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by Gillian A.M. Mitchell

Introduction: ‘What Kind of Life?’ (BBC Television for Schools and Colleges, 1971)

Brian Latham (Charles Bolton), a senior member of the Mill Street Youth Club in the northern industrial town of Cambury, is persuaded by his friends to sing a couple of songs with The Gift, the rock band which is providing live music for the club’s Friday night dance. His performance, enthusiastically received by fellow club-goers, impresses the band members, and they offer Brian the chance to join them as vocalist. While Brian’s friends resoundingly encourage him to embrace this opportunity, Brian himself is less certain. He is part-way through an apprenticeship at a local factory, and understands the risks of abandoning the security of his current path. After visiting the band in their rather run-down digs the following morning, Brian feels more torn still. The band members are thoroughly honest about the circumstances in which they live. Theirs is a highly precarious, hand-to-mouth, existence, and they advise Brian that taking the job would mean having to leave friends and family behind, although the opportunity to focus on music provides its own rewards. Brian proceeds to discuss the situation with his parents. His mother is ultimately supportive, recognising that he must make his own choices, but his father, who had helped to secure the factory apprenticeship for his son, reacts to the idea of the career change with angry bewilderment. More confused than ever, Brian returns to Mill Street to seek advice from Steve Brookes, the youth club leader. Though helpful, Steve tells Brian what he has essentially known all along – that, ultimately, decisions concerning ‘what kind of life’ he chooses to pursue are his, and his alone, to make.

‘What Kind of Life?’ was the tenth and final episode of a set of short dramas focused on the activities and members of the Mill Street Youth Club, and first transmitted from January to March 1971 as part of the long-running BBC educational television series Television Club. It is also the only episode of the ‘Mill Street’ series held by the BBC Archive and known to survive today; all others are considered ‘missing, believed wiped.’[1]

This three-part blog post explores a set of dramatised programmes which proved engaging and successful with school audiences during its original transmissions. The programmes constituted a significant change of style and direction for the established Television Club strand, via their focus on social issues and their efforts to portray the lives of contemporary teenagers, and the diverse challenges which they faced, in a realistic and relatable manner. Regrettably, however, and in common with so many educational programmes of its vintage, the ‘Mill Street’ series is largely forgotten today. Part 1 of the post outlines the background to the programmes and the early history of Television Club; Part 2 explores the characters, themes and setting of the ‘Mill Street’ stories, while Part 3 discusses the casting and filming of the episodes and their reception within schools, alongside a consideration of the status of ‘What Kind of Life?’ as the sole surviving episode of the set.

Television Club, 1962-70, and the uses of drama in BBC Educational Television

Beginning in 1962, Television Club, which was invariably broadcast during the spring and summer terms of the school year, was the BBC’s principal educational offering for pupils who encountered significant difficulties with their schoolwork, or who were identified as having particular special educational needs. Initially aimed at pupils (mostly in mainstream secondary education, but also in some specialist schools) in the 11-13 age bracket, Television Club evolved a particular approach and format which apparently worked very effectively throughout the early series. During the 1960s, the programme focused on the dramatised adventures of a succession of family groups – starting with the Wade family (1962-3) and continuing with the Brents (1964-66), both of which comprised two parents and two children (brother and sister). The 1967 programmes altered the focus slightly by featuring two single-parent families – the Barnards, consisting of a widowed mother, her father-in-law and her young son, Peter, and their friends, the Mortimers (Ann and her father, who was also widowed). Nevertheless, the emphasis on the dynamics and tribulations of family life remained consistent throughout the 1960s, with the dramatised portions of the episodes frequently prefigured, or followed, by comments from a ‘club leader’ presenter figure (a role played initially by the actor and former teacher Windsor Davies, with James Lloyd assuming presenting duties from 1964 to 1967).

Television Club tended to adopt something of a ‘light touch’ approach where pedagogical aims were concerned, maintaining this flexibility to accommodate the varied requirements of the audience.[2] The presenter would often appear in the studio to introduce the episode and discuss, in a broad manner, some of its concepts and ideas, while teachers’ notes for the programmes would contain suggestions for activities based on the various topics covered in the episodes. These could be adapted to suit the needs and preferences of the pupils. Young viewers’ freeform creative responses to the programmes – particularly in the shape of artwork, which they were asked to submit in exchange for a certificate of recognition and the chance to have their work showcased on the programme – were also strongly encouraged throughout these early years. Meanwhile, the reading books which accompanied the series, carefully phrased in accessible language, enabled pupils to revisit the stories featured in the programmes. They also – as teachers apparently observed with some frequency – afforded young people who found literacy challenging the chance to engage with materials which were geared towards an adolescent demographic, and therefore more meaningful and enjoyable for them to read.[3]

The varied ways in which drama could serve as an educational tool had been recognised by broadcasters from the earliest days of television for schools. Both classic and modern works of drama had been included in BBC Television’s provision for Schools and Colleges since the late 1950s. However, series, like Television Club, which blended drama with documentary or ‘real-life’ factual elements were also used, with increasing frequency, as a means of enhancing pupils’ learning, or to make particular topics or themes additionally vivid. Series such as Your World (1961-63), for example,aimed to encourage pupils to reflect on particular social or moral issues by fusing dramatised sequences with elements of debate.[4] The long-running Going to Work (1961-86), similarly, often presented dramatised depictions of situations which young school-leavers were likely to face. Some of these were self-contained ‘plays for discussion’, but others would showcase the dramatised sequences before proceeding to evaluate, in studio settings, the scenarios which they had presented.[5] Beginning in 1968, Scene, another enduring and highly acclaimed series aimed at pupils in the senior years of secondary school, made particularly inventive use of this technique. The first play of the series – Keith Dewhurst’s award-winning ‘Last Bus’ (first transmitted 10 October 1968) – centred on a brutal and jarring depiction of an assault on a bus-conductor by four youths. The second half of the play consisted of semi-structured, studio-based interviews with the various characters, during which they were asked to explain their actions on the night of the incident.

Television Club devised its own approach to the blending of fact and dramatised fiction, in a manner designed to suit and stimulate those pupils for whom the programme aimed to cater. As suggested by Morton Surguy, who produced many editions of Television Club between 1972 and its last fully original series of 1978, the longstanding value of drama for the programme’s viewers was not only in allowing them to ‘see and assess models of behaviour’, but also in helping to ‘generate a degree of emotional involvement’ which might serve as a prompt for further work and ‘action’.[6] Its 1960s series seemed, overall, to have been very well received by both teachers and pupils, with the adventures of the various families, and the follow-up work which they inspired, proving engaging and effective for school audiences.

Into the 1970s – A New Approach for Television Club

In 1969, the School Broadcasting Council (SBC – a BBC-funded organisation, comprising broadcasting and educational experts, which worked closely with the Corporation to advise on the commissioning, production and reception of educational television series) declared that the steadily successful Television Club would be steered in new directions for the 1970s.[7] Repeats of the Barnard family’s adventures would be screened across the first two terms of 1970. However, for 1971, the traditional focus on particular family groups would be dispensed with – and, instead of offering continuity between the spring and summer terms via a focus on the same characters and settings, two completely distinct and contrasting sets of stories would be showcased.[8] The intention was to focus, during the spring term, on the exploits of an urban youth club in the north of England, while the summer term editions would present the adventures of a young sailor who, on arrival in London, finds himself unwittingly associating with criminals. This latter, seven-part, serial, shot on film, and preserved in its entirety in the BBC Archive, was first broadcast between April and June 1971 as ‘Roy and the Danelli Job.’

Production techniques for the ‘Mill Street Youth Club’ episodes in the spring term, however, were more typical of those utilised for dramatised educational television programmes at the time. Much of the action was studio-bound, and therefore recorded on videotape (with BBC Television Centre’s Studio 5, where many educational programmes were filmed, used for the majority of episodes).[9] However, the literature accompanying the programmes pointedly highlighted that ‘Cambury’, the industrial town in which the club was located, was based on Preston, Lancashire. Location scenes for the episodes were filmed in Preston, with the youth club attached to St Joseph’s Catholic Church apparently utilised for exterior shots of the club.[10] From its inception, Television Club had always maintained a strong focus on a sense of place – the geography, topography, facilities and culture of the communities (fictitious, but based on real-life locations) in which the various episodes of the series were set frequently informed the dramatic action, and were often commented upon in detail by the programme’s early presenters, and also within the literature accompanying the series. The Wade family lived in a new council house on the outskirts of a Midlands town, while the Brents resided in a new town outside London. The Barnards and Mortimers hailed from a small rural village.[11] The distinctive features of each of these communities were introduced and highlighted to pupils via maps within the accompanying literature, miniaturised models within the studio, presenter discussions of their characteristics, and dramatised storylines focused on particular districts or local institutions. The Mill Street episodes certainly continued in this particular Television Club tradition, although in other ways – as the second part of the post highlights – they would diverge considerably from the patterns set by the earlier series.

Part 2 to follow

[1] For BBC Archive holdings for Television Club, see the BBC Archive Catalogue at https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/collections/bbc-motion-gallery; ‘TV Brain’, the website of the organisation Kaleidoscope, which specialises in identifying, and searching for, missing television programmes, also provides information on lost and surviving episodes of the series. See https://www.tvbrain.info/tv-archive?showname=television+club&type=lostshow. ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ refers to the British Film Institute (BFI) initiative, spearheaded by Dick Fiddy, to locate and showcase lost television programmes.

[2] For an informative and detailed account of the establishment, remit and various early series of Television Club, see the Broadcast for Schools website, by Ben Clarke: https://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Television_Club (Accessed 15/1/26).

[3] Clarke, ‘Television Club,’ Broadcast for Schools.

[4] See, for example, the listing for the edition broadcast on April 21, 1961 at https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e022640e31f54e8784c336b1079b6cda (Accessed 15/1/26).

[5] For example, ‘False Start?’ (26 April 1971) was a ‘play for discussion’ which depicted a young girl’s difficult first days working for a local newspaper. ‘The Interview’ (15 February 1971) meanwhile, presented dramatised scenes of a job interview process which viewers, prompted by the presenter Chris Kelly, were invited to evaluate.

[6] Morton Surguy, ‘Television Club for the Less Able,’ British Journal of Special Education 1, no. 2, (June 1974), 22.

[7] On the history and remit of the SBC, see Steven Barclay, ‘A Historical Framework for Understanding Public Service Media and Children’s Education in the UK: BBC School Broadcasting, 1924-2008’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 22, no. 2 (2025), 190.

[8] The new plans are outlined in ‘Television 1970-71: Programme Proposals (Category C) for Television Club’, Minutes of Meeting on November 14th, 1969, of the School Broadcasting Council for the United Kingdom Secondary 1 Programme Sub-Committee (SB.95/69)’. In ‘Television Club – Part 1’ (File C-TE-1), BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Caversham, R103/336/1.

[9] This information generally appears on the front cover of the 1971 camera scripts for the ‘Mill Street’ episodes (held on microfilm at BBC WAC). However, the script for Episode 8, ‘The Visitor’, indicates that this episode was filmed in Studio G, Lime Grove.

[10] See Clarke, ‘Television Club’, Broadcast for Schools.

[11] Clarke, ‘Television Club’, Broadcast for Schools.

Selected List of Relevant Programmes held in the BBC Archive

Transmission dates have been taken from the BBC Archive Catalogue at https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/collections/bbc-motion-gallery and the BBC Programme Index  https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/.

*Indicates that the programme was accessed via Learning on Screen (https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand)  **Indicates that the programme was accessed via a Research Viewing Appointment at the British Film Institute (BFI) in July 2025.

Television Club

‘Meet the Wade Family’ (The Wade Family), BBC1, 16 January 1962*

‘A Hundred Years Old’ (The Brent Family), BBC1, 2 March 1964*
‘Mr Brent’s Dream’ (The Brent Family), BBC1, 31 January1966*

‘The Dinner Date’ (The Barnard Family), BBC1, 21 February1967*
‘Think Twice’ (The Barnard Family), BBC1, 25 April 1967*

‘What Kind of Life?’ (‘Mill Street Youth Club’), BBC1, 23 March 1971*

‘The Streets Are Paved With Gold’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 27 April 1971**
‘Take Your Money and Go’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 4 May 1971**
‘Find the Furniture’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 11 May 1971**
‘Follow Him’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 18 May 1971**
‘Quick – to the Garage’ (Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 25 May 1971**
‘Are You Mr Perkins?’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’), BBC1, 8 June 1971**
‘The Proof We Need’ (‘Roy and the Danelli Job’ ), BBC1, 15 June 1971**

‘Finding the Way’ (Magazine programme with Anne Gale and David Freeland), BBC1, 22 April 1975*
‘I Remember When …’ (Magazine programme with Anne Gale and David Freeland), BBC1, 13 May 1975*
‘Alright for Some’ (Magazine programme – film sequences only), BBC1, 3 June 1975**

‘Nick’ (‘A Place Like Home’), BBC1, 14 June 1977*
‘Push for Poem’ (‘A School in Time’), BBC1, 6 June 1978*

Scene

‘Last Bus’, BBC1, 10 October 1968*
‘The Sentence of the Court’, BBC1, 17 October 1968*
‘Because There’s Nothing Else to Do’, BBC1, 5 March 1970*
‘I Don’t Know Where to Turn’ , BBC1, 22 March 1973*

Going to Work

‘The Interview’, BBC1, 15 February 1971**
‘False Start?’, BBC1, 26 April 1971**

Working with Youth

‘Different Aims, Different Approaches’, BBC1, 13 April 1972**
‘Making Contact’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 20 April 1972**
‘Why Activities?’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 27 April 1972**
‘Self-Governing and Self-Programming’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 4 May 1972**
‘Individuals in Groups (1)’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 11 May 1972**
‘Individuals in Groups (2)’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 18 May 1972**
‘Helping Individuals’, BBC1, 25 May 1972)**
‘Into the Community’ (mute film sequences only), BBC1, 1 June 1972**
‘Using Space and People’ (film sequences only), BBC2, 8 June 1972**
‘Reaching Out’ (film sequences only), BBC1, 15 June 1972**

Gillian Mitchell is a senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests are in post-WWII popular music and popular culture in Britain and North America

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

Late Summer (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 07 September 1963). Written by Alexander Baron, produced by Leonard White and directed by Reginald Collin. 

 Interviewed about Armchair Theatre in 1960, author Alexander Baron (1917-99) explained his credo as a writer: ‘I like to delve around in every corner of life. Some things I find are nice and other things are nasty. But unsatisfactory lives and situations are every bit as much the business of the writer as the happy ones.’ Late Summer, the story of the stressful relationship between a middle-aged woman and a much younger man, is a fine example of these preoccupations, realised through the unflinching intensity and closeness of television drama.

 Baron was a celebrated novelist before he began to write screenplays. Born in the then largely Jewish East End of London, the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s converted him to communism. An early career in journalism (becoming assistant editor of left-wing magazine Tribune in his early twenties) was interrupted by service in the Second World War, in which he fought in Italy and Normandy. Baron’s wartime experiences became the basis for a trilogy of novels From the City, from the Plough (1948), There’s No Home (1950) and The Human Kind (1953), acclaimed by public and critics for their visceral description and psychological acuity. A second strand of Baron’s fiction told stories of criminal East End life, in novels such as The Lowlife (1963) and Strip Jack Naked (1966). This seamy side of London life was investigated in the first of Baron’s four Armchair Theatre plays, the Soho-set Clip Joint People (4 December 1960, now lost), while The Hero (23 April 1961, another lost play for the series) was set in the East End clothing business.

 Baron’s ideas for television plays often came from observing people’s private behaviour as revealed through their public interactions with each other. The notion for his first TV drama, A Bit of Happiness (Granada/ ITV 1959), came to him while he was lounging in a deckchair in Regent’s Park: ‘Two people, also in deckchairs, were sitting in front of me, and I could not help overhearing them quarrel. It was fatuous, irrational bickering, which told me nothing about the couple, but a great deal about the illusion of love among ordinary men and women.’ Inspiration for Late Summer was similar, coming when he noticed an attractive middle-aged woman and a man 20 years her junior on holiday in Italy, who always appeared to be quarrelling and affectionately making up. The couple turned out to be a mother and son, but the intensity and ambiguity of their relationship when viewed from a distance set Baron thinking about how a relationship between a man in his early twenties and a woman of his mother’s generation might resolve itself. Mothers and sons are continually referred to in Late Summer, both in conversations between Helga and David (the couple having the affair) and in remarks made by onlookers.

 Late Summer is set in a rather sparsely attended hotel in the South of France where, as one character observes, ‘out of season’s one thing, but this is death’. The play is almost exclusively focused upon events in the hotel, with David and Helga’s journey to reach there shown in a sequence of still photographs, over a soundtrack of dialogue and motoring sound effects that works like a radio play: ‘Fasten your seatbelts, we’re taking off!’ Life beyond the hotel is reduced to one small exterior beach set, which becomes the site for a quarrel between the couple.

 The hotel itself is realised in a characteristically elaborate and elegant multi-layered set from the prolific Armchair Theatre designer Voytek (1925-2014). Baron’s script is predicated around the opportunities for overlooking, overhearing and speculating about the lives of other guests created by ‘the old hotel game’, and Voytek’s set presents a clearly-organised space of interconnected reception desk, dining room, bar, veranda, staircase, rooms and balconies in which activity can occur and be observed. In particular, the telling and clear (but technically tricky) moment of character insight in Act Two when Helga descends the staircase and sights David at the bar is achieved through the combined and synchronised talents of Voytek’s design, Reginald Collin’s direction and the actors’ performances.

 Hotels exist in a hinterland in between private and public space, and Helga’s appearance on the staircase (a private despair publicly observed) is one of several moments that make dramatic use of this ambiguity. Even Helga’s room is not entirely private, as seen when a row between the lovers catches the attention of a maid in the garden (shown in an audacious cutaway shot), a lack of privacy that determines events in the play’s final scene. The hotel’s other guests (including a discreetly-depicted gay couple) form light relief against Helga and David. These characters act as a chorus, submitting judgement upon the lovers, especially the North Country family the Dinsdales (‘It’s no crime to take an interest in people’). In particular, the prejudices that nosey Mrs Dinsdale (Joan Heath) expresses in her ham-fisted attempts to befriend Helga serve as an unwitting ironic public commentary on private despair.

 Anglo-American actress Constance Cummings (1910-2005) played Helga (‘with a fine display of anguished lips and quivering glances’, in the words of one critic). Best known at the time for her roles in sophisticated West End comedy, the fuller extent of Cummings’ abilities later became recognised when she played Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s epic tragedy Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the National Theatre in 1971,opposite Laurence Olivier (the subsequent ATV television version is available on a Network DVD). Although Helga is not so complex a role as Mary Tyrone, Cummings’ performance in Late Summer displays something of the same feeling for tragedy. Discussing the part, the actress identified a tragic potential in Helen’s situation: ‘I think people are apt to be awfully censorious about an older woman falling in love with a man so much younger than herself. They take a high tone and say she should know better. Whereas this sort of relationship, as in Helga’s case, is often a tragic sort of compensation for something missed.’

 Helga’s lover David was played (‘with the right flashy, superficial charm’ according to the previously cited critic) by one of Britain’s most exciting young actors John Stride (b. 1936), who had recently performed as Romeo (to Judi Dench’s Juliet) and Prince Hal in Henry IV at the Old Vic. The actor had done little television work before Late Summer, but went on to become one of ITV’s star performers as David Main in Yorkshire TV’s popular legal drama series The Main Chance (1969-75, available on Network DVD). A magnetic facility to communicate righteous indignation and fury made the character of Main a compelling figure for viewers, qualities also seen in Stride’s performance in Late Summer, helping to convey the attraction that the singularly unpleasant David holds for Helga. Stride’s youthful impulsive physicality complements Cummings’ refinement, seen in David’s sulking like a small boy with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, or clambering around the veranda in an excess of energy. John Stride had few illusions about the unheroic nature of David, finding motivation in the character’s honesty: ‘His saving grace is that he can face up to his own shortcomings – his writing pretensions, his refusal to grow up, and his sponging – and he despises himself quite a bit.’

 Late Summer’s two star performances do much to convince the viewer of the moment-by-moment reality of the lovers’ affair. In particular Constance Cummings’ dignity and refinement helps to sell the somewhat sketchy tragic historical context and backstory invented by  Alexander Baron for Helga. Her display of repressed and released emotion in the play’s final scene is a master class of close-up television acting, and is a lasting testament to the dramatic values of Armchair Theatre.

These notes for Late Summer were included in Volume 4 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2018.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

The Invasion (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 31 March 1963). Written by Angus Wilson, produced by Leonard White and directed by Charles Jarrott.

Angus Wilson (1913-91) was one of the most popular and acclaimed British literary novelists and short story writers of the mid-twentieth century, whose works biographer Margaret Drabble characterises as featuring ‘brilliant satiric wit, acute social invention, and a love of the macabre and the farcical, combined with humanity, compassion and a lively interest in human affairs.’ As well as writing three much-read novels of the 1950s (Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Middle Age of Mrs Elliot), Wilson also scripted a stage play, The Mulberry Bush (the debut production of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956). The combination of great literary acclaim, popularity and a proven interest in writing drama, inspired Armchair Theatre producer Sydney Newman to offer Wilson a contract to write television dramas exclusively for the series.

 The three Armchair Theatre plays Wilson wrote for the series show a developing confidence and fluency in the medium of television drama. After the Show (20 September 1959, available on the Network Armchair Theatre Volume 4 collection) was adapted from a short story, and shows a tentative understanding of how dramatic speech works on screen, with one critic suggesting that because Wilson was ‘a literary man’ who ‘when he writes dialogue to be spoken (…) tends to overload it and use turns of phrase that would read well but sound self-conscious.’ These qualms were shared by the play’s star, Hermione Baddeley, who told Wilson that, ‘You wrote some lovely words, dear – I didn’t say many of them, but I knew you wouldn’t mind.’ After the Show’s combination of black comedy and unflinching satire – it starts with a suicide attempt, exploited by assorted unsympathetic grubby bohemian characters for their own ends – meant that an advance warning that the play was only suitable for adult viewers had to be displayed onscreen. Introducing a play that was unorthodox in both register and tone to the readers of the TV Times, director Ted Kotcheff explained that, ‘No one has tried to write this kind of comedy before. It will be a new experience for viewers, and one which I hope they will want repeated.’

 Wilson’s (lost) second Armchair Theatre, The Stranger (20 November 1960) was his first wholly original television play. Set in rural East Anglia, it tells the story of lodger Mr Milroy (Peter Sallis), a 48 year-old bachelor devoted to the care of Mrs Blacker (Madge Ryan), his 75 year-old landlady. When the old woman dies, Milroy is brutally evicted and humiliated by her small-minded legacy-hunting family. The Stranger ends with Milroy’s denunciation of the family for their fear of ‘anything that’s different, anything that doesn’t fit into your little schemes of making more lolly and getting on and having good positions.’

 Angus Wilson’s final Armchair Theatre, The Invasion is a highly ambitious work that combines two opposing strands, with a characteristic social-satirical story undercut by an outlandish tale of Martian invasion, with human characters so wrapped up in their own concerns that they are oblivious to the invasion happening around them. Margaret Drabble traces the play’s inspiration to Wilson’s experience of the 1953 Coronation in a Trust House hotel, where he observed the celebrations of the young drowning out the feeble attempts of older revellers with approval:

 [In The Invasion] only two schoolboys, playing with their television sets, pick up the messages, and like Cassandra, they are ignored. The idea for the play clearly sprang from Coronation Day in Suffolk, and the vision of those alienated prep-school boys hanging around on the fringes of village life – a theme of England divided, un-selfknowing, trapped in the past, unable to meet the future. It is a social comedy rather than a work of science fiction.

 The play revolves around the death of Lord Swent which generates a battle of wills and wits between two families, the old entrenched country firm of the Hedge-Hackings pitted against the new money of the Land-Prices who have taken over Swent Abbey. Both clans have their figurehead. The imposing Clarissa Hedge-Hacking was played by Frances Rowe (1913-88), who first made a name for herself playing Eliza Doolittle and Anne Whitefield in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Man and Superman on Broadway in the 1940s, and is today best remembered for playing the imposing mother Nancy Penrose in the sitcom Fresh Fields (ITV/ Thames 1984-86). Rowe’s theatrical pedigree and comical talents accentuate Mrs Hedge-Hacking’s hauteur and confidence in her own beliefs such as in the superiority of her own servants (‘Simpson’s getting terribly deaf but at least he can understand English, when he can hear’). Property tycoon Royston Land-Price was played by Patrick Wymark (1920-1970), a star television performer of the moment because of his role as Machiavellian businessman John Wilder in boardroom drama The Plane Makers (ATV 1963-65, continued in The Power Game ATV 1965-69). Like Wilder, Land-Price is an ingratiating man of money, largesse and power with quickly-exhausted reserves of charm: ‘So long as people amuse me, they’re welcome to anything I have to offer them, but when they cease to amuse me I kick ‘em out!’

One of the production’s great assets is the expansive Swent Abbey set. Designed by future director James Goddard, its multiple layers are shown to dazzling effect in the play’s swift-changing opening scene. The Abbey’s garish modern features and alterations such as a ‘junior relax room’, reach their apogee in the feature of the baronial fireplace (complete with plastic boar on a spit) that revolves around to become a (staffed) bar.

 Although not exactly a science fiction play, The Invasion makes interesting use of SF tropes, with radio messages picked up from Mars, and a threatening message broadcast to the people of earth (something of a scoop for ‘Mercia Television’). These scenes’ style is indebted to recent ABC anthology series Out of This World (1962), with a recurring sting in Robert Earley’s incidental music a homage to Eric Siday’s OOTW theme. The sleight of hand used in the gradual revelation of the Martian invasion is skilful, acting as a visual counterpoint to Wilson’s witty dialogue. First shown en masse in anonymous crowds, the aliens subsequently appear in swift cutaways, or in the background of scenes, leaving viewers unable to focus for long enough confirm their suspicions. To the unobservant humans, these creatures’ apparitions can be explained by existing prejudices – they must be tourists, Americans or (sotto voce) ‘jay ee double-u ess’. Even once the invaders’ knobbly faces are fully exposed, they are ‘probably the servants – half these village people are deformed.’ The play’s distinctive superimposition of sharp satire and SF parody was generally well-received, especially by Telegraph critic Lyn Lockwood, who praised it as ‘deliciously funny stuff – to Athene Seyler, as the last of a noble line arrived for the ceremony in his casket, went the most laugh-making line I can remember hearing in a television comedy.’

 Writing in 1975, Armchair Theatre’s Story Editor Irene Shubik hailed Wilson as an ‘outstandingly original and skilled’ television writer, the creator of plays ‘so carefully constructed [and where] each word of dialogue was so meaningful in terms of character revelation and satire that each deleted line was a genuine loss. Not until I worked with William Trevor some years later did I encounter once more literary craftsmanship of this order in television writing.’ Although The Invasion was his final original television play, three extraordinary serials taken from Angus Wilson’s novels were subsequently made, Late Call (BBC 1975), The Old Men at the Zoo (BBC 1983) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (ITV/ Thames 1992), adapted by Dennis Potter, Troy Kennedy Martin and Andrew Davies respectively.

This is a slightly revised version of the notes for The Invasion that were included in Volume 2 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2017.

By Lillian Crawford

‘Femme Helmers Brighten Brit Biz’ ran the headline of a Variety article by Adam Dawtrey in 1995. The feature covers a new generation of women directors working in the British film industry, including Beeban Kidron and Antonia Bird, both of whom directed films which were broadcast under the Screen Two banner. Dawtrey quotes David M. Thompson, who produced Priest (18 November 1995), directed by Bird, and Captives (11 May 1996), directed by Angela Pope, explaining the reason for hiring more women to direct single dramas at the BBC: ‘Women are more willing to let go emotionally than some English men directors, and films that let go emotionally are what audiences want to see’. Mark Shivas, Head of BBC Film, echoes Thompson’s sentiment, saying, ‘There’s an emotional range that women can bring to films that men, and especially British men, find difficult, because they are so repressed’. (1) In 1993 the BBC Charter Review series published an essay addressing the question of the organisation’s employment of women, noting that as a public service body its workforce ought to reflect the demographic variety of its constituency (2). An increasing number of women joined the Association of Cinematograph, Television, and Allied Technicians (ACTT) during the 1980s, especially in Floor positions in film and television. The largest change in this decade was that almost two hundred women joined the union in a ‘producing’ or ‘directing’ role. (3) The BBC responded to this increase by hiring more women as directors, including for Screen Two productions. 

Out of 168 films broadcast with the Screen Two ident, sixteen were directed by women. This includes three by Pope (Sweet As You Are [24 January 1988]; Children Crossing [25 March 1990] and  Captives), and two by Jean Stewart (Men of the Month [15 May 1994] and Nervous Energy [2 December 1995]). It also includes two by Bird, who in addition to Priest had her 1993 ScreenPlay Safe repeated as a Screen Two on 1 June 1994 when ScreenPlay and Screen Two were merged under the single Screen Two title. Nine further women directed one feature each: Barbara Rennie (Dead Lucky [17 January 1988]); Anna Benson Gyles (Stanley [31 January 1988]); Eva Kolouchova [Flying in the Branches [22 January 1989]); Jenny Wilkes (Sitting Targets [19 March 1989]); Lesley Manning (My Sister-Wife [23 February 1992]); Jane Howell (Return to Blood River [13 April 1994]); Noella Smith (Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre [21 May 1995]); Beeban Kidron (Great Moments in Aviation [11 November 1995]); and Ann Turner (Dallas Doll [16 November 1996]). This totals twelve women who directed Screen Two productions. Of those sixteen films, eight were written by women—two by their director (Dead Lucky and Dallas Doll). Eight were solely produced by a woman, with two further films co-produced by a woman with a man. Six films were headed by women in the writer, director and producer positions.

In 1974, the first ‘Women’s Introductory Technical Workshop’ was held at the National Film School (NFS), later the National Film and Television School (NFTS), which was established in 1971 after the Department of Education and Science recommended its creation in 1967. The workshop provided women from different areas of the film industry with the opportunity to learn how to use professional camera and sound equipment, delivered by women from the ACTT, the BBC, and NFS. Several women who directed films for Screen Two were NFTS graduates, including Kidron, Wilkes, Smith and Manning. When the school was established, only one of the twenty-five students enrolled was female, although this increased through the 1970s. While the degree was almost a guarantee for a job for men, it was considerably harder for women graduates to break into mainstream directing (4).

An alternative route for British women into directing was through theatre. Howell was the only woman to direct for both Play for Today and Screen Two. She directed plays for many other BBC strands from 1975, including Centre Play, Second City Firsts, Play of the Week, Play of the Month, and ScreenPlay. Her most significant television work was directing for the BBC Shakespeare series—The Winter’s Tale in 1981, the entire first tetralogy, consisting of Henry VI parts one to three and Richard III in 1983, and Titus Andronicus in 1985. She was the only woman to direct for the series. Born in 1935, Howell was by far the oldest woman to direct for Screen Two when she made Return to Blood River for the 1994 series. Her education began at Bristol University and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, before she went on to direct plays with the Hornchurch Repertory Company in the early 1960s and then joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Howell’s transition to television came through the BBC directors’ training course in the 1970s. Unlike the riskier hiring of young, politically-conscious, feminist filmmakers fresh from 1970s NFTS courses, Howell was a stalwart.

The Royal Court also played a role in the creative development of Antonia Bird. Born in 1951 to a stage-manager mother and an actor father, Bird started work as an assistant stage manager at Coventry Rep where her hopes of becoming an actress were derailed by stage fright. Bird went on to become a resident director at the Royal Court from 1978, where she worked with Hanif Kureishi, Samuel Beckett, Trevor Griffiths, and Jim Cartwright. Her transition to television came with a small-screen adaptation of Tom McClenaghan’s play Submariners in 1983, which Bird originated at the Royal Court. Unlike Howell, who managed to remain in the more highbrow realm of single plays, it was a decade before Bird returned to the genre with Safe for ScreenPlay in 1993. During that time Bird directed episodes for a plethora of series, including Casualty, The Bill, and Inspector Morse, as well as the miniseries The Men’s Room in 1991. In 1985, the same year that Screen Two began, Julia Smith and Tony Holland created the soap drama EastEnders, which was praised at the time for its realistic depiction of daily British life in the fictional neighbourhood of Albert Square. Bird was recruited to direct eighteen episodes from 1985 to 1986, including a celebrated two-hander starring Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson.

Czech director Eva Kolouchova directed episodes of Coronation Street between 1986 and 1987 before she directed Flying in the Branches for the 1989 series of Screen Two. She worked as Second Editing Director to Michael Apted on 1984’s 28 Up at Granada Television, where she was employed to make drama-documentaries or ‘docudramas’ for the current affairs department. A profile of Kolouchova in Television Weekly from March 1983 heralds the director as one of the pioneers of this hybrid genre, detailing how she came to Britain on a scholarship to read History and Politics at Cambridge in 1970 before being tried and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment by her government in her absence for her ‘revisionist’ beliefs. She was saved from prison by being employed as a researcher at Granada on World in Action, although she had her citizenship taken away by the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia after she produced the 1980 docudrama Invasion about the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 (5). Flying in the Branches follows sisters Dana and Sue who were born in Czechoslovakia but have not seen each other for twenty years. Inspired by Kolouchova’s own life, the script was developed with Anna Fodorova, a fellow Czech woman living in London, with the character Sue remaining in England after the Soviet invasion meant that she would be imprisoned if she returned home.

Before becoming the first woman to direct a Screen Two film in 1988, Barbara Rennie wrote and directed the convent-school black comedy Sacred Hearts for Film on Four in 1984. The film was based on Rennie’s mother, who was an orphan raised by nuns, and was the first feature created by Reality Productions for C4. Sacred Hearts was broadcast on 16 May 1985 to an audience of 5,528,000, and again on 5 February 1987 to 4,775,000, one of the most-viewed films screened in the Film on Four slot (6). Beeban Kidron also directed a film for Film on Four, 1988’s Vroom written by Jim Cartwright, which played on television on 22 March 1990 to an audience of 3,494,000. Rennie and Kidron’s projects with C4 raised their status as filmmakers prior to being hired to direct for Screen Two, revealing that the BBC was luring talent away from the ‘opposition’ to replicate the success of Film on Four. 

The aim of increasing budgets and shooting on film to appeal to writing talent at the BBC brought in Elaine Morgan as one of the first women to write for Screen Two, with The Burston Rebellion for the first series of in 1985, directed by Norman Stone. He was originally hired to direct Morgan’s script about the artist Stanley Spencer for the fourth series before he was replaced by Anna Benson Gyles. Morgan was an established writer for television since the 1950s and worked with Benson Gyles on a similar biographical film for the BBC in 1984,  Journey into the Shadows: Portrait of Gwen John 1876-1939, starring Anna Massey as the artist. Along with producer Ruth Caleb, the placement of women in all three top creative jobs on Stanley was frequently commented upon in the extensive press coverage: a piece headlined ‘Stanley and the Women’ in The Observer describes the trio as ‘a formidable team’, and that ‘it was Ms Morgan’s script which held the viewer by the throat’ (7); Mary Downes reviewed the film in City Limits as ‘[a]n unsentimental approach by a team of women producers to this arrogant, stupid but talented painter distinguishes it from other TV biographies’ (8). The collaboration of women writers, directors, and producers was deemed unusual enough to provoke comment by the press and by creatives themselves. 

In a piece on My Sister-Wife by Elisabeth Dunn for The Daily Telegraph in 1992, writer Meera Syal reflects that working with director Manning made it ‘the most companionable of shoots’ (9). Rona Munro expressed similar fondness for having collaborated with Stewart on the production of Men of the Month, commenting in Television Today that before working with Stewart she had seen herself ‘as a writer who wrote for television to pay the mortgage’ but now it had greater appeal (10). Women clearly felt more comfortable working on productions with other women, which was facilitated on several occasions during the run of Screen Two.

By contrast, Ann Turner wrote and directed Dallas Doll, the final film directed by a woman broadcast as a Screen Two, herself. Turner launched her filmmaking career with Celia in 1989, an Australian horror film set in 1957 about a young girl with a wild imagination on the outskirts of Melbourne during the Red Scare, and Hammers Over the Anvil in 1993. Dallas Doll is a surrealist vision of middle-class Australia with a similar narrative to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema. The film stars American actress Sandra Bernhard as a golf expert who moves in with a family and begins to seduce and corrupt each of them, regardless of gender. The film received a theatrical release following screenings at Cannes and the Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film & Video Festival to a warm critical reception, before later being broadcast on BBC Two. 

Kidron was one of the most successful directors who worked with the BBC on a Screen Two production. She directed her first film, Carry Greenham Home with Amanda Richardson in 1983 during her first year at NFS. She went on to direct the mini-series adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, produced by Philippa Giles, for the BBC in 1990, and the ScreenPlay production Antonia and Jane which was broadcast on 18 July 1990. That film was blown up from 16 to 35mm for US distribution by Miramax, with Harvey Weinstein also investing 25% of the budget of Kidron’s Screen Two feature, Great Moments in Aviation. Weinstein forced Winterson to rewrite the film’s ending, costing $20,000 in reshoots, and while the film screened at Cannes and London, it never received theatrical distribution. Having already directed one film in Hollywood, Used People (1992) starring Shirley MacLaine, Kathy Bates, and Marcello Mastroianni, Kidron went on to direct To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes. Pregnant during production, Kidron gave birth to her son Noah on the last day of filming (11).

Bird also went to Hollywood following the success of Safe. Discussing her 1995 teen road movie Mad Love, starring Drew Barrymore and Chris O’Donnell, with Shireen Jilla for Premiere, Bird expressed disgruntlement at Touchstone’s treatment of the film she delivered. The interview ends with Bird saying, ‘If someone would pay me to make movies in this country [the UK], I’d stay here, believe me […] But I really will try to make my next Hollywood movie ‘an Antonia Bird Film’. (12). Her next project, Face, released in 1997, was produced by BBC Films, granting Bird her wish, although her Hollywood career ended in 1999 after her horror film Ravenous lost 20th Century Fox ten million dollars. Kidron directed the big-budget features Amy Foster in 1997 and the second Bridget Jones film in 2004, before being the final director to attempt to end the disastrous production of the unreleased film Hippie Hippie Shake. Her charitable work in the creation of Filmclub in 2006 and later Into Film in 2013 aimed to introduce children to cinema at a young age, hoping to encourage girls and young women to aspire to a career in the film industry. Created a life peer as Baroness Kidron in 2012, she has sat on the House of Lords Democrat and Digital Technologies committee since 2019, responsible for reports on BBC Charter Renewal and the future of Channel 4. Screen Two sits at the heart of Kidron’s career, from forging her way into the film industry alongside other pioneering women in the 1970s to determining the future of public service broadcasting in Parliament. It played a significant role in determining opportunities for women directors in Britain at a crucial turning point.

Lillian Crawford is an AHRC-funded TECHNE doctoral student working in collaboration with the Centre for the History of Television Culture and Production at Royal Holloway University of London and BBC History.

(1) Adam Dawtrey, ‘Femme Helmers Brighton Brit Biz’, Variety, 7 August 1995.

(2) Reinventing the Organisation, quoted in Janet Thumim, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women, and the Box (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 177-8.

(3) Melanie Bell, Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021), p.33.

(4) Ibid., p.187.

(5) ‘Interview with Eva Kolouchova’, Television Weekly, no. 8, 11 March 1983, p.15.

(6) John Pym, Film on Four 1982/1991: A Survey (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), p. 45.

(7) John Naughton, ‘Stanley and the Women’, The Observer (1988), in BFI National Archive, Anna Benson Gyles Collection, Stanley, ABG-1-24-7 Press Cuttings + Letters of Congrats.

(8) Mary Downes, ‘Network News/TV Selections’, City Limits, Jan 28 – Feb 4 1988, p.57.

(9) ElisabethDunn, ‘My Sister-Wife’, The Daily Telegraph, 22 February 1992, reproduced in BFI programme notes for Nineties: Young Cinema Rebels, 2019.

(10) Angus Towler, ‘Male workout’, Television Today, no. 5900, 12 May 1994, p.21.

(11) Sue Fox, ‘How We Met; Eve Arnold and Beeban Kidron’, Independent, 11 May 1996.

(12) Shireen Jilla, ‘Cameos: Director Antonia Bird’, Premiere, vol. 3, no. 11, December 1995, p.38.

Screen Two at 40: Television Drama and Film, NFT3, BFI Southbank, London, 12 November 2025, 11:00 – 17:00

An event co-hosted by the BFI and the Centre for the History of Television Culture and Production, Royal Holloway, University of London (in association with the AHRC-funded Screen Two research project)

Overview

Launched by the BBC in 1985 as a successor to Play for Today, Screen Two featured an eclectic range of over 150 single dramas, including The Burston Rebellion, Brothers in Trouble, The Grass Arena, The Firm, Edward II, Persuasion, O Mary This London, My Sister-Wife, Small Faces,  Truly, Madly, Deeply and Priest.

 On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, this symposium brings together television professionals and scholars to assess the contribution of Screen Two to television and film production, examine the more general transition from the single play to the television film that occurred during this period and assess the legacy of both Screen Two and the ‘television film’.

In doing so, the symposium will not only seek to reflect on the achievements of Screen Two but also consider their relevance to current UK film and television production.

Schedule

 11.00 – 11.10    Welcome: John Hill, Xavier Pillai

11:10 – 11:55    Introduction: Lillian Crawford

This presentation, including clips, will cover the span of Screen Two, from Alan Clarke’s Contact in 1985 to Stephen Poliakoff’s The Tribe in 1998, and discuss the reasons for re-assessing the strand during its 40th anniversary year.

12:00 – 13:00    Panel 1: Television Drama in Transition

Panellists: Ruth Caleb, Andrea Calderwood, George Faber, David Thompson  Chair: John Hill

This panel will consider the beginnings of Screen Two, the shift in BBC policy it manifested and the transition from the single television play to the ‘television film’ it involved. The panel will consider why and how this occurred and with what results.

13:00 – 14:00    Lunch

14:00 – 14:55    Panel 2: A Generation of Women  

Panellists: Ruth Baumgarten, Lesley Manning, Nia Childs

Chair: Lillian Crawford

The number of women working in film and television significantly increased during the run of Screen Two. This panel will include some of those involved and consider issues of access to the industry and the types of opportunities offered by the BBC and Film on Four during this period.

15:00 – 15:55    Panel 3: The Artistic and Cultural Legacy   

Panellists: Suri Krishnamma, Christine Geraghty, David Thompson, John Wyver  Chair: Lisa Kerrigan

This panel will reflect on the achievements of Screen Two, its model of making television single drama and films, and the fusion of film and television aesthetic to which it led. It will consider what the legacy of the series is 40 years on and assess its relevance for today’s film and television landscape.

16:00 – 17:00    Keynote Q&A:  Jimmy McGovern Chair: Mark Duguid

 18:00               Screening: Priest + introduction (Jimmy McGovern and George Faber with Lillian Crawford) (Booking separately)

Notes on Participants:

Ruth Baumgarten was a critic before joining the BBC where she produced films, series and serials across the Television Drama department. Among many other productions, she is best-known for The Grass Arena, which among other awards, won the Michael Powell Prize for Best Film as well as being nominated for a BAFTA Best Film. Ghostwatch was the first fake factual horror film, taken for real by large parts of the record-breaking audience and has since gained a cult following. The Screen Two film My Sister Wife, and the serial A Respectable Trade, both won The Race in the Media Award and the latter was also nominated for a BAFTA for Best Drama Serial. The detective series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries ran for eight seasons and is still being screened.  

Andrea Calderwood is an independent producer and partner in Potboiler Productions. Andrea was previously Head of Drama at BBC Scotland, where she commissioned numerous drama series and award-winning films, including Ratcatcher and Mrs Brown; she was then Head of Production at Pathé Pictures where she commissioned several films including Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim, and Oliver Parker’s An Ideal Husband. Establishing her own company Slate Films in 2000, and joining forces with Potboiler in 2009, Andrea has produced and executive-produced over 60 award-winning feature films and TV series to date, with highlights including the John Le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie adaptation Half of a Yellow Sun, Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos, Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Andrea won the BAFTA for Best British Film for The Last King of Scotland as well as receiving an Emmy Award nomination for the acclaimed HBO series Generation Kill with David Simon. Recent projects include two seasons of the award-winning comedy drama Funny Woman, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s second feature Rob Peace and K’naan Warsame’s debut feature Mother Mother as well as Lynne Ramsay’s feature film Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, which has just released worldwide.

Ruth Caleb is a multi-award winning producer/ executive producer. She joined the BBC in 1965 from the theatre as an Assistant Floor Manager and stayed for the next 48 years, first on staff and then contract. She was the BBC’s first female head of drama as Head of BBC Wales Drama in the early 1990s. Her production credits include many award-winning television and film dramas, including Sweet As You Are, The Lost Language of Cranes, Pat and Margaret, Genghis Cohn, Tomorrow La Scala, Care (which won a Prix Italia and a BAFTA), A Short Stay in Switzerland and A Poet in New York. Theatrical releases include Last Resort, Bullet Boy, Stonewall and Shooting Dogs.  Ruth won the Alan Clarke BAFTA Award for outstanding creative contribution to TV and, in 2012, the Women in Film and Television Eon Productions Lifetime Achievement Award. She was also awarded an OBE n the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for her services to Drama. Ruth herself comments that ‘there is such a rich seam of talent in the UK – writers, directors, actors, talent at all levels of the production process – and it has been my great good fortune and privilege to work with the best’.

Nia Childs is a writer / director and curator. Her short films have played at a number of festivals including The BFI London Film Festival, The London Short Film Festival and BFI Flare. She is also a curator of contemporary British cinema, particularly those focusing on working-class stories. She has curated projects for the BFI, Bechdel Test Fest, The London Short Film Festival and others.

Lillian Crawford is a writer and curator. She is currently researching a PhD on Screen Two at Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with BBC History for whom she has curated the Screen Two at 40 Canvas story: https://canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/screentwo/. She is co-founder of Stims Collective which curates relaxed screenings for neurodivergent audiences, including monthly at the BFI. Her lead essay on Priest is included in a BFI Blu-ray published on 17 November. 

Mark Duguid is senior curator of archive projects in the BFI National Archive, responsible for the representation of archival film and television on digital and other channels, including BFI Player, BFI Screenonline, YouTube and the BFI Mediatheques across the UK. He programmed the BFI Southbank seasons ‘Second Coming: The rebirth of UK TV drama’ in 2010 and ‘The Wednesday Play at 50’ in 2014, and was lead programmer of the 2012 season ‘Ealing: Light and Dark. He is the author of the BFI Classic Cracker (Palgrave/BFI, 2010) and co-editor of Ealing Revisited (Palgrave/BFI, 2012), and also contributes to Sight and Sound and various DVD releases. His essay on Jimmy McGovern for BFI Screenonline may be found here: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/510555/index.html

George Faber began his career in the BBC Drama department at the BBC where he worked for 10 years until 1997. During that time he ran the Screenplay, Screen Two and Screen One strands before heading up the Single Drama division. As an independent producer George was twice winner of Best Independent Production Company at the Broadcast Awards and also winner of Best European Production Company at the Monte Carlo TV Festival. He is the recipient of multiple Golden Globes, EMMYs, BAFTAs and RTS Awards for his wide-ranging independent productions including Shameless, Skins, Elizabeth I, Generation Kill, The Shadow Line, The Devil’s Whore, The Village, Wild at Heart, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, A Room for Romeo Brass and Morvern Callar. More recent productions include The Buccaneers for Apple TV+, Shardlake for Disney+, National Treasure and Help for Channel 4, and Collateral for Netflix/BBC.

Christine Geraghty is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She publishes on film and television with a particular interest in fiction and form. Her books include Coronation Street (BFI, 1981), Women and Soap Opera (Polity, 1991), My Beautiful Laundrette (Bloomsbury, 2004), Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Bleak House (Palgrave/BFI, 2012). More recently, her work has included essays on Dennis Potter’s version of Tender is the Night (BBC 1985) and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe (BBC 2020). She is an editor of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and is Book Reviews editor for Critical Studies in Television.

 John Hill is Professor of Media and Director of the TV Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of a number of books including Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television (co-ed 1996), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (co-ed 1998), British Cinema in the 1980s (1999), Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (2006), Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (2011) and Global Film Policies: New Perspectives (co-ed 2025). John was also the Chair of the Northern Ireland Film Council, a Governor of the British Film Institute and a founding Director of the UK Film Council as well as the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, The History of Forgotten TV Drama in the UK.

Lisa Kerrigan is the Senior Curator of Television at the BFI National Archive, leading the team responsible for selecting contemporary acquisitions from partner public service broadcasters and streaming companies to the national television archive. She has supervised research access for PhD students on BFI projects including ‘Play for Today at 50’ and ‘Visions of Change: TV Documentary of the 1950s-1960s’, and has contributed to journals including Critical Studies in Television and VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture. Lisa advises on academic research into the Archive’s television collections and is a member of the FIAT/IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives) Media Studies Commission.

 Suri Krishnamma is the winner of a Royal Television Society award in 2021 and three-time BAFTA nominee. He has a broad range of experience across television and feature film. He recently directed The Canterville Ghost for BBC Studios, The Librarians: The Next Chapter for Balkanic Media, as well as award-winning productions A Respectable Trade and The Cazalets. He has directed numerous prime-time dramas such as Waking the Dead, Blue Murder and Cold Blood as well continuing dramas Casualty, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Internationally acclaimed, Suri has directed seven feature films including the award-winning Dark Tourist and A Man of No Importance starring Albert Finney (which, along with O Mary This London, formed part of Screen Two). His film New Year’s Day was named Best UK Feature Film at Raindance. He has led workshops in directing, screen acting, and writing, at the National Film and Television School, Norwich University of the Arts, The Arts University Bournemouth, and the University of the Arts, London. He has also served on a number of BAFTA juries and film festival juries and, in 2013, was appointed President of the Jury for the Munich International Festival of Film Schools. Suri is Professor of Film at Norwich University of the Arts and an Honorary Fellow of the Arts University Bournemouth.

Lesley Manning is an award-winning film and TV director and writer. After graduating from the National Film and TV School, Lesley directed films and serials for TV. These included My Sister Wife for Screen Two (Best Asian Film, CRE Best Drama), the seminal horror film Ghostwatch for Screen One (voted amongst the top 20 “Best British Horror Films of all Time” by Indiewire), and the series Blood Rights (written by Mike Phillips) and Drovers’ Gold (nominated for 3 x BAFTA Cymru). After a break from directing in order to bring up her children Molly Manning Walker (How to Have Sex) and Charlie Manning Walker (rock band The Chisel), she returned to directing with Curtain Call (best short film, Fort Lauderdale IFF), The Vest, Help and The Joke. Between 2019 – 2023 Lesley also directed original writing for theatre (The Agent, Delivery, Love Dance, and Happy Hour) and is at present in post-production on a multi-million SFX horror feature set in Antarctica.

Jimmy McGovern is the highly acclaimed writer of some of television’s greatest dramas. In Jimmy’s own summary: ‘He was born in postwar Liverpool. He joined the Scotland Road Writers’ Workshop in the early seventies, did a bit of theatre in the very early eighties and then got in at the very start of Brookside. He was there before the houses were finished. Since then he has written and created Cracker, Hillsborough, The Street, Accused, Time and many other films and series’. These include the single film Priest, made as part of Screen Two, and showing after the event. He and producer George Faber will provide a short introduction to the screening.

Xavier Pillai is TV Programmer at the BFI with previous experience of working on historical collections in the BFI National Archive. He is the curator of the current BFI ‘Cinema of Duty’ season looking back on global Black cinema.

David Thompson has executive-produced/produced over 150 film and TV projects, winning numerous awards including 3 BAFTAs, 2 Golden Globes, and 2 Emmys. He ran BBC Films and Single Television Drama at the BBC 1997 – 2007 where his credits included Billy Elliot, An Education, The Firm, Revolutionary Road and My Summer of Love. Over the years he’s been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to back much new and emerging talent including Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Paul Greengrass, Steven Knight, and Pawel  Pawlikowski. He’s worked with numerous directors, such as Jane Campion, Stephen Frears, Danny Boyle, Woody Allen, Stephen Daldry, and David Cronenberg, and writers such as Peter Morgan, William Nicholson and Armando Ianucci. His latest film from his production company Origin, is 500 Miles starring Bill Nighy to be released next year. He is also Professor in Film and Television Production at Royal Holloway, University of London.

John Wyver is a writer and producer with the independent production company Illuminations, and Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster. His recent productions include Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of ‘Play for Today’ (BBC4, 2020) and Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain (BBC4, 2022). Other arts documentaries and screen adaptations of theatre and dance produced by him have been honoured with a BAFTA Award, an International Emmy and a Peabody. He is the author of Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (2007) and Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (2019), and co-editor with Amanda Wrigley of Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television (2022). His cultural history of interwar television, Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain, will be published in January 2026 by Bloomsbury and the BFI.

Tickets for the symposium may be purchased here.

Tickets for the screening of Priest may be purchased here.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

Nothing to Pay (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 2 September 1962). Written by Alun Richards, produced by Sydney Newman and directed  by Charles Jarrott.

Nothing to Pay was the first play for Armchair Theatre by Alun Richards (1929-2004). Although rarely featuring in histories of television drama, Richards was a regular writer for television during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and a significant cultural observer of a changing Wales. Born in Pontypridd, he trained as a teacher before doing National Service in the Royal Navy. This, in turn, stimulated an enduring interest in the sea and maritime life that fed into much of his writing for television including the single play O Captain, My Captain (1961), episodes of The Onedin Line (1971) and the six-part series, Ennal’s Point (1982), based on his novel about a lifeboat crew. Richards began writing short stories in the 1950s and attracted the interest of the BBC with an adaptation of one of these. Although this went unproduced, BBC Wales subsequently mounted a production of Going Like a Fox (1960), a family drama featuring Rupert Davies as a disgraced politician. This encouraged the BBC to offer him a multi-play contract which led, in due course, to productions of O Captain, My Captain, The Elephant You Gave Me (1964), partly based on his own experiences as a probation officer, and another Welsh drama, The Big Breaker (1964), produced for The Wednesday Play slot and starring Rupert Davies.

Although the BBC had hoped that their contract would tie him to the organisation, Richards also found himself in demand at ITV. Nothing to Pay was commissioned by Sydney Newman for Armchair Theatre and, although an early work, reveals many of the themes evident in Richards’ writing: flawed family relations, the unattractive and often self-deluded attitudes of men, the disadvantaged position of women, and the corrupting power of wealth.  Mostly set within the confines of a London hotel on the day of a rugby international between England and Wales at Twickenham, the play mainly concerns the attempts of a Welsh businessman Louis Shell (Clifford Evans) and his nephew Lydiat (Kenneth Griffith) to break up the relationship between Louis’ daughter Eleanor (Daphne Slater) and the man she loves, a Polish émigré, Vladek (Philip Madoc) whom they consider to be an opportunist capable of being bought off. Directed by Armchair Theatre regular Charles Jarrott, ‘the expert in emotional drama among A.B.C’s directors’ according to one contemporary review, the play vividly brings out the high emotional cost of the men’s manoeuvrings not only for the couple concerned but also for the men themselves (highlighting, in so doing, the irony of the production’s title).

Although Richards was wary of being cast as a purely Welsh writer, and considered his plays to be as much ‘poetic’ as social-realist, his story was not simply about family dysfunction but the changing character of Wales as well (with a whistled version of ‘Bread of Heaven’ beginning and ending the production). Accused by his daughter of being ‘a very contemporary figure … the American Welshman’, the businessman Louis, who has recently benefited from a financially lucrative takeover, embodies the materialism and financial gain identified with a newly emerging Wales. Louis, in this respect, is contrasted with the more down-to-earth Welsh rugby supporters, representative of the ‘old Wales’, who are also to be found inside the hotel. However, insofar as this more traditional version of ‘Welshness’ is also associated with the world of men (and heavy drinking), the play maintains a degree of, partly comic, distance from it.

As such, the play may be seen to take the side of the women characters who seek to escape the oppressiveness of the masculine world in which they unwillingly find themselves. However, as one contemporary reviewer commented, Richards appears to be ‘much happier writing about men than women’ with the result that this ‘message’ is in part undermined by the prominence of the men within the play as well as the sheer brio of the leading actors, Clifford Evans and Kenneth Griffiths, whose performances rather overwhelm those of Daphne Slater and Margaret John (in the relatively marginal role of Lydiat’s wife).  The overall quality of the play was nevertheless appreciated by the critics who welcomed it for both its air of freshness and sense of conviction. A report, written for ITV, also praised the play’s excellence, identifying Richards as ‘an author to cultivate’. This advice was clearly heeded with Richards going on to provide a further three plays for Armchair Theatre – Hear the Tiger, See the Bay (1962), The Hot Potato Boys (1963) and Ready for the Glory (1966) – as well as sustain a successful career as a television writer, novelist and short story writer.

This is a slightly revised version of the notes for Nothing to Pay that were included in Volume 1 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2017.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

 Speaking in a 1987 interview, Sydney Newman recollected the advice given to him by ABC’s Managing Director (Howard Thomas) when he was appointed Producer of Armchair Theatre:

 The one bit of advice he gave me, he said, ‘You know, Sydney, we’re a regional operation. Our franchise is Manchester, the Midlands and the North. I think if you could manage to get the plays to reflect those regions, that would be very good for us in the eyes of the ITA’.

The Fishing Match demonstrates Newman’s commitment to ensuring that drama from the regions was central to Armchair Theatre. The production was the second of an ambitious trilogy of plays directed by Alan Cooke set in the environs of Nottingham, commissioned from the Newark-upon-Trent playwright Norman King. Neither the first (Night Stop,27 May 1962) nor the third (The Cruel Kind, 17 March 1963) of the plays survives.

 Writing was a secondary career for King, who worked as a consultant civil engineer for a firm of architects and had enjoyed considerable success with his first play, Shadow of Doubt (1955), which transferred from the King’s Theatre, Glasgow to the Saville Theatre in the West End. The play received some acclaim in London (the Mail’s critic enthusiastically hailing it ‘as expert and exciting a first play as I can recall’), running for a creditable 188 performances. The story of a compromised physicist wrongly convicted under suspicion of being a Russian spy, Shadow of Doubt combined topical ethical concerns with thriller techniques. The play went on to enjoy a considerable afterlife in regional theatre for several years (Harold Pinter appearing in a Bournemouth Repertory Theatre production in 1956) and was adapted for television in Australia in 1957 and by the BBC in 1958.

 King’s inspiration for his Armchair Theatre trilogy came through his office window overlooking a lock on the River Trent, where he could watch barges travel up and down river all day. All three plays feature riverside pubs and the people who frequent them. Both Night Stop and The Cruel Kind are set in the same hostelry, The Cockpit, and have violent overtones. In Night Stop a bargee investigates the suspicious drowning of a workmate, and encounters a pair of well-to-do delinquents who hold some knowledge of what occurred. King used his play to explore the motivations of prosperous juvenile delinquents:

 One doesn’t have to wear a leather jacket with high-heeled boots, and do a ‘ton’ on a motorcycle to be a spiv. Nor is the Teddy Boy mentality confined to any particular area or class. Gary and Ray have more wealth than imagination and are frustrated by small-town life.

 In The Cruel Kind the landlord (an army deserter) and landlady of The Cockpit attempt to prevent a vigilante lynch mob from attacking a Spanish boy after a local businessman’s daughter has been assaulted. The symbolism of the play’s cockpit location is blatant, King explaining his intention to create ‘a reminder that in earlier times a lot of today’s cruel instincts would have been channelled into barbaric sport.’

 Reviewing Night Stop in the Mail, Peter Black identified the play as part of a trend in television drama in its depiction of provincial squalor:

 It depicted life in the Midlands with a seaminess which suggested that Mr King will make haste away from it as quickly as he can. (…) the resemblance to Z Cars in the ugliness in the life shown was obvious. (…) The dialogue and characters, the very effective designs and direction were consciously directed to emphasising nastiness.

 The landlady Cissy was played in both dramas by Fanny Carby, who commended their authenticity: ‘Like all of Norman King’s characters she is absolutely true. A warm, generous woman – but sharp with that particular edge of humour you get in the Midlands and North’.

 These qualities are also found in The Fishing Match, a lighter play than either Night Stop or The Cruel Kind. The riverside pub in this comedy-drama is called The Angler’s Prayer, catering for a leisurely clientele of fishermen. Arriving in a dilapidated car held together by insulating tape, five anglers (a councillor, a clerk, a bone merchant, a baker and his young collier nephew) visit the pub on their annual fishing trip. The play’s comic scenes are probably its highlights for most present-day viewers, particularly those featuring Peter Butterworth and Yootha Joyce. A familiar face from the Carry On films, Butterworth’s aptitude for portraying fumbling deviousness is put to good use in The Fishing Match as he endeavours to get the bar to open early, or attempts a surely futile flirtation with the temporary landlady. Joyce’s character, Cissy, is the unwilling caretaker of the pub, placed in charge while her sister is away. Some of the same commanding abilities of taking charge seen in Joyce’s most famous performance in George & Mildred (Thames 1976-79) can also be found here as she sets the reluctant men to work readying the pub for opening. Cissy is a warmer and less frustrated character than Mildred Roper, however, qualities perceived by one critic who claimed that Joyce’s performance, ‘fairly represented every man’s ideal of the welcoming, motherly but definitely no-nonsense barmaid’.

 Cissy’s maternal nature is demonstrated in her responses to the play’s main plot, in which the visit to the pub sets off a journey of self-discovery for the young collier, Peter, in which he discovers hidden truths about his origins and starts a romance with Kath, the landlady’s daughter (Jo Rowbottom). It must be said that the (highly convenient) device by which Peter discovers about his past would not be out of place in a Victorian melodrama, but it does provide Colin Campbell (best remembered for his parts in The Leather Boys and the Granada serial A Family at War, 1970-72) with the means to demonstrate a range of powerful emotional responses. Peter’s personal epiphany becomes combined with a local specificity at the culminating point of his personal crisis, when the River Trent becomes imbued with baptismal qualities of renewal and rebirth.

 Assheton Gorton’s set is impressively expansive, creating enough space for a car to be driven inside the studio and allowing for quick, integrated movement between interiors and exteriors. The wider world beyond the fishing party is evoked through a cyclorama that shows the factory towers and chimneys of Nottingham on the horizon, and keeps the industry and commerce of the city in the viewer’s mind during Peter and Kath’s romantic exchanges. The hidebound nature of a provincial sensibility is underlined when Kath reflects that Tahiti must be ‘no bigger than Eastwood’.

 Of particular interest to present day viewers will be that The Fishing Match includes the earliest surviving performance of one of Britain’s foremost actors, Sir Derek Jacobi. The part of Eric – a loud-mouthed layabout and bully – is a role of a type that Sir Derek has rarely played since, but he approaches the role with commendable bounce and commitment, finding the right emotional notes in his two scenes to convey something of the hidden vulnerabilities of an ostensibly unsympathetic braggart.

These notes for The Fishing Party were included in Volume 3 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2018.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

The Thought of Tomorrow (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 11 October 1959). Written by James Brabazon, produced by Sydney Newman and directed by Alan Cooke.

The Thought of Tomorrow was the third play for television by James Brabazon (1923-2007) whose career embraced acting, writing, script editing, directing and producing. Brabazon was born Leslie James Seth-Smith in Kampala, Uganda, where his parents owned a plantation. The family returned to England in 1928 and after being expelled from Cambridge University for ‘associating inappropriately with a member of the opposite sex’ Brabazon acted in repertory, before turning to playwriting in the late 1950s. He had two plays produced by Associated Rediffusion for Television Playhouse in 1959 (neither survive) and in the same year his play People of Nowhere, set in a refugee camp in Germany in 1945, was staged as part of World Refugee Year, to some acclaim.

The Thought of Tomorrow – Brabazon’s third television play screened in 1959 – and his only one for Armchair Theatre – centres upon Geoffrey Hanbury (Rupert Davies), the Sales Director of a cloth manufacturing company, whose health is suffering from the relentless pressure to achieve results in a competitive market. In the first scene Hanbury’s ruthlessness is demonstrated when he sacks an employee for poor performance, following which he takes some of the pills he uses to relieve the pressure he constantly experiences. In a subsequent business meeting at his home he fails to get the price his chairman has set him for a sale, increasing the pressure on him, and we learn from his concerned wife that he is taking non-prescription drugs for a heart condition. The subject of the play is the ruthlessness of business and the price that must be paid for achieving success. It is ‘the thought of tomorrow’ which drives Hanbury on, the relentless daily pressure to succeed which is ruining his health: ‘We’re all so frightened of what may happen tomorrow, it makes wolves of us.’ Hanbury is clearly paying the price for trying to satisfy the demands of his chairman, both in terms of his failing marriage and his deteriorating health: ‘Look at me, a palpitating mass of nervous tension, drugged up to the eyeballs.’

Rupert Davies, who a year later was to take up the role for which he is best known as Chief Inspector Maigret in the long-running BBC series, gives a good performance as the harassed Sales Director, perspiring visibly as the pressure builds on him. His wife Elspeth (Gillian Lind) and secretary Jane (Jennifer Daniel), with whom he has apparently been having an affair, have less to do, but Stanley Van Beers livens things up as the vengeful go-between, Maurice Hurry, to whom Hanbury turns in an attempt to forge a successful deal.

Alan Cooke, directing the first of his 25 Armchair Theatre plays (he also directed three Armchair Mystery Theatre plays), does a very competent job, making good use of close-ups to show the pressure building on Hanbury (although there is one odd cut when Hanbury learns that his secretary is engaged to be married which leaves a question hanging in the air).

After adapting People of Nowhere as a BBC play in 1961, Brabazon wrote an episode of Crane (with Patrick Alexander) in 1963 before joining the BBC as a script editor/story editor, working on plays for First Night, Thursday Theatre, Theatre 625 – including John Hopkins’ Talking to a Stranger – and Plays of Today (1969). He adapted two full-length plays for the BBC, wrote Cold Game Pie for Thames TV’s The Sex Game (1968) and directed three Thirty-Minute Theatre plays for the BBC in 1969 before joining Granada, for whom he worked as a producer on series such as Confession (1970), A Family at War (1971), Sunday Night Theatre (1971-73), Childhood (1974), The House of Caradus (1979) and The Spoils of War (1980-81). In the 1980s-90s Brabazon returned to writing with a three-part adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1984) and the feature films Lost in Siberia (1991) and Albert Schweitzer (2009) which was released two years after his death. He also produced a number of feature films and documentaries, wrote a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, revised his 1976 biography of Schweitzer and edited a selection of Schweitzer’s writings. A summary of his eclectic career can be found here.

This is a slightly revised version of the notes for The Thought of Tomorrow that were included in Volume 4 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2018.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases. 

Worm in the Bud (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 27 September 1959). Written by John D. Stewart, produced by Sydney Newman and directed by Charles Jarrott. 

Given its high cost compared to other forms of TV programming and the limited studio facilities available in Belfast, the production of television drama in Northern Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s was extremely rare. This meant that writers from Northern Ireland  who aspired to write for television had to look across the water for an outlet for their work.  Armchair Theatre was to play an important role in this regard, not only providing openings for writers from the English regions but from across the UK more generally. The first TV production of a play by the Ulster actor and playwright Joseph Tomelty, A Shilling for the Evil Day (1959), was made for Armchair Theatre and became the first local play to be seen on the newly-opened Ulster Television. A Headful of Crocodiles (1961), the first television play by Stewart Love, dubbed ‘the Belfast John Osborne’, was also an Armchair Theatre production. However, the first – and oldest surviving – play by a Northern Ireland writer to benefit from the patronage of Armchair Theatre was John D. Stewart’s Worm in the Bud, broadcast in September 1959.

John D. Stewart was born in Belfast and studied at Queen’s University before becoming a civil engineer. He started writing for radio in the 1940s and, by the end of the 1950s, had succeeded in having a number of radio plays broadcast.  His best-known work was the play Danger, Men Working, about tensions on a building site, which was originally produced for the Festival of Britain in 1951 by Tyrone Guthrie but was subsequently reworked for radio. It then became a successful television production when Armchair Theatre revived it in 1961 and repositioned it in relation to the contemporary trend towards working-class realism.

Worm in the Bud, however, is a rather different piece. In correspondence with a BBC Northern Ireland producer, Stewart observed that his radio ‘epics’ would not work on television and that he was seeking to write the television equivalent of his ‘short stories’: ‘intimate things about ordinary people, preferably with suspense’ that should be ‘true and recognisable to a majority of people, and technically neat’.1 This is a good description of Worm in the Bud which focuses on the character of Mrs Bratney (Elizabeth Begley), a nosy widow with too much time on her hands who becomes increasingly suspicious of the apparently odd behaviour of her elderly neighbour Mr Snow (Edward Malin) whom she repeatedly refers to as ‘Crippen’. The play cleverly draws the audience into the intrigue but also sounds a note of warning regarding the dangers of jumping to conclusions about those around you.  Although the play is scarcely political, its plea for tolerance and simple Christian charity also carries a particular resonance for the city of Belfast in which it is set (and clearly accords with Stewart’s own characterisation of himself ‘a sort of independent socialist … [and] … ill-constructed Presbyterian humanist’).2

The play was not, however, produced in Belfast and the play’s local dimensions largely derive from the actors involved and their use of local speech. Two of the leads – Elizabeth Begley and Joseph Tomelty – were members of the Ulster Group Theatre and flew from Belfast to England to participate in the production. Begley dominates the proceedings with a commanding performance that gives vivid expression to her character’s malevolence and streak of religious narrow-mindedness. As a council employee responsible for the inspection of drains, Tomelty plays a more traditional form of comic ‘Irishman’ but his humorous commentary on events also hints at some of the hidden social tensions underlying the banter (complaining at one point that ‘Belfast is the most ungrateful city in the British Empire’).

Voytek’s anonymous but nonetheless striking sets add an element of claustrophobia to the drama while Charles Jarrott’s stylish and often noir-like direction invests it with a corresponding air of mystery. Jarrott was an English actor who had acted in and directed for television in Canada before following producer Sydney Newman back to England to work for ABC. This was his first Armchair Theatre production and proved to be a remarkably accomplished debut. As The Times noted at the time: ‘Not often is a live television play treated to a bravura production but… Worm in the Bud… was one of the exceptions – from the opening with its enormous close-ups of the inquisitive woman’s eye watching her victim through a lace curtain and the stuffed owl glassily watching her, Mr. Charles Jarrott’s production moved crisply and confidently in a series of boldly composed shots precisely edited’.3

Despite the success of both Worm in the Bud and Danger, Men Working (1961), John D. Stewart’s career as a TV writer did not prosper and he had only one more work produced for television: the UTV comedy drama Boatman Do Not Tarry (1967), about local resistance to a ferry closure, only part of which now survives. Following its initial transmission, Worm in the Bud itself remained unseen until it was restored as a part of the Forgotten Television Drama project and screened at the Belfast Film Festival. This was an event of particular note. For while the play is set in Belfast, features Belfast actors and was written by a Belfast man, the play was not actually seen there at the time of its original transmission insofar as it was broadcast two months before the local ITV station, Ulster Television, was launched!

This is a slightly revised version of the notes for Worm in the Bud that were included in Volume 2 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2017.

1. Letter from John D. Stewart to Ronald Mason, Drama Producer, 11 July 1959, BBC Written Archives NI20/14/1. ︎
2. J. D. Stewart, ‘Afterthoughts on “Danger Men Working”’, Rann: An Ulster Quarterly, 13, 1951, p. 20. ︎
3. ‘Comedy with a Serious Aim’, The Times, 28 September 1959, p.5. ︎

For more on John D. Stewart and the beginnings of Northern Ireland television drama, see John Hill,  ‘Television Drama and Northern Ireland: the First Plays 1959-67’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 20: 3, 2023, pp. 279-304.

In 2017, Forgotten Television Drama launched a series of DVDs in conjunction with the DVD distributor Network. Following the untimely death of Network’s Managing Director Tim Beddows and the subsequent closure of the company, we are now making available all the viewing notes that accompanied our releases.

The Bird, the Bear and the Actress (Armchair Theatre, ABC, 8 March 1959). Written by John Glennon, produced by Sydney Newman and directed by William Kotcheff.

 The story of a fateful chance encounter between three Americans of the New York theatre and a reclusive old Englishman, The Bird, the Bear and the Actress is a fine example of Armchair Theatre’s transatlantic horizons. The play’s creative personnel were largely North American. Producer Sydney Newman and director Ted Kotcheff were both Canadians (who first met and collaborated together at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to England to work for ABC), as was lead actress Kate Reid. The play’s author, John Glennon (b. 1931) was American and the leading actor, Guernsey-born Barry Jones, was based on Broadway and making his British television debut. The combined talents of these individuals result in a surprising play: international in its scope but sharing the thematic preoccupation with personal integrity that marks many classic Armchair Theatre dramas.

 The three New Yorkers holidaying on the French Riviera are Broadway producer P. Panghurst Shippers (Harry H. Corbett) and husband and wife director and actress Harris and Gertrude Glass (Lee Montague and Reid). By chance they learn that a reclusive octogenarian English theatre designer ‘T.G.B.’ (Jones) lives locally and invite him to design for their new play, with no real intention of using him other than to cash in on his famous name. The character of ‘T.G.B.’ was a barely-disguised version of a living person, visionary designer Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) whose modernist and symbolic sets were greatly influential across European theatre in the early 20th century, but whose exacting demands for total creative control had led to his withdrawal from stage production, and who had lived in exile in France for many decades.

 Many of the play’s strongest and most affecting moments come when an enthused T.G.B. explains his artistic vision (of an integrated design that opens the theatrical audience up to rapturous experiences) especially when the old man – in an allusion to Isadora Duncan – reminisces about watching his old muse ‘Eleanora’ dance and having witnessed the divine in her performance.

 T.G.B.’s imagistic understanding of the world remains undimmed, and his perception of the three worldly New Yorkers gives the play its name. John Glennon chose the title because he:

 wanted to convey a meeting of creatures who should have never come together. The old man refers to people by the names of creatures they call to mind. The Producer reminds him of a bird, ‘Not an eagle; a small bird’. The Director he likens to a bear. For Gertrude, the director’s wife, he has no symbol, and calls her only The Actress, because to him, to act, to move, to be alive is the greatest of all worlds. (quoted in Leslie, 1959)

Appropriately for the play’s subject, Glennon’s script is marked by a vivid visual  understanding, with an arresting image illuminating most scenes – the eagle blown away to its death in the hot mistral wind, Shippers’ greedy accumulation of gambling chips at the roulette table and, especially, T.G.B.’s manipulation of an exquisite Chinese puppet. Timothy O’Brien’s expansive design and Kotcheff’s fluid direction both realise this heightened aesthetic sense.

 The Bird, the Bear and the Actress enjoyed an unusual afterlife for a television play when it was revived in 1966 as a prestige stage production at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, Connecticut. Although the play received a muted response, the part of T.G.B. was a significant late role for the veteran film star Franchot Tone (1905-68), a great admirer of Edward Gordon Craig.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Leslie, Cecilie, ‘Betrayal – in Three Acts’, TV Times, 08 March 1959, pp. 16-17.

This is a slightly revised version of the notes for The Bird, the Bear and the Actress that were included in Volume 3 of Armchair Theatre Archive, released in 2018.