Posts

The Lie

Image
  The Lie, I discovered after watching it, was originally broadcast in Swedish, so that the Play for Today version was a translated work rather than, as I imagined, something commissioned from Ingmar Bergman especially for Play for Today. That explains why nothing about it seemed English - not the architecture, nor the settings, nor the clothes. Possibly not even the way the characters behaved - although I think it would be unfair to the people of Sweden to imagine they all live their lives along the lines of what one was shown in this play. The action opens on a shot of a one-story house, built around the 1960s I would guess. Conveniently for the cameraman the people inside the house sleep with their curtains open so we are able to peer through the windows to meet the main characters, each in their bed in their separate bedrooms. The husband gets up and does a few cursory physical jerks, the wife lies under the covers and expertly fends off her rather sweet little boy, who comes i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Angels Are So Few by Dennis Potter, broadcast 5 November 1970

Image
I enjoyed this odd little play. The opening scene is fairly unpromising. A Royal Mail van comes flying round the corner into a suburban street, a postman gets out to empty a pillar box, remarking on how cold it is, a woman watches him through her mullioned window and calls her child, saying it is "time for your programme", adding to herself, discontentedly, "time for MY programme." A young man comes rapidly down the street singing about Zion. He stops to chat to the postman who asks him why he isn't freezing, given that he is wearing sandals and bare feet, jeans, a cotton shirt and a striped blazer and nothing more. The newcomer replies, "It's winter my friend" and continues with a small sermon about how extraordinary it would be if all that we had ever said remained in the air above us, reminding us of the good and the bad utterances we have made. He explains to the postman that he is an angel and tries to get him to accept the present of a dead l...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Hallelujah Handshake

Image
  The Hallelujah Handshake  could equally well be called  The Fantasist  as that is what its central character rapidly turns out to be. Like  Robin Redbreast,  the play is supposedly drawn from reality. It tells the story of a man who joins church congregations in the hope of belonging - or, more than that, of becoming indispensable to others. It is well-acted and the enigmatic main character - who exaggerates and lies to impress, making it impossible to know who he really is - is intriguing. The script is well-written, the story well-shot and edited. But what must strike a viewer in 2024 more than anything else is the underlying assumption that churches in Great Britain are places teeming with people of all ages, central institutions in most individuals’ lives.  I was doubtful if that was true even at the time the play was broadcast, until by chance I came upon this wonderful piece by Robert Colls in a recent  New Statesman: “ The death of a chur...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robin Redbreast

Image
I saw this play years ago. It is something of a cult classic. Sitting on a winter's evening in a lonely Suffolk cottage, especially back when it was made, it would be enjoyably scary - a tale of rural pagans pursuing age-old rituals at the cost of feeble incomers.  When I watched it I was in Australia and I was sitting outside on a sunny late afternoon. In those circumstances the play was largely stripped of its ability to induce fear. All the same the scene when the stones come down the chimney is, even in broad daylight, pretty alarming. On the other hand, the final scene when the main character looks back from her car is pure village pantomime. The author explained some time after it was shown that he based it on a true story. That is hair-raising, if true,
Post a Comment
Read more

Hearts and Flowers by Peter Nicholls, first broadcast 3 December, 1970

Image
Apparently this is what he looked like in the early scenes It may not be worthwhile writing about this play, given that the only version I could find is so exceptionally dark and blurry that you might as well be listening to a radio play as watching a television play. All the same, as I was an eccentric child who often feigned illness in order to stay home from primary school to listen to the Afternoon Play on the BBC, I enjoyed it.  The play opens with the camera trained on a bed in which you eventually realise a woman is already lying and, while you watch, or listen, her husband joins her. There is a conversation about sex and whether she is still interested in him. She appears not to be enormously, and she mentions that she may be pregnant. Then the telephone rings and the husband is called away to his mother's, where, it transpires, his father has dropped down dead. A doctor turns up and either that night or the next day an undertaker. Everyone is highly matter-of-fact. With su...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Right Prospectus by John Osborne, 1970

Image
  Zoë - The Right Prospectus is the second play to be broadcast in the Play for Today series. Together with its predecessor, The Long Distance Piano Player, it ought to have been enough to have the entire series cancelled, in my opinion. I have rarely seen such a tedious load of piffle. The play opens on the visit of a wealthy couple to a boys' public school. The usual cliches associated with the portrayal of such institutions - a cricket match on a sunlit pitch overlooked by fine buildings, boys in tail-coats, others in boaters, a headmaster in a woodlined study, are all in evidence.  The visit complete, the couple drive off in a Bentley or similarly grand vehicle, complete with chauffeur. We find them next at lunch in a country hotel or restaurant, where they pore over prospectuses for further public schools. It emerges from their conversation that they have no children and that the wife wants none. Having removed the broad brimmed green hat she wore to tour the school - i...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, 6 June, 1974

Image
Zoë:  The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is, according to the information accompanying the film on YouTube,a play written in the 1970s by Merseyside-born playwright John McGrath. From April 1973, beginning at Aberdeen Arts Centre, it was performed in a touring production in community centres in Scotland by 7:84 and other community theatre groups. The television version, directed by John Mackenzie was broadcast on 6 June 1974 by the BBC as part of the Play for Today series. The play seems to me to be the nearest you can get on telly to "promenade theatre". The one and only thing I like about promenade theatre is that you get a bit of exercise as you have to move about a building, rather than sitting in a seat in the stalls. Of course, when watching such a thing on television this is no longer the case. Instead of you wandering about, the production does the wandering for you, jumping between the interior of Dornie village hall - complete with rather bemused, mostly...
Post a Comment
Read more