat-loving wife April (Joolia Cappleman), when he co-opts visiting cat photographer Desmond Shakespeare (Sam ‘Grown Ups’ Kelly) into touring his collection of autographs from the great and good and even the rejection slips from the secretaries of the ones that got away – nothing is beneath proud display). He also interrupts her efforts to sell a prized puss to moneyed Miss Hunt (Geraldine James), intruding into the private life and bloodline of this genuine member of the aristocracy in his very home, and furtively looking up her mother’s surname in a handy copy of Debrett’s. This description seems rather convoluted and directionless by Leigh’s standards, and to be fair it does have the feel of a loose collection of ideas and scenes more than any of his other entries in the strand (even the bitty Hard Labour). Series producer Margaret Matheson had encouraged him to do something beyond what, after the success of Abigail’s Party, had come to be characterised as his trademark milieu of lower middle class suburbia. Matheson’s initiative to push writers away from their familiar areas, which worked so well in 1978’s ‘Social Issues’ season, was less successful here here. The nearest thing to a central performance is Alan’s wonderful Rigsbyesque creation, and scenes without him suffer, with the exception of the spiralling Crouchurst interview. Like the televisation of Abigail’s Party before it, this was a quick commission by series producer Louis Marks, after an ambitious Anglo-Israeli co-production authoured by David Mercer fell through. Leigh himself admits that illness and the birth of his first child interrupted the shoot, and an extra few weeks could have helped iron out the rougher element – in particular the dinner party scene, which sails as close as Leigh’s work has come to the alleged vices of improvised caricature and loud, repetitious cliché his harshest critics have levelled at him, but even here there are the pockets of great character work and observation characteristic of even Leigh’s weakest work.  

The Last Window Cleaner - w Ron Hutchinson. Detective Constable Ken Campbell is tranferred to Belfast, taking digs in a run-down boarding house called The Crumlin View, populated by an assortment of bizarre and troubled (as well as Troubled) eccentrics, including Patrick Magee, Norman Beaton, John Bird and Pat 'Play School' Abernathy.  

Plougman's Share - w Douglas Dunn. Joseph Brady is a Scottish ploughman of the old school, coping with redundancy. Featuring Iain 'Fingermouse' Lauchlan.  

Degree of Uncertainty - w Alma Cullen. Jennie Linden plays a single mum and mature student at a Scottish university, continually at odds with the mindless juvenility of her younger cohorts and the faculty staff, including a predatory lecturer.  

Don't Be Silly - w Rachel Billington. A young wife tries to cope with her abusive husband, with Susan Fleetwood and Christopher Godwin.  

Light - w Tony Perrin. Communism, picket lines and suspicion threaten the peace of a quiet Cheshire village.  

Coming Out - w James Andrew Hall. Anton Rodgers plays a happily closeted homosexual writer called Lewis Duncan, not at all bothered by his double life, until an article he wrote in a gay magazine under the pseudonym Zippy Grimes threatens to blow the lid on his private life. Richard Pearson appears as a querulous old queen (as he always seems to) along with Hywel Bennett and Nigel Havers.  

Long Distance Information - w Neville Smith.  Smith writes and stars as Christian Harvey, disc jockey and obsessive Elvis Presley fan, presenting his radio show when the news of the great man's death is broken, while shellshocked ageing teddy boys listen in. With Jim Broadbent. 

Cries from a Watchtower - w Stephen Lowe. Watchmaker Paul Copley is made redundant by the dreaded silicon chip.  

Youth rebellion of very different stripes - Our Day Out and Comedians.

Comedians - w Trevor Griffiths. Not a true Play for Today this one, perhaps, as it had been in theatres since 1975, but it's easily one of the best televised plays, one of the best plays full-stop, perhaps - and certainly one of the best TV dramas there's ever been. The action concerns a notional evening class for budding stand-up comics in a Manchester secondary school. The students are Gethin Price (Jonathan Pryce), a young man in his mid-'20s, bright, sarcastic, not really of a piece with his classmates; George McBrain (Louis 'Hard Labour' Raynes), a loud, garrulous Ulsterman, prone to lapsing into Frank Carson or Ian Paisley as the mood takes him; Phil Murray, the embittered, nervy straight man of a double act with his relaxed, likeable brother Ged; Sammy Samuels, a smartly-dressed Jewish businessman; and Irish docker Mick Connor. Their teacher is Eddie Waters (Bill 'Army Game' Fraser), "The Lancashire Lad" - a nearly man of wartime northern club comedy, known and respected by his eager students but with a sense of unfulfillment hanging round him. He leads them through some weird warm-ups for the main event of the evening - performing at a nearby club in front of a showbusiness agent, with a view to getting on his books. At the club, after a far from glowing introduction by the MC ("this'll last half an hour at the most"), the turns go on, and mostly bomb, particularly the Murray brothers, who try and do a mock-ventriloquist act but bicker amongst themselves and freeze up completely, and Price, as a clown-cum-bovver boy, who does a bit of mime with a comedy violin, then assaults two tailor's dummies in evening dress ("Laugh you buggers, laugh!"). Back in class, Challenor doles out cursory notes on the acts, generally unfavourable, but offers to sign up Samuels and McBrain, seemingly more for their adherence to the standard club comic patter than any genuine achievement in humour. As the comics start to melt away in mixed joy and disappointment, Price, left with Waters, kicks about the bones of his act for a while, then rounds on Waters for having gone soft since his early days, and unexpectedly gets an astounding, painful revelation from him. What makes all this so good is that it treads neatly along the tightrope so many Play for Today entries fall from. It's a "play of ideas" - what play isn't? - but it's also a story of real people - the comedians just happen to represent, in various ways, to comic stereotypes. The wily Samuels really would ditch his failing Yiddishe schtick halfway through and make with the Plan B of corny but crowd-pleasing "Irish ship full of yoyos" gags. Price's act is pure agit-prop, and could quite easily be imagined at the ICA, but he's no cartoon performance artist - he's also a keen student of comedy, able to ape Frank Randle and the like at the drop of a hat (needless to say, it's a brilliant turn by Pryce). Even though it's obviously meant as a bit of the ol' symbolism, the collapsing ventriloquist act is painfully convincing, and again, half-inspired by a similar act Randle used to do with Jimmy Clitheroe. Northern comic traditions are all over the play, and of course there's Fraser, entirely convincing as a weary, failed comic, but also as someone who passionately believes there's more to a life in comedy than telling gags for coins. Cough and the world coughs with you. Fart and you stand alone.  

Even Solomon - w Andrew Taylor. Paul Henley plays a sexually repressed and confused young man, whose reticence gives rise to speculation among friends and family.  

Just a Boy's Game - w Peter McDougall. A Thursday night in a Greenock pub, and as revellers drink to the beat of punk outfit The Cuban Heels knocking out a rickety version of Paint It Black, Jake McQuillan (Frankie Miller) and pal Dancer Dunnichy (Ken 'Murphy's Mob' Hutchison) find themselves drawn into a brawl. Jake, a noted local hard man, is trying to move away from such pointless aggro (as the barman remarks, 'I thought you'd given up the games?') but when Dunky McAfferty (Billy 'That Sinking Feeling' Greenlees)'s gang unsheath their chibs and start wantonly slashing the faces of punters, he's been provoked enough. The ensuing fight takes over the entire pub, and Jake arms himself with a bottle as the staff batten down the bar grilles. The police eventually arrive - a discreet few minutes after it's all cooled off, of course - and the (largely) innocent Jake is fingered by them as the instigator purely on his rep. Jake makes his way back home, to his grandparents, morose Jean 'Orkney' Taylor Smith and cadaverous, tubercular Grandad (legendary Edinburgh comic Hector Nichol). Grannie's worn down through worry, and there's no love lost between Frankie and his grandad, in his day a hard man himself of some rep, who scowls at both of them when he's not helplessly coughing his guts up (literally). Friday morning, Dancer wakes up to his wife (Katherine Stark) beating him about the head and demanding to know where the hell he was until five this morning. Calmly opening a tin of lager, he smooths things over with her - after a fashion - and, as their three kids bolt into the front room to turn on all domestic appliances for an invigorating pre-school blend of Johnny Cash on the radio and Open University quantum mechanics on the telly, Dancer gives himself the day off work, and cunningly hides what bread is left in the house about his person as an excuse to go out to the shop. His plan working, he skips down the street like a schoolboy during a teacher's strike, blagging a bottle of Vat 69 from the unopened offie, on the way to rendezvous Jake at the docks. It doesn't take long in the cab of Jake's crane, to persuade him that a long weekend is preferable to unloading containers and heating toast on the element. With a nod from the foreman that's surprisingly easy to obtain (as was Dancer's wife's agreement to phone him in sick - whatever work ethic there once was in these parts has long departed) Jake and Dancer head off in a torrential downpour to the barren estate which is home to Bella (Jan Wilson), a middle-aged woman who entertains the pair in her clarty flat for half a bottle of fortified wine. After Jake nearly sets fire to the house while lighting the bricket, Dancer makes it clear he's there for more than a, well, dance, and Jake reluctantly goes outside, to be challenged by some kids over the previous night's altercation with McAfferty. Smacking one of the boys in the head, and getting no reprisals from anyone, Jake walks away, slightly apprehensive at what seems to be brewing. Nearby is the flat of Jake's estranged mum, outside which he pauses, watching her Hoovering, but resists the temptation to call. The pair collect their ebullient chum Tanza (Gregor Fisher) from his garage prior to the evening's entertainments. A phone call from home - Grandad's at death's door - merely spurs Jake on to go to town more. A match in a quiet snooker hall is disrupted when the kids from earlier follow them in and eye them up. Taking the same boy he lamped earlier aside in the lavs, Jake reduces him to a pitiful, quivering wreck merely by staring him out. Finally, as the three leave the snooker hall, they're set upon by McAfferty's gang, and the ensuing punch-up, ranging round the nocturnal crates of the docks, makes the pub barney look like a schoolgirl slap-up. Jake manages to best McAfferty and Tanza looks after himself, but the less able Dancer loses an eye, runs pell mell into a throat-high mooring cable and tumbles into the dock, dead. Tanza grieves at the loss, but Jake remains as impassive as he's always been. 'It's just part of the Game,' he says, trying more to reassure himself than Tanza. Back home, Grandad's in his final minutes. The presence of various long-lost relatives, including mum, is heralded by Jake with a curt 'What do you want?' There's to be no tearful reunion at this wake. Gran, still resigned even though her husband's called her by her name for the first time in over thirty years, calls Jake in to see the old man. Jake decides to make his peace, forgiving Grandad for the contempt uously shabby treatement he's meted out to Gran, himself and the rest of the shattered family. The old boy chokes some air into his lungs, and summons a last ounce of strength to respond: 'I've... I've ne'er been fond o' you. And in my day, I could've taken ye any time.' Close in on Jake's ever-impassive eyes as the closing song (sung by Miller) plays out. What makes this fantastic entry work so well is McDougall's firm grasp of the rough milieu it depicts. Aside from the slovenly coppers, there's no finger-wgging at any outside authority here, it's almost straight reportage of the impossibility of rising from the bottom of the urban heap, the endless cycle of despondency and despair, with only the crutch of cheap wine and the status of the brawler to leaven the funereal monotony. Humour is here throughout the pain, not in a judgemental, mocking sense on behalf of the makers, or as wisecracks for their own sake, but a defence mechanism, showing the lads to be every bit as aware of what the suburban viewer would find 'gahstly' about their life, but still, if not able to change it significantly, than at least capable of shouldering it to one side for a moment. As Dancer appears after the pub fight with a bottle of whisky and twelve lagers, Tanza muses 'Well, that'll dae us for the bus.' Of the rain-sodden concrete housing estate, Dancer remarks 'I can remember this before they landscaped it.' Tanza's wayward choice of apparel is highlighted with: 'Did you cover your body in glue and jump through a wardrobe?' And the end gag - for all its tragic punch, it's still a gag, undercutting the expectation of a traditional deathbed reconciliation with majestic aplomb - is one of the most grimly powerful of any piece of drama. The performances are imbued with the same stock of first-hand knowledge as McDouigall's script. Hutchison and Fisher, the latter close to the very start of his acting career, are marvellous, and Miller, better known at the time for his songwriting, inhabits the intense-yet-poker-faced Jake in a way it's unlikely any trained actor would be able to. McDougall's Play for Today partner John MacKenzie directs at perfect pitch, drinking in the sozzled and grimy locations without trying to overstate his case with excessive focus on economic deprivation, and getting the most out of the intense face-to-face encounters when the words stop. And no-one can choreograph and film a ruck like MacKenzie. Despairing, defiant, compassionate but free from the empty calories of textbook polemic and hand-wringing sentiment, Just a Boy's Game belongs firmly among the top entries of the Play for Today canon.  

Dancer, Tanza and Jake stumble through 24 hours of aimless violence and drunkenness in Just a Boy's Game.

Billy - w GF Newman. Harrowing story of the brutal treatment inflicted on a four-year-old boy, in a typically unflinching play from the creator of Law and Order.  

Instant Enlightenment Including VAT - w Andrew Carr. Post-Jonestown indictment of personality cults, with a sinister Simon Callow as 'Maximillian Schreiber', taking an assortment of gullibles under his wing in a series of gruelling 9AM - midnight "motivation" lectures from which no-one is permitted to leave. Similar in subject matter and style to Potter's The Confidence Course of 14 years earlier (qv).  

A Hole in Babylon - w Jim Hawkins/Horace Ove. Account of the 1975 Spaghetti House Siege, when three black men held up a Knightsbridge Italian restaurant in a long stand-off with the police. One of the restaurant owners ended up breaking through the atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust to found a sort of friendship with the leader of the gang, and ended up testifying in his defence at the subsequent trial. With Floella Benjamin, Michael Sheard.  

The Slab-Boys - w John Byrne. First of a semi-autobiographical trilogy from the writer of Tutti Frutti, detailing the tribulations of a young man with artistic ambitions working in a carpet factory in the late '50s.  

Katie: The Year of a Child - w Ian Cullen/John Norton. Margaret Kelly plays a 14 year old child of a large Irish travelling family, who finds herself in charge when her father leaves for England and her mother falls ill. Featuring Pat 'Play School' Abernathy and 'the travelling people of Ireland'.  

The Network - w Stephen Fagan. A mutually beneficial upper middle class social circle begins to exert undue pressure on two of its members.