The Left and "Play for Today"

On Monday BBC4 showed a brilliant ninety-minute documentary produced and directed by John Wyver. Wyver, a distinguished TV producer since the 1980s, has written superb books about arts programmes on television (Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain, 2007) and on filming Shakespeare (Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2019).

Wyver is the creative driving force behind the 50^th anniversary celebrations of BBC1’s Play for Today (1970-84), running on Radio 4, BBC4 and at the BFI this Autumn. His documentary, Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today has rightly received enormous acclaim. It showed clips of many of the outstanding dramas, from Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party to David Hare’s Licking Hitler and Ian McEwan’s The Imitation Game. It also included interviews with not only Leigh and Hare but also the directors Ricard Eyre, Ken Loach and Roy Battersby, as well as producers and script editors like Peter Ansorge, Ann Scott and Margaret Matheson.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, the documentary put the series in its historical context. This was a period of profound political crisis, and the debate triggered on the Left by Benn and Healey can still be felt today, in the fallout from Corbynism. Trevor Griffiths’s All Good Men was broadcast in 1974, and the exchanges between Jack Shepherd and Bill Fraser could have been written yesterday. Wyver also does a superb job of pointing out the key absences: how few women or people of colour worked on Play for Today, as writers or directors.

Perhaps the most interesting debate the programme triggered on social media was about politics. After Roy Battersby directed Colin Welland’s play, Leeds United! (1974), about a strike by women textile workers in Leeds, Battersby never directed another Play for Today. It is tempting to suspect a kind of McCarthyism was at work.

Tempting but wrong. What Wyver’s documentary made clear was how political Play for Today was. Writers like Hare, McEwan, Jim Allen, Trevor Griffiths and Barry Hines, directors like Loach and producers like Tony Garnett, were given the best railway set in British TV drama. They were allowed to give their version of British politics, past and present, from Jim Allen’s four-part drama, Days of Hope, about the betrayal of the working class up to the General Strike in 1926, to Hare and McEwan’s plays about British myths about the war. Trevor Griffiths’s Country (shown on BBC4 on Monday), was a powerful analysis of the 1945 Election. There were also dramas about trade union militancy, like United Kingdom, Leeds United! and The Price of Coal.

What is astonishing is how little attempt there was at any kind of political balance, especially when you consider that Margaret Thatcher was elected and then resoundingly re-elected during Play for Today‘s run. And it wasn’t that these plays were pro-Labour. They were far left, more SWP and WRP than Healey or Wilson. Jim Allen, a regular writer, joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the forerunner of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) led by Gerry Healy, and was expelled from the Labour Party. Ken Loach was associated with (or was a member of) the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers Revolutionary Party), the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party or SWP) and the International Marxist Group. Before writing for Play for Today, Trevor Griffiths had written plays about Gramsci and the factory occupations of 1920s Italy (Occupations) and the Glaswegian Trotskyist John Tagg (The Party).

None were banned from working on Play for Today, though Allen and Loach later had work banned by the Royal Court and Loach by LWT, over a programme about the 1980s Miners’ Strike. Only two plays were banned out of more than three hundred: Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle about a man raping a young handicapped woman and Scum, a violent drama about the terrible conditions in a borstal (including scenes of rape). The sex and violence were considered unacceptable, the politics not.

Fifty years on, perhaps the most surprising thing about Play for Today is how the far Left were allowed to air their views at peak time on BBC1 and Right-wing writers were as absent as women or people of colour. Things have changed since then. On Sunday, BBC1 will be showing the first episode of David Hare’s new drama series, Roadkill, in which Hugh Laurie plays Peter Laurence, a self-made Conservative minister who “embodies the fictional future of the Conservative party”.

Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today, Trevor Griffiths’s Country and Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party can be seen on BBC iPlayer.