The Wednesday Play

The Wednesday Play
Cathy Come Home (1966)
Genre	Anthology, television plays
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
Release
Original network	BBC 1
Original release	October 1964 – May 1970

The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.

History

Origins and early seasons

The series was suggested to the BBC's Head of Drama Sydney Newman, by the corporation's director of television Kenneth Adam after his cancellation of the two previous series of single plays.^[1] Newman had been persuaded to join the BBC following the success of the similar programme Armchair Theatre, which he had produced while Head of Drama at ABC Television from 1958 to 1962. Armchair Theatre had tackled many difficult and socially relevant subjects in the then-popular 'kitchen sink' style, and still managed to gain a mass audience on the ITV network, and Newman wanted a programme that would be able to tackle similar issues with a broad appeal. Newman also wanted to get away from the BBC's reputation of producing safe and unchallenging drama programmes, to produce something with more bite and vigour, what Newman called "agitational contemporaneity".^[1]

The Wednesday Play certainly succeeded in meeting this aim, and the BBC quickly developed the practice of stockpiling six or seven Wednesday Plays in case there were problems with individual works.^[2] One production, The War Game (1965), was withdrawn from broadcast by a nervous BBC under pressure from the government, while John Hopkins' Fable (20 January 1965),^[3] an inversion of South Africa's Apartheid system, was delayed for several weeks over fears that it would incite racial tensions.^[3]

Intended as a vehicle for new writers, several careers began thanks to the series. Television programmes had a much shorter lead time in this era, and Dennis Potter's first four accepted television plays were shown during the course of 1965. The two Nigel Barton plays (8^[4] and 15 December 1965)^[5] first brought him to widespread public attention and the slightly earlier Alice (13 October 1965),^[6] about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, developed themes to which Potter would return.

In the first half of 1966 a series of 26 Wednesday Plays were produced by Peter Luke, the playwright, and story edited by David Benedictus. Highlights included The Snowball (20 April 1966),^[7] adapted from the novel by Brigid Brophy, Toddler on the Run adapted by Shena Mackay from her novella and directed by James MacTaggart, (25 May 1966),^[7] Cock Hen and Courting Pit (renamed A Tour of the Old Floorboards, 22 June 1966)^[7] by David Halliwell and two plays by Frank O'Connor (which Hugh Leonard adapted)^[8] virtually without dialogue^[8] and which, renamed Silent Song, won The Prix Italia award^[9] in 1967 for 'original dramatic programmes' jointly with a French programme.^[10] The other O'Connor/Leonard work was The Retreat (11 May 1966).^[7] These two plays starred Milo O'Shea and Jack McGowran. Cathy Come Home by Nell Dunn and Jeremy Sandford was offered to the Luke/Benedictus team who passed it on to Tony Garnett.

Tony Garnett and Ken Loach

Garnett was quickly seen as someone capable of delivering plays which would gain much publicity for the BBC and its Drama department.^[11] He had the enthusiastic support of Newman, his immediate superior, who lobbied for increased funding to allow for more location shooting on film rather than shooting productions in the multi-camera electronic television studio, a practice which was felt to impair realism, the preferred mode.^[11]

Director Ken Loach made ten plays in all for The Wednesday Play series.^[12] Two of them are among the best remembered of the entire run: an adaptation of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (3 November 1965),^[13] and the saga of a homeless young couple and their battle to prevent their children being taken into local authority care: Cathy Come Home (16 November 1966).^[14] The latter began Loach's 13 year collaboration with Tony Garnett as his producer, although Garnett had been closely involved with Up the Junction as well.^[15]

Plays like Up the Junction though were controversial among more conservative viewers. The 'Clean-Up TV' campaigner Mary Whitehouse accused the BBC of portraying "promiscuity as normal" in Up the Junction^[16] and The Wednesday Play as featuring "Dirt, Doubt and Disbelief".^[17] The writer on television Anthony Hayward quoted Garnett in 2006: "Mary Whitehouse was on the prowl, which was an added frisson, but it was actually very good free publicity and helped the ratings."^[16] The 'drama documentary' approach was criticised by television professionals who thought it was dishonest. In a Sunday Telegraph article published before its first repeat transmission Grace Wyndham Goldie complained that Cathy Come Home "deliberately blurs the distinction between fact and fiction ... [viewers] have a right to know whether what they are being offered is real or invented."^[18] Loach has admitted that "[w]e were very anxious for our plays not to be considered dramas but as continuations of the news" which preceded The Wednesday Play's slot.^[19]

Later seasons

The last three years of the strand were predominantly produced by Irene Shubik and Graeme MacDonald, by this time the BBC Drama head Sydney Newman had left the BBC. Highlights from this period include several plays by David Mercer such as In Two Minds (1 March 1967)^[20] and Let's Murder Vivaldi (10 April 1968)^[21] and Potter's Son of Man (16 April 1969),^[22] a modern interpretation of the story of Jesus.

Suffering from declining audience figures, the run of The Wednesday Play ended in 1970 when the day of transmission changed, and the series morphed into Play for Today.

Reputation and availability

It is regarded as one of the most influential and successful programmes to be produced in Britain during the 1960s, and is still frequently referenced and discussed. In a 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute to find the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, two Wednesday Plays made the list: The War Game was placed twenty-seventh, and Cathy Come Home was voted the second greatest British television programme of the century.

Some examples of The Wednesday Play, such as The War Game (which was not screened by the BBC for 20 years) and Cathy Come Home (1966), a television play exploring the theme of housing and homelessness, was according to filmmaker Roger Graef "a giant wakeup call for the whole nation,"^[23] and some of the Potter plays, surfaced on VHS and DVD; the Potter play, Alice was a bonus feature of a Region 1 DVD in 2010 of Jonathan Miller's surrealist version of Alice in Wonderland. The Ken Loach material has resurfaced in a Ken Loach at the BBC set. However, as with much British television of this era, many episodes are lost, leaving 76 surviving in the Archives (along with 3 with some surviving sequences) out of 170 transmitted.^[24]