TV
Looking back at Play for Today
The 1970s BBC drama showcase launched many careers. David Herman looks back.
October 15, 2020 12:51
By, David Herman
3 min read
The 1970s BBC drama showcase launched many careers. David Herman looks back.
October 15, 2020 12:51ByDavid Herman, David Herman
This month BBC One’s Play for Today celebrates its 50th birthday. It ran from 1970 to 1984 and was one of the highpoints of a golden age of British TV drama. During these years Play for Today showed more than 300 plays by some of Britain’s best writers including John Osborne, David Hare and Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett, Trevor Griffiths and Ian McEwan.
This special anniversary is being marked by events at the BFI, documentaries on Radio Four and BBC Four and a season of some of the best plays will be shown on BBC Four. BFI Southbank will be celebrating the series throughout October and November.
A number of the best plays were by Jewish writers, including Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh, Bar Mitzvah Boy and Spend, Spend, Spend! by Jack Rosenthal, Soft Targets by Stephen Poliakoff and Love Letters on Blue Paper by Arnold Wesker. Most were part of a new generation of playwrights who broke through as television dramatists in the 1970s and 80s, largely thanks to Play for Today.
The Jewish writers fell into two groups. There were a handful who wrote one or two plays: Wesker, Maurice Edelman, a long-time Labour MP, Lionel Goldstein, Elaine Feinstein and Helene Hanff. But there was another group who found their voices with Play for Today, in particular, Mike Leigh, Jack Rosenthal and Stephen Poliakoff. Between them, they wrote almost a dozen dramas for Play for Today. Their experience of single dramas, and the acclaim these plays received, allowed them to move on to bigger projects. They went on to write and direct some of the best- known British TV dramas and films of the next 30 years.
It wasn’t just about writers, of course. Their plays featured Jewish actors like Warren Mitchell, Ron Moody, Cyril Shaps and Jonathan Lynn. Mitchell gave a memorable performance in Moss by Bernard Kops, Ron Moody starred in Rocky Marciano is Dead, also by Kops, and Cyril Shaps gave one of his best performances as Grandpa Wax in Bar Mitzvah Boy.
There were also new Jewish producers and directors. Irene Shubik was a well-known producer at the BBC in the 1960s and 70s before leaving to produce the first series of Rumpole of the Bailey and devise The Jewel in the Crown for ITV and a generation of new directors included Jack Gold, Stephen Frears and Ted Kotcheff.
What is striking about these TV plays is how few of them are by women. Elaine Feinstein’s Breath, with Angela Pleasance, and Helene Hanff’s adaptation of her novel, 84 Charing Cross Road (co-written with Hugh Whitemore) were the only two dramas written by Jewish women. This was not untypical. Looking through the history of Play for Today, there were hardly any plays written or directed by women and almost none by non-white writers.
There is another absence. The 1970s was the moment when British TV began to address the Holocaust and antisemitism, in documentaries like the famous Final Solution programme in The World at War, US imports like Holocaust with the young Meryl Streep and TV dramas like The Glittering Prizes and The Evacuees. But not on Play for Today. It gave young Jewish writers an opportunity to learn their craft and find their voice as writers. But it was really more of a home for plays about northern working class subjects and left-wing politics. Apart from Bar Mitzvah Boy (a huge success, later repeated five times on the BBC), none of the works by these Jewish writers and directors was on a Jewish subject.
This is curious because the 1970s was a breakthrough moment for Jewish subjects. Rosenthal’s The Evacuees, with Maureen Lipman, was about a Jewish family during the Second World War and Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes included episodes about antisemitism and a thinly disguised Oswald Mosley. A few years later, in 1980, Stephen Poliakoff wrote Caught on a Train for BBC2, about Frau Messner, from Vienna, which began Poliakoff’s preoccupation with Jews and the dark side of European 20th century history.
More than Play for Today, these BBC dramas brought Jewish voices out of the ethnic closet. What Play for Today achieved was giving new Jewish writers and directors a chance. They took it and it laid the foundations for some brilliant careers.
