Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television

The transmission of Diary of a Young Man in August and September of 1964 occurred at a time of change for both BBC drama and the country more generally. After thirteen years of Conservative rule, a new Labour government was elected, in October 1964, by a narrow majority. Although Labour had campaigned on a platform of economic modernisation, propelled by scientific and technological innovation, the new regime had also sought, in the words of Jonathon Green, to position itself as ‘an agent of liberal reform’.⁶⁸ As early as 1959, the Labour ‘revisionist’ Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary from 1965 until 1967, had made the case for a new ‘climate of opinion … favourable to gaiety, tolerance, and beauty, and unfavourable to puritanical restriction, to petty-minded disapproval, to hypocrisy and to a dreary, ugly pattern of life’, calling for extensions in personal freedom and an overhaul of the laws governing capital punishment, homosexuality, abortion, divorce and censorship.⁶⁹ During Labour’s term of office, many of these laws did indeed change even if they were the result of private member’s bills – as in the case of abortion – rather than official government legislation. Capital punishment was abolished by a vote of Parliament in 1965. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 finally decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults over twenty-one in England and Wales, some ten years after this had been recommended by the Wolfenden Report. The Abortion Act of 1967 permitted termination of pregnancy in certain circumstances up to twenty-eight weeks while the Divorce Reform Act of 1969 introduced ‘marital breakdown’ as grounds for divorce (and no longer required the establishment of guilt and injury). The Lord Chamberlain’s office, responsible for censorship of the theatre, was also abolished in 1968.

Although the extent of legislative reform was often limited, and motivated by the desire to manage ‘social problems’ rather than a committed spirit of libertarianism, such changes were nonetheless a crucial part of what came to be identified as a new era of ‘permissiveness’. As Dominic Sandbrook points out, however, the idea of ‘the permissive society’ is something of ‘a myth’.⁷⁰ There was no coherent ideology or political group fuelling the march towards ‘permissiveness’ and popular attitudes towards the legal reforms were highly ambivalent (and often hostile). Indeed, as Sandbrook goes on to suggest, the idea of ‘permissiveness’ was in some respects the invention of its opponents, such as Mary Whitehouse. for whom it came to symbolise (and condense) the social trends that they deplored – secularism, the decline of moral absolutism and a growing lack of respect for authority. The economic and social forces responsible for these social changes were, of course, complex but for the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA), the successor body to the Clean Up TV Campaign launched in 1965, it was television that held a particular responsibility for the promotion and spread of ‘permissive’ values. For Mary Whitehouse, the secretary of the organisation, it was the BBC in particular that bore the brunt of the blame, particularly under the Director-General Hugh Greene, whom Whitehouse appeared to hold personally responsible for almost single-handedly plotting the moral decline of Britain. Although something of a pragmatist, Greene did nevertheless feel duty-bound not to give way to the demands of Mrs Whitehouse, repeatedly refusing to meet her and dismissing her ‘populist’ claims ‘to speak for “ordinary decent people” and “to take a stand against” unnecessary dirt, gratuitous sex, excessive violence and so on’ as little more than ‘a dangerous form of censorship … which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks, not to undertake those adventures of the spirit which must be at the heart of every truly new creative work’.⁷¹

This clash of social and political outlooks found particular expression in relation to the BBC’s ‘Wednesday Play’ which Whitehouse attacked on a regular basis, accusing it of roaming ‘week after week … clumsily, even subversively amongst the more sensitive areas of human, social, political even international affairs’.⁷² Although the series has acquired retrospectively a semi-mythical status, it was not the outcome of a carefully planned strategy but emerged out of a state of crisis within the BBC’s Drama Group. In early 1964, the two main single-play drama series, ‘First Night’ and ‘Festival’ were faced with falling viewing figures and criticisms of their poor quality. In an effort to boost ratings, the new Chief of Programmes for BBC1, Donald Baverstock, proposed to reduce the number of single plays in order to divert resources towards popular series and serials such as Z Cars and Dr Finlay’s Casebook (which had, in fact, taken over the ‘First Night’ Sunday-evening slot in January 1964). These suggestions were bitterly opposed by the Head of the Drama Group, Sydney Newman, who had appointed James MacTaggart (in February 1964) as the series producer of ‘First Night’ in the belief that things could be turned around.⁷³ Baverstock and Newman proved unable to reach an agreement with the result that Kenneth Adam, the Director of Television, was obliged to mediate. He decided to put an end to the ‘First Night’ and ‘Festival’ series, recommending a ‘temporary concentration on … certain winners’ but also proposing a new series of ‘specially written plays’ to be broadcast the following year under a ‘safer and more practical’ title (such as ‘Wednesday Night Theatre’).⁷⁴ This desire for an ‘uncommitted’ title, and lack of agreement over alternatives (such as ‘Centre Stage’ and ‘Wednesday Playbeat’), led to the launch of the new series under the title of ‘The Wednesday Play’ in October 1964. The first series, however, mainly consisted of plays recorded for the ‘Festival’ series (produced by Peter Luke) and it was not until January 1965 that the series began to assume a more recognisable identity when an extended run of plays produced by James MacTaggart was launched. However, even many of the first ‘Wednesday Plays’ of 1965 – including Loach’s A Tap on the Shoulder, Three Clear Sundays and The End of Arthur’s Marriage – had, in fact, been originally commissioned for ‘First Night’.⁷⁵ Given the rather muddled circumstances under which the series began, the philosophy underpinning the new plays was relatively thin (and not very much different from that of ‘First Night’). The plays were largely conceived as original works for television that would be contemporary and set in the UK. ‘Almost all’, announced the publicity for the first 1965 season, ‘will be about life today and the people in a society on the move.’ As one of the perceived failings of the ‘First Night’ series had been its lack of variety, the publicity also promised an unorthodox mixture of ‘[d]rama, melodrama, thrillers, comedy, [and] satire’.⁷⁶ However, it soon became clear that one of the distinguishing features of the series was to be its willingness to tackle uncomfortable social and political issues and it was not long before a number of plays – such as John Hopkins’s Fable (tx. 27 January 1965), Alan Seymour’s Auto-Stop (tx. 21 April 1965), Michael Hastings’s For the West (tx. 26 May 1965) and Dennis Potter’s Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (initially scheduled for June 1965 but not shown until December) – ran into trouble with either the BBC’s opponents (the NVALA was especially incensed by For the West, calling for the Director-General’s resignation) or the BBC’s own management (which decided to withdraw Vote, Vote because of its political content). It was, however, Up the Junction, directed by Loach, that proved to be the most controversial of all. It was not Loach’s first production for the series though. This was A Tap on the Shoulder which kicked off the 1965 season accompanied by a new set of credits that, according to The Times, revealed how ‘The Wednesday Play’ was set to become both ‘urgently contemporary and socially relevant’.⁷⁷

In some ways, however, A Tap on the Shoulder (tx. 6 January 1965) was not quite the harbinger of things to come that might have been expected. Described in the publicity as a ‘comedy thriller’, it focuses on a group of thieves plotting and then carrying out a gold bullion robbery at an airport. The play, however, was written by an ex-prisoner, James – or Jimmy – O’Connor and the play was partly promoted in terms of the ‘realism’ it was claimed his insider knowledge afforded. According to the play’s producer James MacTaggart, the programme did not show ‘the kind of crooks you may have seen in TV serials and films’ but rather ‘professionals who know their trade’.⁷⁸ This emphasis upon the ‘professional crook’ is also used to invest the play with an allegorical dimension that carries echoes of the commentary upon ‘state of the nation’, and accompanying anti-establishment sentiments, to be found in Diary of a Young Man. The production is set in a contemporary post-Profumo affair England in which traditional moral distinctions and class boundaries are dissolving and the line between crime and legitimate business has become blurred. This is particularly evident in the case of Archibald Cooper (Lee Montague), a self-made tycoon who has risen to the top and won acceptance in ‘respectable’ society on the basis of crooked property deals and ‘straightening’ (i.e. bribery) of everyone from local councillors to senior churchmen. Hence, at Archie’s Hunt Ball, criminals, aristocrats, call-girls (of the ‘Keeler/Mandy Rice-Davies type’) and debs gather in his ‘stately home’ to hear the local Chief Constable (Noel Johnson) pay tribute to Archie’s forthcoming knighthood (or ‘tap on the shoulder’). The play’s cynicism towards conventional society is underlined by the rejection of a conventional ending involving the gang being brought to justice. Instead, the gang members escape to the French Riviera where they enjoy ‘the good life’ and plan to go legitimate by abandoning ‘climbing over roofs’ and becoming ‘respectable property men’. As the gang leader Ronnie (Richard Shaw) observes, ‘white collar crime – that’s the business’.⁷⁹ However, while the production was promoted in terms of the ‘authenticity’ that O’Connor’s background provided, the play’s broad comedy and reliance upon social types linked it to the ‘anti-naturalism’ of Diary of a Young Man rather than any particular ‘realist’ impulse.

‘Urgently contemporary’: ‘The Wednesday Play’ in 1965

This is the case even though the production makes a substantial use of film, amounting to around twenty minutes of a seventy-minute production. However, apart from some night shooting in London, the bulk of the filming occurs in the country and is enlisted to most vivid effect in the actual heist. In this respect, film is used in a ‘cinematic’ way in order to heighten tension rather than highlight the ‘authenticity’ of its locations (or suggest a documentary-type style). The beginnings of what would come to be regarded as a more characteristically ‘Loachian’ aesthetic in this regard are actually more apparent in the studio scenes, particularly those that occur in the pub at the play’s beginning. Thus, when Tim (Tony Selby), Terry (Griffith Davies) and Patsy (George Tovey) are introduced in the pub belonging to George (Edwin Brown), the use of untidy compositions, a mobile camera that ‘follows’ the conversation when heard off screen and characters ‘unexpectedly’ walking in front of the camera reveal a self-consciously ‘casual’ style designed to suggest ‘reality’ caught as it happens (even though the scene was carefully planned and rehearsed). This appears to be the first of many such scenes in Loach’s work to treat ordinary conversation in ordinary locations as virtually a dramatic event in itself, laying stress on conversational rather than ‘theatrical’ speech and the ‘authenticity’ that this is assumed to deliver. The scene is also intercut with film footage of Ronnie and Hazel (Judith Smith) after his escape from prison. Although some viewers considered this ‘overlapping of conversation with pictures’ to constitute ‘a technical slip-up’, it actually represented an early exploration of a technique that was to become more common in the productions to follow.⁸⁰ At this stage, however, it is not invested with the ‘documentary’ quality that it was later to acquire and serves primarily as a narrative bridging device.

The production was reasonably well reviewed but, given its light-hearted tone, did not generate much controversy. Some viewers complained that the criminals ‘get away scot free’ and objected to ‘the passages that appeared to mock at Royalty, the Church, marriage and the credulity of people of standing’ but these were not significant and the BBC was happy with the audience of 9 million that the programme attracted.⁸¹ The second of Loach’s collaborations with O’Connor, Three Clear Sundays (tx. 7 April 1965), however, presented the BBC with rather more problems. During World War II, O’Connor was sentenced to death for a murder he always denied committing (and for which another man subsequently admitted responsibility). He then spent eight weeks in a condemned cell before he was granted a reprieve (although not a pardon or release from jail). This was an event that was to haunt O’Connor for the rest of his life and provided the inspiration for his play Three Clear Sundays which the story editor Roger Smith described in the Radio Times as O’Connor’s ‘emotional biography’.⁸² The phrase ‘three clear Sundays’ refers to the time for which a prisoner must be detained, by law, in the condemned cell and the play itself deals with the downfall of a young market trader, Danny Lee (Tony Selby), who is executed for the murder of a prison officer. In this respect, Three Clear Sundays represents the first of Loach’s productions to highlight social injustice (in this case, capital punishment) through an emphasis upon the travails of a victim-protagonist. In the play, Danny is, in effect, a simple-minded ‘innocent’ who, through a combination of bad luck and naivety, falls foul of an uncaring system. Sent to prison for an impetuous assault on a policeman (‘the wickedest copper in the manor’) who has unnecessarily provoked him, he runs up against an unsympathetic prison governor who refuses him permission to see his pregnant girlfriend, Rosa (Finnuala O’Shannon) and places him on ‘report’ when he protests. Following a spell in a punishment cell, Danny is housed with two hardened criminals, Johnny May (George Sewell) and Robbo (Ken Jones), who, having identified him as ‘a mug’, trick him into participating in a staged assault on a guard designed to earn the two lags some remission. Inadvertently hitting the warder too hard, Danny ends up charged with murder. The irony of this tale, however, is that, in a social universe in which virtually everyone is ‘bent’, Danny (who has deliberately chosen to avoid a career as a thief by working in the market) remains one of the few ‘honest’ characters to be found in the play. Thus, despite the evidence of mitigating circumstances surrounding his case, his insistence on telling the truth in court and refusing to obey ‘the eleventh commandment’ – ‘thou shalt not plead guilty’ – result in him falling victim to a heavy-handed judicial system and the sentences of imprisonment and death by hanging that it imposes.

Death by hanging: the end of Three Clear Sundays

The play’s determination to highlight the cruelty of state execution – at a time when the death penalty had yet to be abolished – also led the production into controversy. Even before the production had been transmitted, the issue of the film’s ending became a matter of deliberation within the BBC. At a meeting of the Board of Governors, the Northern Ireland Governor, and former Inspector-General of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sir Richard Pim, queried whether the showing of the hanging itself was necessary and secured the Board’s agreement that the play should end before the execution occurred.⁸³ Although the Controller of Programmes, Television, Huw Wheldon, personally approved the final scene as broadcast, Pim was discomfited that the Board’s wishes had apparently been ignored in what he regarded as a ‘failure of control in the Television Service’. His fellow Board member, Sir David Milne, a former civil servant, also complained that the play had misleadingly focused upon ‘a miscarriage of justice in order to make a general propaganda point against capital punishment’.⁸⁴

This issue of ‘control’, and how the Board was to exercise it, resurfaced when the play was repeated three months later (tx. BBC2, 16 July 1965). Wheldon took the view that the positive response to the play on its initial broadcast – winning one of the biggest audiences for a ‘Wednesday Play’ as well as a higher-than-average ‘reaction index’ – had warranted a repeat without cuts. In a memo to the Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, he argued that any tinkering with the conclusion would leave the ending looking ‘cut, or censored’. He also felt that the implementation of cuts would inevitably have given the impression that the BBC was succumbing to ‘nervousness’ in the face of ‘the Clean-Up campaign’.⁸⁵While the Board accepted that the decision to repeat the play without cuts did not constitute ‘an act of deliberate defiance’, it did resolve that similar matters should in future be referred to the Director-General and Chairman of the Board for a final decision.⁸⁶ Despite the Board’s strictures, the programme’s ending is, in fact, relatively discreet, relying on suggestion rather than explicit display. Thus, in the final scene, the prison warders and the hangman Ketch (Howard Goorney) grab and disarm a screaming Danny before tying his legs, covering his head with a bag and placing a noose around his neck. The play then ends with a shot of a hand pulling the lever that will open the trap below. As the screen goes silent, a series of quotations (including testimony to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1950) on the process and effects of hanging follow. In this way, the power of the ending derives less from what is actually shown than what is implied.

Responding to a letter of complaint from a viewer, the producer of the programme James MacTaggart claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the play was intended simply to ‘state the facts’ rather than ‘to alter people’s opinion’.⁸⁷ It is evident, nevertheless, that Three Clear Sundays did signal a move in the direction of a new kind of socially conscious television drama designed to raise contemporary social issues and intervene in current political debates, such as that surrounding the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill then passing through Parliament. Indeed, the transmission of the play led to a complaint from the Conservative Party Chief Whip on precisely these grounds.⁸⁸However, the form such drama should take was still taking shape and the play occupied something of a ‘halfway house’ between the broad comedy and social caricature to be found in A Tap on the Shoulder and Diary of a Young Man and the social melodrama of subsequent work (such as Cathy Come Home).⁸⁹ In this respect, it appeared to be influenced by the work of Theatre Workshop which had achieved considerable success in 1963 with Oh What a Lovely War, its tragi-comic dramatisation of World War I. Under its director Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop had developed a particular reputation for productions that departed from the conventions of the well-made play by incorporating elements from variety and music hall and employing a number of broadly ‘Brechtian’ techniques (such as episodic narrative, emblematic characterisation and direct address).⁹⁰ In a similar fashion, Three Clear Sundays uses a number of folk songs and traditional ballads (sung to new words by O’Connor’s wife Nemone Lethbridge) as a means of introducing characters or elaborating upon a particular situation. Thus, when Danny arrives at Pentonville Prison, two of the prison officers sing a duet over shots of the various prisoners whom they are about to admit. Similarly, when we first see Danny’s mother, Britannia (Rita Webb), counting her money at home in Notting Dale, she may be heard singing ‘I’ve been out on the blag since I was eight years old’ on the soundtrack. When Danny’s three brothers subsequently arrive at the house, they too are heard to sing. The employment of ballads also takes on a more expressive function when the performance of a song accompanies short visual montages designed to evoke a mood or express an attitude. Thus, after Danny has agreed to participate in Johnny May and Robbo’s scheme (mainly in the belief that the money he will earn will help Rosa), we hear ‘Rosa’s song’ on the soundtrack as the camera cuts between Rosa in the bar in Notting Dale and Johnny inside his cell (initially shown in a somewhat studied composition). Although the conventional vocabulary of editing would suggest the characters’ actions are occurring simultaneously, the temporal relationship between them is, in fact, indeterminate. Moreover, given the situation of the characters, the status of the shots is also ambiguous, possessing both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ dimensions. Thus while the play’s use of ballads suggests a semi-Brechtian concern to interrupt the flow of the plot and comment upon the action, it is also associated, as in this case, with the expression of interiority and subjective yearning.

Although the sequences discussed so far are confined to the television studio, the inclusion of ballads is particularly pronounced in the play’s film sequences. This is partly because most of the film footage is silent and the ballads provide a unifying thread in the absence of dialogue. However, these scenes also benefit from the additional editing possibilities that film allows. Thus, when Danny’s three brothers wait outside Pentonville for Rosa (and are heard to sing ‘Muvver’s got the geezer straightened’), the use of film enables a visually inventive montage of the men filling in time, including walking among rows of white cars and entering the frame from different directions. Even more significantly, the play begins with a series of shots filmed on location at Portobello market which indicate the ‘observational’ purpose to which film will increasingly be put in Loach’s work. This sequence begins with shots of the market (accompanied by ‘the street singer’s song’) followed by shots of Danny pushing his barrow and working his stall (accompanied by his song ‘I Am a Barrow Boy’). Unlike the other film sequences (such as those outside the prison) which are all staged for the camera, what this sequence reveals is not simply the employment of an actor in a real location but the editing together of an actor’s actions with semi-documentary footage of real people apparently engaged in their normal activities. Indeed, one lady pensioner, seen in the opening shot buying from a stall, was taken by surprise by her inclusion in the programme and wrote to the BBC requesting payment. No doubt alert to the cost implications of such a claim for future productions, James MacTaggart got back quickly, arguing that ‘[a]nyone who is seen casually in filming in the streets etc cannot be said to have performed’ and was therefore not entitled to a fee.⁹¹ Although the matter was not pursued, it represents an early example of Loach filming real people in a fictional situation and offers one of the first indications of how this might give rise to issues concerning the relationship between actuality and performance in Loach’s work. At this stage, however, the ‘documentary’ element in Loach’s work remained a subordinate strand. By the time of his third O’Connor production, The Coming Out Party (tx. 22 December 1965), made after Up the Junction, it had become a core element and provides a clear indication of how his aesthetic had developed.

As the producer Tony Garnett observed in the Radio Times, the production came at the end of a remarkable year in which there had been thirty-five ‘Wednesday Plays’, six of them directed by Loach.⁹² As A Tap on the Shoulder had been the first of these, it was regarded as fitting that the third of O’Connor’s plays, The Coming Out Party, should bring the year to a close. Like the earlier plays, this was set amongst the criminal fraternity of Notting Dale. Some of the same characters (Jimmy the Gent, Big Al) and many of the same actors (George Sewell, George Tovey, Rita Webb, Griffith Davies, Dickie Owen, Will Stampe) are also carried over from Three Clear Sundays. Like Three Clear Sundays, the play also concerns a young ‘innocent’ Scimpy (Dennis Golding) who may not suffer quite the same fate as Danny but nonetheless falls prey to an inhospitable adult world. However, despite the continuities of subject-matter, the style of the play differs significantly from its precursors. In particular, The Coming Out Party cuts back on the elaborate plotting and dialogue that had been a feature of the earlier O’Connor plays in favour of sequences that are primarily observational in character. This was the first O’Connor play to be shot on 16mm (both synchronised and silent) with the result that it contains significantly more location shooting than either A Tap on the Shoulder or Three Clear Sundays. Thus, while a substantial proportion of the play still occurs in the television studio, the film inserts are both more frequent and more extended than in its precursors. As in the opening sequence of Three Clear Sundays, this location shooting is partly used to suggest an affinity with documentary. Thus, when Scimpy goes in search of his mother whom he has discovered is in prison, he approaches a policeman on traffic duty for directions to the jail. This encounter is filmed from a distance with the result that both pedestrians and road traffic are seen to pass in front of them and obstruct the spectator’s view. In this way, the position of the camera and its vantage-point suggest that the action has been ‘captured’ on film in the manner of documentary even though the conversation (if not the traffic) has been specifically ‘staged’ for the camera. A similar effect is achieved (as in the scene introducing ‘The Princess’ played by Carol White) when – apparently real – people walk across the screen and momentarily look at the camera as if only just realising that filming is occurring. Whereas such occurrences (or apparent ‘mistakes’) would normally be edited out of a work of fiction, they are here preserved as a means not only of suggesting a kinship with documentary shooting but also as a way of reinforcing the verisimilitude to which the ‘staged’ images lay claim.

The other notable feature of the film sequences is the way in which the production employs the kind of descriptive montage sequence developed at the start of Three Clear Sundays. Two aspects of this are worth noting. Revealing a debt to the French nouvelle vague (and Les Quatre Cents Coups [1959], in particular), various sequences feature locations selected to express the central character’s troubled mental state. Thus, having heard that his mother is in prison, Scimpy sets off on a journey through the city that will continue for most of the play. Immediately after he has heard about his mother, Scimpy is shown to wander aimlessly through the streets of the surrounding neighbourhood (to the accompaniment of children singing a Christmas carol rewritten by Lethbridge). In contrast to the elimination of ‘dead time’ and ‘surplus’ detail in Diary of a Young Man, this sequence does not significantly advance the narrative but concentrates instead on the physical locations in which Scimpy is, almost literally, discovered. The second shot of the sequence, for example, begins with an exterior view of a derelict building. The camera then tilts downwards onto some lorries parked below before Scimpy is revealed emerging from behind one of the vehicles. A similar effect is achieved in the fourth shot when Scimpy appears from behind a wall, following the movement of the camera across another derelict building and over the rubble below. The attenuation of narrative action and foregrounding of place contained in this sequence may therefore be seen as giving physical embodiment to Scimpy’s emotional distress over the discovery about his mother. Similar uses of montage occur later when Scimpy is shown adrift in the city centre while his inner thoughts are revealed on the soundtrack. However, the strong emphasis upon the actuality of place also involves an increased emphasis in Loach’s work upon the physical conditions that characters inhabit. As Deborah Knight suggests, the significance of location shooting in Loach’s work is not simply the ‘effect of the real’ that it creates but the ‘metaphorical’ role it plays in drawing attention to the influence of environment upon characters.⁹³Writing from a later perspective, Knight understandably downplays the more subjective and modernist aspects of Loach’s early work. Nevertheless, in a sequence such as this, it is possible to see how place may perform a double ‘metaphorical’ role, not only providing ‘objective correlatives’ of a character’s mental state but also ‘objective’ reminders of the way in which the social and physical environment imposes upon a character’s subjectivity. There is, in this respect, a degree of difference from ‘new wave’ films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) and A Kind of Loving (1962) which reveal a similar predilection for the display of place in excess of narrative requirements. However, whereas this commonly involves an element of formalism or aesthetic display, the ‘poeticising’ impulse is much less pronounced in a sequence such as this. While this may be due in part to the pressurised circumstances under which such footage was collected (and the aspiration to simulate the tropes of the observational documentary), it also indicates an emerging concern in Loach’s work to establish the link between character and environment. In the O’Connor plays, however, the precise significance of this relationship has yet to be worked out and there is a certain amount of hesitation regarding how the influence of ‘environment’ is to be understood.

In his obituary of O’Connor, Andrew Weir suggests how O’Connor’s plays succeeded in introducing to television ‘the shadowy universe of crime, prison and policing’ and ‘[r]eal working-class life’.⁹⁴ While it is undoubtedly the case that these productions played a role in introducing new kinds of depiction of the criminal ‘underworld’, it is also a highly partial portrait of the working class. O’Connor’s plays do not really represent the ‘working class’ as such so much as a criminal subculture conceived as virtually ‘a class apart’. Given the plays’ general cynicism concerning the hypocrisy of ‘straight society’, there is, in fact, little attempt to portray the activities of the ‘respectable’ working class and, publicans apart, very few members of the ‘community’ are shown to hold down proper jobs. Thus, while it could be said that the plays challenge the normal perception of official society (laying bare its hypocrisy and self-interestedness), it also runs perilously close to reinforcing a stereotypical view of working-class culture as predominantly criminal. This, in turn, has an impact upon the kind of social diagnosis that the plays are then able to offer.

For while they are concerned to highlight the hypocrisies of legitimate society and identify the shortcomings of the official institutions encountered by the plays’ luckless protagonists such as Danny and Scimpy, the characters are primarily failed by their own families. In Three Clear Sundays, the father is absent and the family is ruled by the Dickensian matriarch Britannia who shamelessly encourages her sons to engage in thieving at the expense of their education (with the result that they have remained illiterate). As a result, it is no surprise that, at the end of the play, Danny should turn on his mother and blame her for sacrificing his well-being for the sake of ‘money, money, money’. In The Coming Out Party, Scimpy is primarily let down by his parents who prove incapable of staying out of jail (despite the exhortations of the police and prison authorities that they should do so). In their absence, he has benefited from the protection of his grandparents but even his grandmother (Hilda Barry) is arrested for receiving stolen goods with the result that he is sent first to a remand home and then a reception centre.⁹⁵ Near the end of the play, Scimpy enjoys the freedom of Kensington Gardens before the affable police constable, Nicholls (Alec Ross), arrives to take him away. Over a series of shots of Scimpy, Nicholls is heard discussing the boy’s prospects with ‘The Princess’ who is herself about to go to prison. Commenting on the injustice of his situation, she points out how unlikely it is, given ‘all the people around him’, that Scimpy will avoid turning out ‘a villain in the end’. Thus, while the stress on the physicality of place contained in The Coming Out Party may be seen to entail a growing emphasis upon the environmental conditions underpinning the characters’ actions, it is a working-class culture of criminality, rather than economic factors such as poverty and poor housing, that is identified as the key ‘environmental’ factor in both Three Clear Sundays and The Coming Out Party. Thus, while The Coming Out Party does explore some of the inequities of the ‘affluent society’ (having young Scimpy claim, in an ironic allusion to Harold Macmillan, that he has ‘never had it so good’ when he and a friend have broken into Harrods), the problems of Danny and Scimpy are seen to derive less from economic disadvantage (and poor housing conditions) than from the attachment of their families, and the community of which they are members, to careers of crime. In this respect, there is a degree of tension within the plays between an implicit celebration of the sense of community (and commitment to helping their ‘own’) found among the criminal fraternity (and the play’s obvious relish in the conviviality of the pub) and a recognition of its destructive grip upon such ‘innocent’ victims as Danny and Scimpy. This tension is, in fact, suggested by the story editor Tony Garnett’s own account of the play in the Radio Times in which he notes how the drama may involve ‘a sad search which leads into trouble’ but also includes ‘a glorious knees-up comedy which should put us all in a Christmas spirit’.⁹⁶

The Coming Out Party, therefore, begins to move away from the ‘romantic’ attachment to working-class crime as an ‘honest’ response to a dishonest society found in A Tap on the Shoulder towards a more sombre assessment of the destructive effects of the criminal underworld upon the ‘innocent’. However, although this involves a ‘materialist’ turn towards showing the economic conditions encouraging crime, the plays’ vision of the contemporary working class remains confined to the criminal fringes. This, however, begins to change in productions such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home which focus on more ‘representative’ working-class characters (even if, as in Up the Junction, petty crime remains a significant feature of the portrait of working-class existence). In so doing, the portrayal of the working class also begins to change in other ways as the productions begin to register some of the more general, contemporaneous social and economic changes, such as the break-up of traditional working-class communities due to slum clearances and the rise of mass culture and consumerism.

As previously noted, The End of Arthur’s Marriage had connected its critique of middle-class conformity with the emergence of a new kind of pop music and youth culture (represented by mods on Lambrettas) and Arthur himself finds a temporary release through his encounter with a group of fashionably dressed, sexually hungry youngsters. Superficially Up the Junction (tx. 3 November 1965) might also appear to be linked with the emergence of what became known as the ‘swinging sixties’. The programme became famous for its frank approach to sexual themes and featured a loud pop-music soundtrack that included songs by The Kinks and The Searchers. Its cast also included the ‘Battersea Bardot’, Carol White, who (partly as a result of her work with Loach) became something of an emblem of the 1960s.⁹⁷ In conception, however, the production was intended to challenge what were regarded as the myths of affluence and the ‘swinging sixties’ by reminding audiences that not everyone was a beneficiary of these social and economic changes. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook observes:

In all the talk about the new classlessness of the swinging era it was easy to forget how unequal British society was. Between 1965 and 1975, the bottom 80 per cent of the population owned just over 10 per cent of the nation’s wealth.⁹⁸

It was exactly this kind of ‘forgetfulness’ that the programme’s story editor, Tony Garnett, suggested that the play was intended to target. Writing in the Radio Times, he claimed that the setting for the play, Battersea (which, he argued, could have been ‘lots of places’), was typified by ‘dead-end jobs, crumbling houses, dirty streets and … an overwhelming sense of you-never-had-it-so-bad’ while the people who lived there were ‘exploited, given a raw deal, or just conveniently forgotten by the rest of us’. ‘Whether you like it or not’, he continued, ‘this is here, now, 1965.’ However, while the play was motivated by a desire to show the ‘other’, ‘forgotten’ England, it also set out to debunk the myth of the ‘swinging sixties’ in another way. The programme-makers’ intentions were not only to portray its characters as simple victims of social and economic inequality but also to demonstrate how, in Garnett’s words, the people shown remained, in spite of their circumstances, ‘irrepressibly alive’ and capable of demonstrating ‘a personal style and sophistication which put to shame the self-promoting “in-groups” with their trendy clothes and their colour supplements’.⁹⁹ In a sense, it is this mix of social exposé and celebration of working-class ‘vitality’ in the face of social disadvantage that invests the play with much of its unusual quality and which provoked such strong reactions, particularly given how much of the ‘vitality’ of the characters within the play derives from an enthusiasm for sex (or conversation about sex).

Loach had been encouraged to read Nell Dunn’s novel of the same name (first published in 1963) by Stanley Myers, the co-author of The End of Arthur’s Marriage and composer for many of his earlier productions. Loach then took the idea to Tony Garnett, then working as story editor on ‘The Wednesday Play’, and, in collaboration with Dunn, ‘edited a script’ based on the book.¹⁰⁰ Dunn herself was a well-to-do bohemian (and millionaire’s daughter) who had moved, with her husband Jeremy Sandford, from Chelsea to Battersea in the late 1950s. Her experiences of living and working in Battersea provided the inspiration for the book which consists of a series of loosely connected sketches of working-class life. Thus, while the stories are presented as works of fiction, they also possess many of the characteristics of sociological reportage. The stories are told primarily through the use of direct speech that we are led to understand has been spoken to, or overheard by, the narrator. The descriptive prose, linking the speech, is also restricted to external observation and deliberately avoids overt authorial commentary or speculation on the characters’ inner thoughts and feelings. In this respect, the book’s ‘hybrid’ quality – partly literature, partly sociology – may be linked with a more general movement in the arts and social sciences interested in capturing, as Richard Hoggart puts it in The Uses of Literacy, ‘the “real” world of people’.¹⁰¹ It possesses, for example, a number of similarities with the more overtly ‘sociological’ work of Tony Parker whose ‘autobiography’ of a professional criminal, The Courage of His Convictions (1962), was based on a series of tape-recorded interviews.¹⁰²His account of a released prisoner, The Unknown Citizen (1963), published the same year as Dunn’s book, went one step further and combined recorded (or simply recalled) conversations with ‘reconstructed’ incident and ‘imagined’ dialogue.¹⁰³ Indeed, despite its supposedly factual character, the book was also adapted as a play for the BBC’s ‘Story Parade’ series in 1964 (when it was described by the Radio Times as ‘more than a sociological case-study’).¹⁰⁴

The combination of ‘documentary’ observation and fictionalised events evident in Dunn’s book was to carry over into the television play, which Tony Garnett described as ‘a show which defies the categories’. ‘It is not a play, a documentary, or a musical’, he suggested: ‘It is all of these at once.’¹⁰⁵ Indeed, although it was the content of the programme that provoked the strongest reactions, the play’s form also generated considerable critical comment. As Peter Black, of the Daily Mail, suggested, the production was barely ‘a play at all’ in the conventional sense of having ‘a middle, beginning and end’.¹⁰⁶ Like the original novel, the play lacks a clear dramatic structure, consisting of a series of episodes that are only loosely linked. Although the three main female characters – Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner) – provide an element of continuity, there are also a number of sequences (such as those involving ‘the Tally Man’ and the ‘Old Scrubber’) in which they do not appear. Moreover, while there is a measure of dramatic incident (such as Rube’s miscarriage and Terry’s [Michael Standing] death), these events are not clearly tied to a pattern of narrative causality but remain relatively self-contained interludes with only limited consequences (Terry’s death, for example, has little visible impact on Rube and it is only referred to as part of a conversation in a café during her first appearance after the event). As in Dunn’s stories, the narrative consists less of dramatic incident than snippets of conversation that, in effect, become narrative ‘events’ in themselves. Dunn had been especially enthused by the narrative quality and humour of the language used by the working-class women whom she met in Battersea and, by maintaining an emphasis upon ‘ordinary’ people talking, Loach’s production not only sought to reproduce the perceived vibrancy of working-class speech but also to avoid the ‘literary’ language conventionally associated with the television play.¹⁰⁷

This enthusiasm for ‘ordinary’, everyday language also led to the employment of visual techniques indebted to documentary and montage. Although Dunn’s book is ‘observational’ in character, its concentration upon the characters’ speech means that its employment of visual detail is sparing (as if to compensate for this the book was published with accompanying line drawings by Susan Benson). In Loach’s version, the establishment of the actuality of place and setting acquires considerable importance and the production involved several days’ shooting on 16mm film around Clapham Junction and other London locations. Even more so than in earlier productions shot partly on film (such as Three Clear Sundays and The End of Arthur’s Marriage), the production places a particular premium upon the ‘authenticity’ of its settings. The three leading characters are introduced by way of an extended pan down from a sign for Clapham Junction station that not only pinpoints the characters’ exact geographical location but also underwrites the claims of the play to ‘documentary’ accuracy (‘this is here, now, 1965’). This documentary element is reinforced by the apparent casualness of the shot itself. As Sydney Newman suggested at the time, the production aimed ‘to achieve an impression of real life’ through the use of photography that was ‘made to appear like hurried newsreel camera work’.¹⁰⁸ In this way, the production deliberately set out to evoke associations with documentary through the adoption of an unpolished style of camerawork that gives the impression that events might actually be ‘happening’ rather than being specifically staged for the camera. Thus, in the fight between Sylvie and her estranged husband Ted (Ronald Clarke) that occurs outside the pub, the use of shaky camera movement, occasional blurred focus and a restricted field of vision (caused by supposed ‘bystanders’ walking into shot) invest the scene with a degree of documentary verisimilitude that a more conventional method of filming (or shooting in the studio) would not have provided. As in The End of Arthur’s Marriage and The Coming Out Party (which it precedes), actors are not only filmed in real locations but also among real people. Thus, in the concluding scene (‘up the junction’), the three women walk down a busy street of shoppers, whose reactions to the actors and the presence of the camera appear to be genuinely unrehearsed. The positioning of the camera on the other side of the road also means that pedestrians and vehicles pass in front of the camera in a manner that was presumably unplanned (and which adds to the sense that the events could not have been ‘staged’).¹⁰⁹

‘Up the junction’: Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner)

Documentary techniques may also be seen to inform the shooting of the ‘Tally Man’, Barney (George Sewell), though, in this case, with rather more complicated aesthetic effects. In Dunn’s original book, many of the stories are told in the first person and the characters’ comments correspond to what the narrator (referred to in the first story as ‘an heiress from Chelsea’ based on Dunn) has been told or has overheard. In the Tally Man story, the character is a married man whom the narrator has met in a club and whom she subsequently accompanies on his rounds. In Loach’s television version, the character of the narrator is eliminated and replaced by Rube’s ‘mate’, Eileen. Given the absence of the narrator in the television production, the presentation of the Tally Man’s story creates a degree of ambiguity. In line with the production’s documentary-influenced aesthetic, it seems as if his comments may be being made to a documentary crew (in a kind of mock interview). His conversation is cut together with documentary shots of ‘ordinary’ people on the streets while Barney himself is filmed from the rear of his van. In this respect, the sequence does not simply mimic the observational techniques associated with documentary but appears to owe a specific debt to French cinéma vérité (and the work of Jean Rouch) in which the presence of the camera in recording events is openly acknowledged.¹¹⁰ However, unlike the scene in The End of Arthur’s Marriage in which Loach appears in front of the camera outside Fortnum & Mason’s, Up the Junction chooses not to show the film-maker and therefore leaves it unclear as to whom Barney is talking. In this respect, the withholding of the reverse-angle shot identifying a listener, could suggest that Barney may, in fact, be disrupting the ‘illusion’ of conventional television drama and directly addressing the television viewer.¹¹¹ However, his later comment to camera, regarding a drink, that ‘you look as if you could do with one’ suggests he is actually talking to a character off screen and that the look of the camera therefore corresponds to this character’s point of view. While a familiarity with the original book would encourage the association of these point-of-view shots with Dunn’s narrator, the absence of this character from the television production means that, for the television viewer, the sequence possesses an ambiguous status. In one respect, it might be contended that the use of the technique is no more than a hangover from the novel that has not been fully thought through. On the other hand, the combination of features in this manner is also indicative of the way in which the production more generally depends upon a certain amount of mixing of elements suggestive of both ‘modernism’ and ‘documentary’.¹¹²

Thus, while the play’s adoption of a documentary-like style results in some takes of longer-than-average length, these are complemented by an extensive recourse to editing (which is partly necessitated by the size of the cast). Indeed, for John Caughie, it is montage that should be regarded as constituting ‘the dominant mode of the drama’.¹¹³ The opportunity for a sustained use of editing was made possible not only by the amount of shooting on film that was undertaken but also, as Loach recalled, through the use of a 16mm back-up print for the post-recording editing of material shot in the studio (some of which was itself ad libbed rather than carefully pre-planned).¹¹⁴ As a result, the studio scenes employ an unusual degree of cutting not only to capture the energy of the situations depicted (in the pub, at work in the café) but also to reproduce the juxtaposition of conversational fragments that is a major component of the original stories. Montage had, of course, been an important tool for Loach since the experiments of Catherine and Diary of a Young Man. However, whereas editing was used primarily for narrative and rhetorical purposes in Diary of a Young Man, it acquires a much more pronounced descriptive and ‘sociological’ dimension in Up the Junction. As in The Coming Out Party, the production employs short montages of descriptive shots not only to show the physical actuality of the locations that people inhabit but also to suggest the ‘sociological’ importance of the social and economic environment in shaping character. This is apparent, for example, in the opening sequence in which there are no less than eight ‘establishing’ shots of the area around Clapham Junction (Battersea Power Station, people on the streets, kids playing in a wrecked car, trains, two policemen, a block of flats) prior to the appearance of the three ‘main’ characters (Rube, Sylvie and Eileen). A montage of workmen demolishing houses (consisting of eleven shots) also follows Eileen and Dave’s (Tony Selby) lovemaking (in a derelict building). Such sequences add little to plot momentum but function as a form of visual punctuation depicting the physical (and by implication social) environment in which the drama occurs. In so doing, they seek not only to establish the importance of the physical circumstances in which people live but also to generalise out from the individual experience to the conditions shared by the larger community (and, even, social class).

This kind of linking of the particular to the general is suggested by other forms of montage device. When Dave is up in court, for example, this is preceded by a series of shots of other men recalling their involvement in criminal activities. Similarly, when Eileen visits Dave in prison, the camera does not restrict itself to their conversation but cuts to other – previously unseen – women in the same position. In this way, the specific predicaments of the main characters are connected to the experiences of other ‘ordinary’ men and women with whom they share a common condition. This is also so of the sequence identifying Rube’s pregnancy in which a series of documentary-like shots of ‘anonymous’ pregnant women and mothers (shot in doorways, on the street and in the park) precedes a close-up of Rube. These shots are also accompanied by unsynchronised voiceovers in which various unidentified women (other than Rube) describe incidents related to becoming pregnant (e.g. ‘I never once lay down with him’, ‘the worst thing was telling my mum’). In Dunn’s original book, a high proportion of the speech is ‘untagged’ and the juxtaposition of items of anonymous speech is employed to evoke the sense of a shared oral culture. In Loach’s version, this inclusion of unidentified voices assumes a specifically audiovisual character through the imitation of television documentary conventions. The production appears to be particularly indebted to a programme such as Denis Mitchell’s Morning in the Streets (1959) in which the voices of ordinary people, separately recorded, are laid over documentary footage of a (composite) city.¹¹⁵ In this way, the presence of the unidentified voiceover not only adds an aura of documentary to the production but also offers a further means of generalising out from the individual drama. Thus, while Rube’s story may be the one upon which the play is – temporarily – concentrated, it is clearly intended to be read as representative of an experience that is broadly similar to those of the other girls whose voices we hear. Rube’s ‘typicality’, or representativeness, is underlined in a subsequent scene when Eileen and Annie (Gilly Fraser) accompany her across Wimbledon Common in order to see Winnie (Ann Lancaster), whom Rube will pay for an abortion. The shots of the three women are accompanied by more female voiceovers (belonging to Rube and Annie) prior to the introduction of a male voiceover in which a doctor recalls the number of women who have visited his surgery contemplating a backstreet abortion. The doctor’s voiceover resumes during further shots of Rube crossing the common and then when Rube finally undergoes an induced miscarriage. Although Up the Junction was the first of Loach’s productions to give rise to complaints about the confusion between ‘drama’ and ‘documentary’, the doctor’s voiceover (spoken by Tony Garnett’s actual GP, Don Grant) was in fact the only ‘genuine’ documentary device in the play (which otherwise relied on the simulation of documentary techniques). Its use in the play, however, clearly conformed to the production’s overall strategy of investing its individual dramas with a more general social and cultural representativeness. Garnett himself has claimed that the use of a voiceover at this juncture was also a self-consciously ‘Brechtian’ strategy that sought to invest the viewer’s emotional response to the scene (the shots of Rube screaming) with a more analytical perspective.¹¹⁶ This has, in turn, been criticised for the way in which it apparently subordinates ‘private’ female experience to the ‘public’ voice of male authority.¹¹⁷ While there is undoubtedly a degree of validity in this, it should also be noted that the male voiceover does not so much ‘refuse’, or cancel out, the female perspective, and emotional response that it generates, as draw upon it while adding a further layer of significance.

Rube screaming: the controversial abortion scene in Up the Junction

The production’s juxtaposition of speech and image is complemented by the use of music which (as Garnett’s description of the play as partly a ‘musical’ would indicate) features prominently in the production. The presence of pop songs not only invests the play with an additional sense of ‘immediacy’ (Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’, which is heard in the café, had been No. 1 in the charts only a matter of weeks before) but also plays an important role in delineating the cultural milieu that the characters inhabit. Songs, however, do not simply form a part of the drama (performed or overheard in the pub, at work or in the café) but are also employed as formal devices, punctuating the action or linking individual sequences of shots (as in the factory when The Searchers’ version of ‘Hungry for Love’ accompanies a short montage of the women working). While some of these songs possess a diegetic motivation (‘Hungry for Love’ is supposedly playing through a factory loudspeaker), others have no realistic source (as in the concluding sequence when The Searchers’ ‘Sugar and Spice’ is heard on the soundtrack). Featuring pop music in this way was still unusual and provided a means of creating atmosphere (reinforcing the girls’ exuberance in the final sequence, for example) as well as commenting upon the action.¹¹⁸ This latter approach was partly inspired by Dunn’s original stories, in which the lyrics from contemporary pop songs function as an ironic counterpoint to the events being described. Ben E. King’s ‘Yes’ is heard on a radio in the kitchen while Rube undergoes an abortion upstairs; Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ ‘Ecstasy’ plays on the jukebox at the end of a desultory conversation about ‘fellas’ (that takes place in a grubby café containing ‘full ashtrays and dripping sauce bottles’ and ‘sugar-bowls with brown clotted lumps in the white sugar’).¹¹⁹ Both songs reappear in the television version but not in quite the same context and without their original diegetic rationale. They do, however, maintain a degree of continuity in the way in which they relate to the action. ‘Ecstasy’, for example, is first heard during Eileen and Dave’s lovemaking and continues over the ensuing montage of shots of slum clearance for which it, in effect, provides the unifying principle. The use of the song in this manner also adds an extra level of meaning to the imagery, not only highlighting the drabness of the environment in which the characters live (and the passing of a traditional working-class way of life) but also creating a sense of disjuncture between the ‘fantasy’ world of mass culture and the actual circumstances in which the characters conduct their romance. This split between romantic ‘fantasy’ and harsh ‘reality’ is also suggested by the way in which Loach’s production develops the novel’s reference to the song ‘Yes’ (and its celebration of male sexual bravado), employing it to accompany a close-up of Rube’s anguished face during her abortion as well as a subsequent montage of shots from earlier in the play (Rube outside Clapham Junction station, walking the common and lacquering her hair in the pub toilet). In this way, the song not only ‘licenses’ the temporal play of the imagery and invests it with an added emotional poignancy but also provides a form of ironic commentary upon Rube’s situation in relation to the ‘fantasies’ of mass culture (represented not only by the song but the many photos and magazine cuttings pinned to her bedroom wall).

As this might suggest, the play’s attitude towards changes in working-class culture is not entirely straightforward. The production follows in the wake of the cycle of British ‘new wave’ films that had manifested a concern about the erosion of traditional working-class culture in the face of consumerism, mass culture and ‘Americanisation’. In some respects, Up the Junction clearly departs from this tradition, placing emphasis upon the group rather than the individual and upon women rather than men (be they ‘angry’ or otherwise). However, the play is also set in a period of economic and social change characterised by the passing of an older ‘way of life’ identified with the housing (where Dave grew up) now being pulled down and the washhouse where the ‘Old Scrubber’ – whose funeral occurs near the play’s end – has spent all her working life. Thus, while the play celebrates the oral culture associated with the traditional working class, there is also a strong sense of the way in which this now has to compete with new forms of mass culture such as pop music. In the ‘new wave’ films (such as A Kind of Loving), the advent of mass culture is also commonly associated with a process of ‘feminisation’ and the prominence of pop music in the women-centred drama of Up the Junction might also suggest a similar concern with the erosion of traditional male roles (it is noticeable, for example, that while virtually all of the main women characters are shown at work, very few of the men appear to have stable jobs and they frequently operate on the fringes of criminality). However, while the play does contrast the idealised world-view of pop songs with the harsh realities of everyday life, it does not follow the ‘new wave’ films in identifying pop music as purely a threat to traditional working-class culture. Thus, while the play may be sceptical about the social reach of the ‘swinging sixties’, it also recognises the potency of popular music for a new generation of young people and the energies that it is helping to release. In this respect, the play avoids representing ‘mass culture’ as simply a culture imposed from above but seeks to show how the characters succeed in making pop songs their own (as when the women return home from the washhouse singing a Beatles song or Sylvie performs at the club) and are able to use pop music as a cultural resource in the struggles of everyday life.

Working-class vitality in the face of economic disadvantage: the women at the factory in Up the Junction

The oscillation between the celebration (of working-class vitality) and critique (of harsh social and economic conditions) that underpins the play’s attitude towards popular music may also be detected in the play’s treatment of abortion. Abortion was, of course, still illegal at this time and it remained a sensitive issue for television. Nevertheless, public awareness of the dangers involved in ‘backstreet’ abortions was growing and the pressure for legislative change had been gaining momentum. So, while the Abortion Act was not passed until 1967, the Labour backbencher Renée Short had already introduced a bill in support of abortion law reform in June 1965.¹²⁰ This encouraged discussion of the matter on television and, in July 1965, the current affairs programme Gallery featured a report on ‘Abortion and the Law’ in which various interviewees discussed whether the time had come for the law on abortion to be changed.¹²¹ By this point the subject had also made an appearance in television plays. These included Loach’s own Three Clear Sundays, in which Rosa is urged by Britannia to obtain an abortion, as well as an episode of the popular series, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, broadcast in April 1965. The controversy surrounding the representation of abortion in Up the Junction, therefore, was less to do with its suitability as a topic for television than with the manner with which it was dealt.¹²² Tony Garnett has indicated that he was keen that the play should help the case for legal reform and the programme was commonly perceived as providing a powerful portrayal of the risks that attached to illegal abortions. Even Mary Whitehouse, who loathed the play, was forced to concede that ‘[t]he screaming girl undergoing an illegal operation was enough to make anyone pick up his or her pen and write to their M.P. The sooner these terrible back-street abortionists are put out of business the better.’¹²³ What Whitehouse objected to, therefore, was less the actual portrayal of Rube’s abortion than what she perceived as the play’s failure to locate it within an appropriate moral framework. Thus, in a letter to the Minister of Health, sent after the play’s transmission, her main complaint was not that the play had included an abortion scene but that it had represented sexual promiscuity as ‘normal’.¹²⁴ Thus, while some critics in the press argued that the play provided a moral warning against the dangers of promiscuity, the problem for Whitehouse was that it did not.¹²⁵

Whatever the value of Whitehouse’s overall stance on the matter, her analysis of how the play works is not without its merits. In the original novel, Dunn’s low-key prose is self-consciously designed to avoid judging the events that the book describes. So, while the book’s account of the miscarriage is shockingly matter-of-fact (ending with Sylvie wrapping Rube’s aborted foetus in a newspaper and throwing it down the toilet), the book nonetheless refuses to invest the reality of abortion with any exaggerated political or moral significance. Rather, it is presented as an unexceptional part of everyday life that, according to Minogue and Palmer, constitutes ‘a little local difficulty’ that will permit the women to return to their ‘true source of joy, sex’.¹²⁶ As has been seen, the television version presents the abortion in a much more emotionally charged manner and adds a voiceover intended to place the event in a more directly ‘political’ context. However, in terms of the production overall, and its place in the characters’ lives, Rube’s abortion remains only one among a number of scenes competing for our attention. In this respect, it is instructive to compare the play’s treatment of abortion with the film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), released a few years earlier. In the film, the abortion (at the film censor’s insistence) is not only shown to fail but also becomes a narrative turning point, shaping the subsequent trajectory and emotional development of both Arthur (Albert Finney), who decides to marry Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), and Brenda (Rachel Roberts), who is reconciled to life with her husband Jack (Bryan Pringle) with whom she will raise Arthur’s child.¹²⁷ In Up the Junction, however, the abortion not only ‘succeeds’ but, partly as a consequence of the play’s episodic structure, carries few narrative consequences. Rube herself reveals no lasting effects and is soon to be heard complaining that ‘when you’ve been going steady for six months it gets a bit boring snogging with the same fella every night’. Unlike Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, therefore, there is no particular penalty to be paid for sexual ‘promiscuity’ and life (including the pursuit of ‘fellas’) does, indeed, carry on as ‘normal’. It may, of course, be the case that sexual excitement (like pop music) provides one of the few pleasures in a life dominated by poor housing, low-paid work and the fear of debt or – given the allusions to the Bomb in one scene – fear of the end of world. However, if this is the case, it is the social and economic conditions to which the characters are subjected – rather than their behaviour – at which the play directs its criticisms (even if the production’s enthusiasm for the vitality of working-class culture then runs the risk of obscuring some of the deleterious effects of these very same conditions).¹²⁸

Thus, while some critics attacked the play for a romanticisation of the working class, or a contradictory attitude towards them, it was undoubtedly the play’s portrayal of sexual behaviour that provoked the most vigorous response. According to Sydney Newman, there were 514 telephone calls about the programme, of which 464 were complaints.¹²⁹ The play, as previously noted, also proved a particular provocation to Mary Whitehouse who wrote to the Minister of Health to complain. Sections of the press were also hostile. The critic of the Daily Telegraph accused the programme of ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ and called for tougher TV censorship.¹³⁰ Peter Black of the Daily Mail was more kindly disposed towards the production but could not resist speculating whether ‘the Wednesday Play boys’ had set out ‘to see just how far they could go in a television play with sex and cuss words’.¹³¹ The BBC’s own audience research also indicated that some viewers found the play ‘disgusting, degrading and unnecessarily sordid’.¹³² Given these criticisms, it is hardly surprising that the controversy surrounding the programme should have re-emerged the following year when the Head of Plays, Michael Bakewell chose it for a repeat showing as part of a best-of season of ‘Wednesday Plays’ (set to begin in July 1966). This decision was approved by the Controller of Programmes, Huw Wheldon, and, while some consideration was given to the timing of the broadcast, the repeat was duly scheduled.¹³³

At the time of the original screening there had, of course, been substantial discussion of the programme within the BBC. It was discussed at the Weekly Programme Review at which it had been praised for its ‘vitality’ and ‘total recall of instant experience’ but had also been criticised for its ‘weak story line’ and apparently excessive length.¹³⁴ The Board of Governors also considered criticisms of ‘The Wednesday Play’, including Up the Junction, but appeared to accept that these had been ‘entirely legitimate productions’ of which critics had taken ‘a superficial view’ that ‘failed to discern their true theme and motive’.¹³⁵ At the same meeting, the Director-General, Hugh Greene, also reported that the ‘Clean-Up TV Campaign’, which had now become the ‘National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’, could only claim ‘a thousand subscribers’ and appeared to counsel against panic measures. However, given the controversy that the programme had generated on its first screening, the Board was much less sanguine about the prospect of a repeat. The Chairman accepted the view that had been put to him by Mrs Whitehouse in a letter that it was ‘one thing to defend the original showing’ but ‘a different matter to defend a second showing’ given ‘its known impact on the audience’. Although Glanmor Williams (the new National Governor for Wales) suggested the Board ought ‘to consider whether the feeling of offence was rationally based and worthy of respect’, the Board nonetheless took the decision that Up the Junction ‘should not be included in the repeat series’.¹³⁶ This involved a rebuke to Huw Wheldon who was accused of making ‘an error of judgement’ for not referring the matter upwards. This also appears to have been the view of Hugh Greene, the Director-General, who told the Board that Wheldon would have been ‘wiser to seek further advice’. Wheldon, however, refused to accept the admonishment and threatened to resign. In a four-page memo to Greene, he conceded that the ‘check-controls’ on ‘The Wednesday Play’ had been ‘far from satisfactory’ and that the plan to stockpile programmes had not proved fully successful.¹³⁷ He also indicated that he did not admire the play as much as some of his colleagues and had asked for a cut to the lovemaking sequence occurring near the play’s beginning. During the discussion at the Weekly Programme Review, he had also stressed ‘the need … not to alienate the audience’ not as ‘a question of morality, but of giving consideration to the sensitivities of the audience, particularly of family groups’.¹³⁸ Nevertheless, it was also his clear view that the ‘programme side of the Television Service … felt that this was the most outstanding and unignorable of all the Wednesday Plays … [and] was proud of it, admiring both its technical brilliance and honesty of purpose’. Given this situation, he did not consider it possible to exclude Up the Junction from a season of second showings of the ‘best’ ‘Wednesday Plays’ and warned that to do so as ‘a matter of policy’ would ‘split the Television Service from top to bottom’.¹³⁹ With the assistance of Sydney Newman, he also prepared a paper on ‘The Wednesday Play’ for the Board in which he defended the series as a whole as well as his specific decision concerning the proposed repeat showing of Up the Junction.¹⁴⁰

However, while the dispute over the repeat of Up the Junction had the potential to break out into open conflict, the split within the BBC that Wheldon predicted (as well as his own resignation) were avoided by an unexpected turn of events. Only a couple of days after the Board had decided not to proceed with the repeat broadcast, the BBC received a letter from solicitors on behalf of the owners of the chocolate factory in which some of the play’s scenes has been filmed, indicating their intention to seek a High Court injunction to prevent a second showing of the programme. The letter claimed that the factory was ‘easily recognisable’ and that the programme could damage business due to the programme giving ‘the impression that food-stuffs were being manufactured … without proper supervision and in unhygienic surroundings’.¹⁴¹ Although the BBC’s own solicitors advised that the application for an injunction was likely to fail, they also warned that the Corporation might prove liable for damages should it proceed with a further screening. Ironically, this threat of legal action suited the BBC management very well as it allowed them to announce the play’s withdrawal without publicly admitting that the Board of Governors had already decided to ban its own play. Thus, Lord Normanbrook was able to express his satisfaction that it was no longer necessary ‘to bring the difference of opinion between the Board and the programme staff into the public arena’.¹⁴² Given that the Board’s original decision not to repeat the play was only known to a few senior members of staff, the convenient fiction that this was a ‘purely legal’ matter quickly became the official line.¹⁴³ Even Huw Wheldon, who clearly knew better, presented the decision as ‘altogether technical’ when responding to an MP’s concerns that the BBC were ‘being subjected to pressures on various programmes’.¹⁴⁴ Although Up the Junction was denied a further outing on television, it did re-emerge as a feature film, written by Loach’s colleague, the BBC script editor Roger Smith, and directed by Peter Collinson. Although Loach was not involved in this remake, he did nonetheless take on a further Nell Dunn project, Poor Cow. However, this was not until after he had achieved even greater impact with his work for television in the form of the most famous ‘Wednesday Play’ of all, Cathy Come Home.

68.Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 59. Jeffrey Weeks suggests how a combined emphasis upon both economic modernisation and social reform underpinned Labour’s attempt to extend its appeal among the professional middle class in Sex, Politics and Society (London: Longman, 1981), p. 266.

69.Roy Jenkins, ‘Is Britain Civilized?’, The Labour Case (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 135.

70.Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006), p. 322.

71.Sir Hugh Greene, The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the Sixties (London: Bodley Head, 1969), pp. 100–1. Although Greene’s instincts were in favour of creative freedom, he was responsible to a Board of Governors that was inclined to be more cautious (and, on occasion, authoritarian). It is for this reason that Michael Tracey suggests that Greene’s willingness to bring the satirical show That Was the Week That Was to an end in 1963 grew out of a pragmatic concern to maintain the unity and stability of the Board. See Tracey, A Variety of Lives, pp. 220–1.

73.Roger Smith and Tony Garnett also became story editors for the series, which Garnett described as consisting of plays ‘dealing with contemporary themes … which break through the conventional barriers of naturalistic form’. Memo from Tony Garnett to Peter Aylen, 30 April 1964, BBCWAC T5/2081/1.

74.Memo from Director of Television to ChPBBC1, HDGTel, 13 July 1964, BBCWAC T16/62/3.

79.This theme of the crookedness of so-called ‘respectable society’ recurs in O’Connor’s autobiography, The Eleventh Commandment (St Peter Port: Seagull, 1976) in which he comments that ‘[p]eople think I’m cynical, but I’ve seen so many people rise from the slums and go into white-collar crime. They’re at the top now. They go to Palace garden parties, Ascot, Lord Taverners, golf at Walton Heath and Wentworth’ (p. 21).

87.Letter from James MacTaggart to P. A. Fletcher, 21 April 1965, BBCWAC T5/659/1.

89.This combination of elements led some critics to criticise the resulting uncertainty of tone. In the Observer (11 April 1965), for example, Maurice Richardson complained that the production’s mix of ‘crook-comedy’, ‘melodrama’ and ‘operatic capers’ failed to ‘blend’.

90.Theatre Workshop had a policy of recruiting a new kind of (untrained) actor to the stage, many of whom went on to work with Loach. Thus, some actors who appear in Three Clear Sundays – Griffith Davies and George Sewell – had also taken part in the original production of Oh What a Lovely War.

91.Letter from James MacTaggart to Miss A. Nichols, 20 April 1965, BBCWAC T5/659/1. However, given that the lady in question appears three times in the play (at the end as well as at the beginning), the way she is used in the production also raises some interesting questions concerning the BBC’s entitlement to use her image without her apparent knowledge or consent.

93.Deborah Knight, ‘Naturalism, Narration and Critical Perspective: Ken Loach and the Experimental Method’, in McKnight, Agent of Challenge and Defiance, p. 66.

95.Although O’Connor’s own family, whatever their other shortcomings, do not appear to have been receivers of stolen goods, his autobiography reveals his distaste for ‘thieves, ponces or receivers’ (The Eleventh Commandment, p. 65). These included George Sewell, the father of the actor of the same name who appears in both Three Clear Sundays and The Coming Out Party.

97.In her autobiography (co-written with Clifford Thurlow), Carol White claims that her name became ‘synonymous with the age: the sixties, Swinging London, long hair, Purple Hearts, mini-skirts, the Beatles’. See Carol Comes Home (London: New English Library, 1982), p. 17.

100.Paul Madden, ‘Extracts from an Interview with Ken Loach’, Complete Programme Notes for a Season of British Television Drama 1959–73 Held at NFT, 11–24 October 1976 (London: BFI, 1976), n.p. Although most of the lines occur in the original, there are some additions to the dialogue as well.

101.Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1959, orig. 1957), p. 79. For a good overview of how post-war sociological studies of the working class in Britain adopted the forms of the ‘documentary, personal reportage and semi-fictional narrative’, see Stuart Laing, Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–64 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), Ch. 2.

102.Dunn herself also went on to adopt a similar method, publishing a book devoted entirely to tape-recorded conversations with a range of women interviewees in Talking to Women (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965).

103.Tony Parker, The Unknown Citizen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, orig. 1963), p. 19.

108.Memo from Sydney Newman to Mr A. L. Hutchinson, 16 November 1965, BBCWAC T5/681/1.

109.Loach’s fondness for this technique is testified to by the fact that he was still employing it over forty years later. In It’s a Free World …, for example, Angie goes looking for her son who has been snatched from her front door. In a short series of shots, the camera is positioned on the far side of the street as it observes Angie walking along the street, asking local shopkeepers if they have seen a little boy. As in Up the Junction, traffic passes in front of the camera and the behaviour of pedestrians genuinely appears to have been caught ‘as it happens’.

110.Although the idea of ‘télé-vérité’ had been applied to TV documentary, Up the Junction appears to be the first drama to be described in these terms. Tony Garnett used the term when commissioning Dunn’s script (Memo to Copyright Department, 6 October 1965, BBCWAC T48/223/1) as did T. C. Worsley in his review for the Financial Times (Television: The Ephemeral Art [London: Alan Ross, 1970], p. 36). The term, however, was applied in a relatively vague way and appears to refer to the influence of US ‘Direct Cinema’ rather than French ‘cinéma vérité’ proper. For a more general discussion of this issue, see Jamie Sexton, ‘“Televérité” Hits Britain: Documentary, Drama, and the Growth of 16mm Filmmaking in British Television’, Screen vol. 44 no. 4, 2003, pp. 429–44.

111.Leigh discusses the scene’s use of direct address in relation to the films of Jean-Luc Godard in The Cinema of Ken Loach, pp. 33–8. However, while in execution the scene is undoubtedly formally disruptive, the evidence suggests that it was planned to conform to the documentary appearance of the programme rather than subvert it.

112.In his account of the emergence of modern European cinema, András Bálint Kovács suggests how French cinéma vérité represented a ‘self-reflective version of naturalist style’ that influenced the way in which the early films of Jean-Luc Godard combined ‘self-reflexive narrative commentary with improvised filming style’ in Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–80 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), p. 169. In a similar manner, it is possible to see how Loach’s mixing of elements from Italian neo-realism and the British ‘new wave’, with influences from cinéma vérité and the French nouvelle vague, generated a degree of fusion between modernism and, what Kovács refers to as, ‘post neo-realism’.

115.In his review for the Sunday Telegraph (7 November 1965), Philip Purser actually referred to the play as ‘a Denis Mitchell documentary, only with actors’. However, although the use of non-synchronised voices on the soundtrack is very similar to Mitchell’s work, the camerawork in Up the Junction is much more casual and less composed than in Mitchell’s case.

116.Quoted in Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2003), p. 74.

117.M. K. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘Boys on Top: Gender and Authorship on the BBC Wednesday Play, 1964–70’, Media, Culture and Society vol. 21 no. 3, 1999, pp. 409–25.

118.As Jeff Smith indicates, in his account of the compilation score, it was another couple of years before the inclusion of pop songs on a film soundtrack gained popularity with the release of The Graduate (1967). Although Smith identifies Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) as a significant precursor of the compilation score, the use of pre-recorded pop songs within a dramatic context in Up the Junction also makes it a notable forerunner.

120.Short regarded abortion law reform as a ‘humanitarian measure’ that commanded ‘the overwhelming support of the people’ and regretted the failure of the Labour government to find the time to pass the appropriate legislation (The Times, 12 July 1965, p. 7).

122.Sydney Newman himself suggested that it was ‘the warm friendly atmosphere’ of Dr Finlay’s Casebook that had rendered its treatment of the theme of abortion ‘acceptable’, whereas it was ‘the harsh realistic context’ in which Up the Junction had dealt with the same subject that had ‘shocked’ many viewers (Minutes of the Northern Ireland Advisory Council, 24 June 1966, BBCWAC NI2/20/1).

123.Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning Up TV: From Protest to Participation (London: Blandford, 1967), p. 167.

124.‘TV Play Blasted in Letter to Minister’, Liverpool Post, 5 November 1965.

125.As M. K. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh indicates, reviewers diverged in the ‘messages’ that they extracted from the production (characteristically in accordance with their own social and moral predispositions). Her own account of the play, however, tends to attribute to it a fairly simple univocal ‘meaning’ that is belied by the complexity of the production itself. See ‘“Drama” into “News”: Strategies of Intervention in “The Wednesday Play”’, Screen vol. 38 no. 3, 1997, pp. 247–59.

126.Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer, ‘Confronting the Abject: Women and Dead Babies in Modern English Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature vol. 29 no. 3, 2006, pp. 116–17.

127.Anthony Aldgate discusses the case of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema and Theatre 1955–65 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), Ch. 5. Although he identifies the abortion scene in Alfie (1966) as a significant breakthrough, it is worth noting that this was not screened until several months after the broadcast of Up the Junction.

128.In a somewhat jaundiced review for the Sunday Times (7 November 1965), Maurice Wiggin commented on the apparent tension within the play between criticism (of social conditions) and celebration (of working-class vitality), complaining that ‘[t]he illusion that life is richer, somehow more human and rewarding, in the slums, is very dear to some progressive intellectuals – who also (quite rightly) want to get people out of the slums, where they are believed to live such rich lives, and into the suburbs, where life is (according to the same authorities) so thin and impoverished’.

129.Memo from Head of Drama Group to CPTel, 15 June 1966, BBCWAC T5/695/2. While these numbers are significant, it is also worth recalling that the overall viewing figures for the programme were 9.5 million – the largest for any ‘Wednesday Play’ up to that point.

130.‘“Raw and Witty” Documentary Scrapes Barrel’, Daily Telegraph, 4 November 1965.

131.‘This Must Be Just about THE LIMIT’, Daily Mail, 6 November 1965. Although the attacks on the play were responsible for its high profile, a substantial number of reviews in the press were, in fact, favourable and even the critic of The Times (4 November 1965) was moved to declare that the play had been ‘remarkable and technically stimulating’.

132.Up the Junction, BBC Audience Research Report, 7 December 1965, BBCWAC T5/681/1.

133.‘Wednesday Play Repeats’, Memo from Planning Manager, Projected Arrangements, to HPDTel, 9 June 1966, BBCWAC T5/695/2. Probably out of recognition that the transmission of the programme might provoke further controversy, the Controller of BBC1, Michael Peacock, asked for a postponement of the broadcast until later in the original schedule. The series eventually began on 6 July with a repeat of Dennis Potter’s Alice and also included a repeat of The Coming Out Party (tx. 10 August 1966).

134.Television Weekly Programme Review Minutes, 10 November 1965, BBCWAC R78/1919/1.

135.Minutes of a meeting of the Board of Governors, 2 December 1965, BBCWAC R1/33/3. This view was also reflected in a letter drafted by Sydney Newman for use in replying to complaints about Up the Junction in which he argued that ‘not only did it represent life as it is and not as we would wish it to be’ but that ‘many people found the play deeply moral as well’ (BBCWAC T5/681).

136.Minutes of a meeting of the Board of Governors, 9 June 1966, BBCWAC R1/34/2. The Chairman also noted the undertaking made by the Board to the Postmaster General in June 1964 that programmes should not be ‘offensive to public feeling’.

137.Following transmission of For the West (tx. 26 May 1965), Wheldon had instructed the Head of Plays, Michael Bakewell, to view every ‘Wednesday Play’ before transmission. When Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton was withdrawn in June 1965 on grounds of its political content, it was also decided to stockpile plays in order to make substitutions possible.

138.Television Weekly Programme Review Minutes, 10 November 1965, BBCWAC R78/1919/1. In a paper on television ‘censorship’, written the following year, Wheldon suggests that ‘the constant and inextinguishable awareness that the audience consists of family groups’ acted as a major restraint upon what could be broadcast (‘Control over the Subject Matter of Programmes in BBC Television: A Note by CPTel’, 28 September 1966, BBCWAC T16/543).

139.Memo from Controller of Programmes, Television, to DG through DTel, 12 June 1966, BBCWAC R78/1919/1. The memo was routed through the Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, who, to his credit, indicated that he too must ‘have failed to understand the Board’s viewpoint’, given that he would not have thought of referring the proposed repeat to the Director-General had he been aware of it (Memo from Director of Television to DG, 13 June 1966, BBCWAC R78/1919/1).

140.‘The Wednesday Play: A Note by Controller of Programmes, Television’, 17 June 1966, BBCWAC G60/66.

142.Minutes of a meeting of the Board of Governors, 23 June 1966, BBCWAC R1/34/2.

143.The BBC’s success in misrepresenting what actually happened has also confused subsequent commentators. Thus, while M. K. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh notes the expedient way in which the BBC responded to the threat of legal action, she appears not to be aware that the Board had already decided to withdraw the play (an action which she suggests would have been too ‘humiliating’ and ‘damaging’ for the BBC to have contemplated). See ‘“Drama” into “News”’, p. 255.

144.Letter from CPTel to Mr Ray Dobson, 27 June 1966, BBCWAC T16/730/1. Dobson’s original letter was responding to the concerns of a constituent that ‘pressure from people who are trying to impose their own values on broadcasting’ meant that the BBC was ‘depriving others of programmes they enjoy and avoiding all controversies’. Letter from Ray Dobson, MP for Bristol North East, to Director of Programmes, 23 June 1966, BBCWAC T16/730/1.