Play for Today Pilgrimage

  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...

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,

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...