Play for Today Pilgrimage

    The Wikipedia entry for this play baldly states that " Our Day Out is about poor children from Liverpool, England", which makes it sound rather solemn. Indeed, if the entry had added that the children in question were all in a remedial class at their local school, that would have compounded the impression. However, this is one of the most joyous, life-giving pieces of television drama that I have seen. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, as Willy Russell also gave us Educating Rita.   Shot entirely on film, the play begins in a street that looks as if bailiffs have removed everything of value, including the trees. It is the bleak, post-industrial landscape that will later feature in Alan Bleasdale's Boys From the Blackstuff. A small girl in school uniform is stopped from crossing the road by an elderly lollipop man and she explains that she's in a hurry because her class is going on a school trip. "Where are you going today?"   "It'...

When Phil told me we'd be watching the trilogy of plays that launched the career of Kenneth Branagh, I was excited, as I'm a fan of Branagh. Some twenty minutes into the first of the three plays, I began to have severe doubts. However, by the end of the trilogy, I decided it was a triumph, while at the same time having been bored stiff quite a lot of the time and finding large chunks of it melodramatic and quite unpleasant. It is the great mystery of theatre that things that are a bit of an endurance test can also be things you do not regret having seen. The three plays are all set in Belfast in the late 1970s. As the first and second open, this is explained on the screen, the "1970s" acquiring an apostrophe in the second one, while the playwright's name, Graham Reid, sheds an initial "J." between Play One and Play Two. Most of the action takes place in the tiny front room of a small terrace house, where the Martin family - Norman, the father, and Billy,...