Spaces for criticism: the Play for Today Viewing Group on work,gender and the body in The Bevellers (1974) and Not for the Likes of Us (1980)

Abstract

The Play for Today Viewing Group, consisting of academics from the United Kingdom and Ireland who meet virtually multiple times per year to discuss a teleplay, collectively analyse two Plays for Today, The Bevellers (1974) and Not for the Likes of Us (1980). These plays reflect Play for Today’s historical tendency towards a greater inclusion of female workers alongside emergent forms and patterns of work, and from heightened studio realism, shot on video, to its use of film and critical dissection of its attractions. Analysis reveals the plays’ thematic intersections concerning work, gender and the body: this comparative approach discerns how Play for Today was a strand of interconnected dramas within British television's flow possessing deep social and cultural significance.

Introduction

Three years into its life, this article documents the history of the Play for Today Viewing Group. It incorporates the group’s interlinked multi-methodological analyses of two Play for Today plays’ representations of work, gender and the body, their status as television and their relations to the theatre and film mediums. Play for Today was a BBC1 strand of one-off dramas running from 1970 to 1984, broadcasting one play written, directed and produced by different people each week, shown midweek on BBC1, directly after the Nine O’Clock News. Around 20 sometimes experimental, invariably unpredictable single dramas were shown under this prestigious banner annually. Play for Today’s pluralism and diversity emerged from the democratising structure of feeling manifested in Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-74), British New Wave cinema (1959–63) and its direct predecessor on BBC1, The Wednesday Play (1964-70), which included the famous socio-politically interventionist docudrama Cathy Come Home (1966). Creators of one-off TV drama, which, since the 1950s had a close affinity with theatre and video, increasingly aspired towards filmmaking.

Famous names associated with Play for Today include Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett – but both of our independent research projects, as well as the Viewing Group’s sessions, have evidenced a wealth of interest and merit beyond the output of these names. While theorists such as MacMurraugh-Kavanagh (1997, 1999) have drawn attention to the male-dominated nature of PfT’s antecedent The Wednesday Play, by drawing attention to two plays either written or directed by women for the latter strand, we wish to make the case that though the gender balance at the BBC during PfT was by no means equal, the canon of PfT typically remembered and celebrated remains disproportionate. As such, scholars would do well to turn attention to lesser-known texts, The Bevellers and Not for the Likes of Us providing only two examples.

Likewise, Play for Today’s memory tends to be evoked in reference to the ‘serious drama’ (Caughie, 2012: 52–53) of ‘realism’ or ‘studio naturalism’ (Cooke, 2015), though works made under the banner did not universally fit such moulds. Even its nominally realist plays often challenged preconceptions of what ‘realism’ might denote and how it could not be seen as antithetical to the use of studio space; points this article will demonstrate.

The Viewing Group is an online community forged during the COVID-19 pandemic, originally convened by the Arts documentarian and TV historian John Wyver, who made the documentary celebrating Play for Today’s fiftieth anniversary, Drama Out of a Crisis (BBC4, 2020). Following renewed interest in Play for Today (PfT) at this time, the first discussion on 5 November 2020 was on Trevor Griffiths’s Country (1981), following its BBC4 repeat. We set the tone by selecting a historical-set play, representing the strand’s diversity while consciously stopping the space becoming an exercise in myopic 1970s nostalgia by beginning with a representation of a more distant past. Starting in this way encouraged a broader kind of reflection upon the strand and its history, reflecting not only on what it can tell us about the period in which it was made but also other historical moments, including the present. The 32 monthly sessions since have involved wide-ranging discussion of a TV play selected by a member of the group.

The group encompasses academics and independent TV historians. Alongside this article’s editors – who have both completed PhDs about PfT – the group’s most frequent attendees are John Cook, Simon Farquhar, Christine Geraghty, Ian Greaves, John Hill, David Rolinson, Billy Smart, John Williams, John Wyver and latterly, Fabiola Creed. Other participants have included Vicky Ball, Rachel Clements, Hannah Cooper, Eleni Liarou, Jonathan Murray, Sukhdev Sandhu and Helen Wheatley.

This list of names, while encompassing a wide span of television theorists from numerous backgrounds, institutions and fields, does tend to mirror trends in authorship in regards to Play for Today and the single play strand at large – particularly in its dominance of White male scholars. This paper, however, pushes back against perceptions of this as pre-determined by the subject matter of teleplays from this period: while PfT’s associations with ‘seriousness’ might have become conflated with ‘masculinity’, and while incessant reference to the names Leigh, Loach, Potter, Griffiths, Allen and Garnett and simultaneous erasure of other names might have deterred female scholars or scholars of colour from exploring PfT or engaging with the critical field, this article presents an alternative vision for engaging with this complex history and narrativisation of PfT, using methods which make space for discussion, contestation and mutual discovery.

A fundamental aspect of the Viewing Group that permitted such work to be done is its openness to a range of approaches. As such, participants have used diverse methodologies to discuss the texts: historical or historiographical analyses, qualitative oral history, quantitative content analysis, textual analysis, alongside intertextuality, authorship, genre and reception studies.

From 2020 to 2023, the Viewing Group have discussed 27 PfTs. Thus far, no PfTs involving Mike Leigh or Dennis Potter – or Ken Loach – have been featured, which infers our collective desire to explore PfT beyond its customarily canonised creators. We have paid sustained attention to studio-based TV drama, with 62.5% of PfTs discussed being totally or mainly video-recorded.

Before the Viewing Group sessions take place, files containing each play, cuttings from newspaper coverage and criticism of the play in question are circulated. This gives group members the time and option to prepare spoken contributions to the group, however formally. Typically, some members attend with something written prepared to share with the group, others have archival documents they want to share more conversationally and some attend only having watched the play, with or without notes, offering textual readings and engaging in discourse. No singular way of preparing for the group has been prescribed nor preferred.

For this article, we selected two PfTs for the group to discuss: Roddy McMillan’s The Bevellers (21 November 1974) and Gilly Fraser’s Not for the Likes of Us (10 April 1980) (NftLoU). Both are available to watch via Learning On Screen’s Box of Broadcasts. While no two plays could be representative of PfT’s varied output, their form and content reflect historical patterns in PfT’s development. These plays exemplify PfT’s shift from predominantly male authorship from 1970 to 1976, to a far greater inclusion of women writers from 1977 to 1982. They intersect thematically: concerning workplaces, gender and the body. Furthermore, these plays variously represent PfT’s theatrical and cinematic facets: The Bevellers is a video-recorded, multi-camera studio production, while NftLoU is all-filmed. They exemplify the strand’s devolutionary tendencies: after three Wednesday Plays (1967–70), The Bevellers was BBC Scotland’s first PfT; NftLoU was PfT’s only BBC Bristol production.

This article provides a multi-perspective analysis of two undervalued PfTs, alongside an exposition of how such a viewing group works through disagreement, difference and knowledge exchange in real time. Via an insight into contemporary interpretations of PfT from leading scholars in the field, this work offers a glimpse at how the theoretical handling of the strand is carefully changing, and demonstrates the merits of looking beyond the canon. We regard this as a valuable task, feeling that renewed interest to PfT in the wake of its 50th anniversary requires an urgent riposte to the view that PfT was uniformly masculine, and solely featured very narrow depictions of historically confined labour struggles. An openness to methodologies, approaches and perspectives allows the Viewing Group to explore the themes of work, gender and the body from numerous new angles, bringing together various knowledges, expertise and subjectivities.

Here follows two edited transcripts of the Zoom discussions of The Bevellers and NftLoU on 22 June and 21 July 2023, respectively. The transcripts incorporate selected typed comments within Zoom’s ‘Chat’ function. Our editing aims for concision and clarity, and distils the conversation to its key themes: work, gender and the body, and how these facets of the two plays are realised on TV within studio or location spaces.

Part 1: Theatrical masculinity in The Bevellers

This session began with the following introduction, written by Tom May and read as follows: The Bevellers centres on young Norrie’s (Andrew Byatt) first day as a beveller – a worker who smooths materials’ sharp edges – within a subterranean Clydeside glassworks. This ensemble drama takes place over one day in one set, and eight of its nine characters are men. Following a day which includes bullying, an unpleasant initiation, the pressures of a ‘big job’ and two bevellers sustaining injuries, Norrie opts to leave this trade.

The Bevellers is representative of PfT’s theatrical influence. It was one of 26 PfTs directly derived from theatre texts, and one of four Scottish-set stage-derived PfTs. The Bevellers’ theatre original was first performed at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum on 16 February 1973, soon transferring to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Its writer, Roddy McMillan, was a veteran actor of the Glasgow Unity Theatre, which had a radical left reputation and aimed to democratise theatrical representation. McMillan’s was the first of BBC Scotland’s 14 PfTs. Another seven were made in Scotland by BBC London. From 1976 to 1982, producers Pharic Maclaren and Roderick Graham led an upturn in the amount and variety of PfTs made by, about and for Scotland, to use Cook’s (2008) formulation.

A majority of Scotland-set PfTs, including McMillan’s, were set in the urban West Central Lowlands. The Bevellers is neglected: never having been repeated on TV, nor analysed within Cook’s (2008), Petrie’s (2000) and Murray’s (2022) Scottish screen studies. Settings in Scottish-set PfTs often include masculine work spaces, like crofting and shipbuilding. Recurrent themes include infidelity or new sexual freedoms, while the pub or drinking alcohol features in 90.5% of the Scottish-set PfTs.

The Bevellers was shot in Studio A, Queen Margaret Drive, Glasgow: BBC Scotland’s base from 1938 to 2007. Figures 1 and 2 exemplify the spaces designer Archie Clark created for The Bevellers in Studio A:

Figure 1.

Screen-shot from The Bevellers. Senior beveller Bob in his workplace.

Figure 2.

Screen-shot from The Bevellers. Three bevellers at their specific workspaces.

The following questions were then posed to the group:

• 1: How do you feel The Bevellers uses Studio A’s space?

• 2: Is its TV drama enhanced by being so closely related to theatre in performance and staging?

• 3: How does The Bevellers represent work, gender and the body?

• 4: How do you respond personally when watching The Bevellers in 2023, and what are your thoughts on its scheduling and reception?

To accommodate full-time caring duties, which he has granted us permission to share to illustrate the virtue of such virtual spaces, Billy Smart often replies first.

Billy Smart (BS): Considering The Bevellers as a stage adaptation, it’s a work play: a naturalist tradition, extending back to Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers (1892). Prominent British work plays include Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1957) and David Storey’s The Contractor (1970). A work play shows the audience a process occurring in real time, and through displaying a working practice, explores the world, and how people understand the world through work. The perfect work play, for me, The Contractor, works as a three-act play: a marquee is erected; it’s dressed; it’s dismantled. Watching the process being enacted is interesting: you’re watching actors perform difficult technical tasks, while being aware that they’re actors, enacting something.

Work plays’ customary flaw is true of The Bevellers: cramming too much in, and not making the work itself central. This TV adaptation is pretty faithful to the original stage text. Tom said the play isn’t canonical in TV studies, but it is theatrically canonical, and is anthologised by Canongate (Craig & Stephenson, 2001). I’ve read it today. Interestingly, the greatest edits are with Bob (Roddy McMillan), who philosophises about work, school and manhood much more in the original source text. When interviewed, McMillan says, ‘On the stage reality depends on the writing; on television, what matters is the framing’ (Benedictus, 1974: 15). This is true, but it’s not everything. Stage acting is a distinctively figurative art form, whereas TV acting is mediated through the director choosing shots.

As a theatre spectator, and for this play especially, you are your own director, observing different details, in your own sequence, through your own understanding and interests; sometimes steered through lighting and movement. On TV, this is largely gone. Act 1’s moment of grace, when Norrie has left and the other workers relax and start working and singing together, becomes a different, less rich experience for the TV viewer. The visual grammar of Armstrong’s direction changes: a series of mixes evokes a different, and older, type of TV drama.

John Cook (JC): I enjoyed it more than Billy, as I’m less aware of the stage version, which got me reflecting on how TV and theatre are preserved. I feel that a relative cultural privileging still persists: a traditional view of theatre as significant and TV drama as second order.

The case for TV drama’s importance is writ large: it’s a record of performance, while preserving the period in which the play is set. Here, very significantly, the original cast from the stage version, recreate it for TV. I thought it was terrific televised theatre. It’s at the extreme theatrical side of PfT, but is also a constructed media product. Advancing Roddy McMillan’s idea of framing, there’s a telling sequence where Bob looks at the mirror and says: ‘This is glass, and framing, in perfect union’.

Ian Greaves (IG): Glass – both hard and brittle.

JC: Symbolically, it suggests harmony between the attempts to depict working reality, versus the framing which a theatrical artifice creates. Now, this is not non-naturalism, but it balances artifice and a mimetic quality. It’s a pity McMillan only wrote two plays in his life: All in Good Faith (1954) and this… If you absorb yourself in it, listen carefully and attend to it, it’s a great example of how studio-based TV drama can give you a rich experience.

Christine Geraghty (CG): Plays are written for a particular space, and to be performed with a particular rhetoric: the actor being audible to the farthest placed spectator. Adapting both the space and the writing can be a problem. But it’s easier for TV than cinema, because of what John Cook was saying: PfT had a tradition of operating within a space. Moira Armstrong's direction handles the studio subtly. Each beveller has their own space: that’s how they work. That gives us a sense of where they are, even when we aren’t looking at them.

BS: Unlike on TV, the theatre text conveys how absolutely disruptive Charlie’s (Jackie Farrell) weightlifting is on stage.

TM: Interestingly, Moira Armstrong was drafted in to direct The Bevellers after James MacTaggart became unavailable (BBC, 1974a).

CG: At key points, like Norrie’s revelation that his mother has died, we get a close-up. This oscillation of position continues throughout. Armstrong is responsive to what’s happening on set. The actors speak to each other quietly, without long speeches, except from Alex’s (Leonard Maguire) theatrical monologue at lunchtime.

The opening setup, showing the set, is classically televisual, as in soap operas. Next, a close-up of two or three people talking, then an individual close-up, followed by a reverse shot for a moment of major drama, then back to the set again. So, The Bevellers is carefully composed. Like most adaptations of theatre plays, at various points it puts us on stage so that we can see better than if we were in the theatre. This was really well done. Is there too much drama? Compared with EastEnders, it’s pretty tame!

IG: These intense working space plays are interesting. Archie Clark’s design here is wonderful. In this set, there’s nothing shiny or new. It’s very worn down: reflecting what the play’s ‘ghost’ talks about.

I wondered about it being condensed; it was cut down. Following Alasdair Milne’s remark about excessive temporal compression of events in Scum (1977), it’s trying to express everything about work in a day, and that acts against realism. In this tiny space, there’s often something interesting going on in the depth-of-field.

John Williams (JW): Another key work play is Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). Christine’s point about them having their own areas is particularly true there; in The Contractor, it’s everybody knows their place, but they all come together to raise the marquee. Here, the centrepiece is lifting the big piece of glass. I was convinced it was going to get smashed before the end! That was strong misdirection.

I echo all the comments about Armstrong’s use of the set. While a factory-set play will ostensibly be realist, a non-naturalism came through when everybody was grinding, which started to make these almost hallucinatory sound effects, and then the singing emerged from that.

And, then, as Ian said, the ‘ghost’! But it’s actually a former employee, Alex. He did the Shakespearean act, entering and waving the admonitory finger… Industrial ailments will get them in the end. So, the best thing to do is get out of there. This lifted it from the standard approach to a factory setting, and was really effective. Maguire’s performance veered on over-the-top, but worked in how it was framed beforehand: a ghost is trying to scare Norrie, but then an actual man, as good as dead, enters.

Katie Crosson (KC): Was this play’s naming The Bevellers a direct reference back to The Weavers?

BS: Possibly. The Weavers is not only a classic naturalist text, it’s a classic Socialist text: showing the process of the weavers being exploited.

KC: Historically, many activist groups have called themselves The Diggers.

I, too, would have liked to have seen more of the work. Sometimes, I find detailed explorations of processes I don’t understand hard to follow. Bevelling was so new to me that I, like others, became entranced by its motions, and felt it was taken away too soon. The injuries might have felt more prescient and visceral had they been linked to a specific aspect of the work.

BS: The source text’s stage directions clarify how well or badly Norrie is working with the machine.

KC: When the ex-beveller Alex discusses bevelling’s beauty, we could be shown more craftsmanship, to understand the allures of the work, alongside the perils, and nuance the construction and appeal of the harmful masculinities we see.

BS: It would’ve been good to see an elaborately bevelled piece of glass.

KC: On Tom’s question about the relationship between the body, work and gender: the workers’ interrelations and the workplace hierarchies go against your expectation. The more senior, world-weary figures embody some of the damage of years of bevelling. Certain younger bevellers are frustrated, gasping for the opportunity to punch down. Today, this Workerist view of workplace relationships, perceiving exploitation and entrapment, still feels fresh and necessary, sadly. As John Williams said about the almost-over-acting, this sometimes felt like male-centred melodrama.

Otherwise, the barrage of events in the workplace reminds me of Carol Bunyan’s work.

CG: I recall a feminist conference in the Seventies where Griselda Pollock said: ‘a Feminist Film doesn’t need to have a woman in it’. Regardless of Roddy McMillan’s intention, his play has the most extraordinary unpicking and pointed examination of masculinity in the raw. Moira Armstrong has had a fantastic career. I’m glad that she got to direct it, and not another of the men. Each character has a particular façade or front in acting out their masculinity. Those who weightlift and cycle present their personas to Norrie in the most vigorous, angry, reckless way. As Billy said, when Norrie goes, they relax into their work roles and stop competing over who can beat up this boy the worst. I thought that was strongly critical, or allowed viewers to be critical. It didn’t force the audience to be critical, but it created a space in which you could be.

About the lack of women, I thought the scene with Nancy was the least well done. Nancy, as a character, is not exactly nuanced, and that event is there just so that Norrie can see Rouger (William Armour) taking advantage of Nancy, so that Norrie has a hold over Rouger, triggering Rouger’s response. At the end, the boss Mr Skinner (John Young) comes down, finds Norrie on the floor, and then takes him back up the stairs to clearly leave the factory, and says to him, softly: ‘Away home to your mother, and you’ll be alright…’

IG: As a last line, it conveys how you never really grow up.

CG: Norrie doesn’t have a mother to go home to. That lack of a feminine presence – because Nancy doesn’t give that – the lack of affection for all these male characters, is profound. You feel all of them needed a mother to go home to, ‘an old lady’, as Bob refers to his mother. I’m unsure how much the absence of the nurturing, the mother and the loving is the play’s point, but it is lurking in the play. Maybe Moira Armstrong allowed it to come through more forcibly.

JW: On masculinity: near the end, when Norrie spills the beans, the two older men Bob and Peter (John Grieve), who don’t like Rouger at all, leg it. They run, they sprint off. They don’t help Norrie at the end, despite them both being, generally speaking, pretty nice to him. They just leave him with the frustrated strong man Charlie and the malevolent Rouger. This moment conveys the reality of the situation in a place like that.

Tom May (TM): I gather the Rouger was a role itself within bevelling, rather than his name...

JC: It’s important to contextualise this play concerning Scottish theatre and Scottish TV drama. As Billy said, The Bevellers is canonical within Scottish theatre history, and its link to Bill Bryden is significant as his work at the Lyceum in 1972–74 instituted Scottish theatre’s deep examination of masculinity, termed Clydesideism: the drama of the populous central lowlands of Scotland.

IG: In 21st November’s schedule, The Bevellers nets 4.4 million viewers, a significant drop-off from earlier BBC1 programmes’ ratings. BBC2’s direct competition was Show of the Week: The Complete Victor Borge (5.6m). On ITV at 9pm was the popular series Father Brown , which got almost 10m: matching the BBC news and outscoring The Bevellers.

The BBC’s viewing barometer has a note, immediately below PfT, which reads ‘followed News Report’. This wasn’t usual. I recalled a fascinating column from Dennis Potter’s time as New Statesman TV critic (1974: 798), which obliquely refers to The Bevellers. The column’s main thrust was that at 8:17 and 8:27pm on the 21^st, two pubs in Birmingham were bombed. Looking deeper, we can see that Midweek and the Late News had high ratings for that time of night, because news and film was emerging from the sites of the wreckage, at a time before rolling news channels. Potter vividly expresses the unsettling nature of different types of TV coexisting as tragedy emerges. ‘The pictures coming out of the screen last Thursday night’, he writes, ‘sent more than shadows into the room, for proximity always increases horror’.

He confirms that the News Report following The Bevellers had ‘hurriedly inserted’ film of the aftermath, ‘taking their place in the sequence of electronic images that lay like lead on the heart’. War in Cyprus and unemployment at 650,000 followed, and a programme about the Cold War. It’s one of the most effective pieces I have read which animates ‘television flow’ (Williams, 1990). Of TV’s relentless connection to violence, and recognising its domestic nature, Potter concludes: ‘the means of its distribution have taken us to the lip of the volcano. We can look down and see the world boiling, and then we can go and put the cat out’.

Tellingly, not a single review the next day mentioned that. Either the critics switched the TV off immediately and called their editor, or they’d already written it.

Simon Farquhar (SF): TV critics only had 15 minutes after the play’s end to file their copy. Like Peter McDougall’s PfT Just Another Saturday (1975), this play presents a day in a boy’s life which culminates in violence, and his initiation into and inability to fit in with the adult world. It captures upsettingly a uniquely masculine ritual of competitiveness, aggression and insecurity. It’s also about fatherhood and paternal roles.

KC: The conditions that the critics were working under clearly inhibit a comprehension of TV as TV, and also PfT as referencing today, contained within a social situation.

CG: The critics relentlessly focus on the Scottish accent. Martin Jackson (1974: 19) calls the ‘guttural’ accent of the Glaswegian workers ‘corrosive’.

TM: Yes, critics’ preoccupation with ‘non-standard’ accents is tiresome, as with McDougall’s The Elephants' Graveyard (1976).

SF: I agree. Nancy Banks-Smith often joked about how she could not understand the accents in any Scottish play.

CG: They did pick up on the notion of work. Banks-Smith (1974: 12) says that ‘each worker went mad in rotation’! And ‘Men working are irresistibly watchable’, which fits with Billy’s and Katie’s points about wanting a better sight of what bevelling involved. But, most responses revolve around the dialect.

JC: The invective in this play, delivered in the guttural Glasgow accents is… off the scale! None of it is terribly realistic. We've got phrases like, ‘I’ll bastricate you!’ which no Glaswegian says!

BS: The stage text has more conventional swearing.

JC: There’s also: ‘you diabatric be hoarible’. Now, I’ve never heard this on the streets of Glasgow! So, the invective is, using our glass, mirror and frame analogy, refracted through a poetic lens.

CG: When you set this inventive new stage Glaswegian speech alongside the PfT’s naturalistic mode, you get a double impact.

JC: It’s finding a surrogate for real Glaswegian swearing and doing it very effectively.

JW: Work plays sometimes feature opaque workplace terminology. McMillan clarifies some of it, but not all. The Rouger being an actual job role fits. We’re watching people at work and they’re using phrases which are completely clear to them, but we’re on the outside. Glengarry Glen Ross also has references which only make sense through their repetition in context.

BS: Paradoxically, greater specificity makes the play more universal and convincing.

KC: We see little work, or work lingo, on TV today that is not either immediately recognisable or valorised, like that of doctors or lawyers. This erases the important distinctions between jobs.

TM: The Bevellers omits discussion of trade union organisation, or Health and Safety. But it shows the problems, subtly agitating for change. For once in British history, the government was listening. Workplace injuries and deaths increased in the 1960s. The BBC had exposed the problems of asbestosis, cement dust and mercury waste, in Tuesday’s Documentary – The Right to Know (23/04/1974). That summer, the new minority Labour government passed the Health and Safety At Work Act, which came into effect in April 1975: ‘the most comprehensive legislation ever drafted covering people at work’ (Beckett, 2009: 297). Here, Charlie’s cut hand shows bevelling’s everyday dangers.

KC: Would the trade union be too much of a ‘mother’? This play is punctuated by a near-total absence of care.

JC: This factory is a relic of the past. It’s vanishing. It’s as much a ghost as Alex Freer is. This isn’t the modern 1970s workplace, but something belonging more to the Dickensian nineteenth-century: see the opening titles’ Victorian-type design.

JW: By now, manual bevelling would have been in the same heavily automated area where the glass was being made.

IG: It’s about skills and craft. There’s one character who constantly goes on about how, ‘I no longer do that’ or ‘I shouldn’t be doing that, he should’ and that's the only hint at any union-minded consciousness…

JW: That’s the pecking order: you move through the jobs to reach the most highly skilled one.

IG: This speaks about how slow that progress is, over a working life, and then the ‘ghost’ turns up and tells you how pointless it is.

…

To summarise, the Viewing Group admired the skill with which Moira Armstrong, Archie Clark and the cast realised writer-actor Roddy McMillan’s drama of a fraught and divided masculine workplace, with its habitual hazards and violence. This intense play, using entirely interior spaces, was felt to exemplify PfT’s video and studio-shot theatre-informed tendency which was generally predominant in the 1970s.

Part 2: Feminist film stock in Not for the Likes of Us

Katie Crosson introduced this group with the following, written as spoken:

PfT is often celebrated for its ‘working-class realism’. But who makes up this ‘working-class’? And what is the ‘real life’ that we see? A canonical PfT might depict traditionally masculine labour, like the bevelling we saw last time, or, that shown in The Black Stuff (1980) or The Rank and File (1971). This narrow history of PfT overlooks the women workers depicted, as in Not for the Likes of Us (NftLoU). On the shop floor during the day, in the cinema in the evening, and serving family in between, the play follows Connie (Pam St. Clement) through the structure of her life. As Connie reminds us: ‘I’m the public and all, ain’t I?’

The Bevellers’ theatrical origins can be felt. NftLoU reflects not what is perceived to be the origins of PfT, but instead, what is understood, rightly or wrongly, to have intercepted it: British cinema. This play is partly set in a dilapidated cinema; a riposte to the idea that PfT need not be renewed as film is the future for radicalism and experimentation. ‘The picture houses were palaces, once’, Connie tells us; a picture far from the environment we see her in.

Vicky Ball (2021) suggests that the cinema here offers images intended to engender a male gaze, intercepted and problematised by NftLoU’s female stewards. They are critical of these supposedly titillating images, finding humour and sadness in them, while being fascinated by the gap between their own self-understanding and the images of women on screen. This sets up a comparison between a moment of cinematic decay and what has rightly or wrongly been declared the ‘golden age’ of television (Shubik, 2000: xiv) as we watch the uninspiring but mighty glow of the big screen on our small screens.

Nonetheless, it is significant that this play is shot on film. Instead of emphasising containment within one working role through studio space, shooting across multiple locations represents a different kind of working life to the bevellers’ entrapment in a specific routine, space and situation. The women here face a different exploitation, expected to juggle multiple different kinds of labour: from the productive, across two ill-paying professions (see Figure 3), to the reproductive at home.

Figure 3.

Screen-shot from Not for the Likes of Us. Denise (Carole Hayman) and Connie clean the cinema.

Figure 4.

Screen-shot from Not for the Likes of Us. Connie floats in a pool in a flowing white dress.

Figure 5.

Screen-shot from Not for the Likes of Us. Connie dives underwater and starts swimming.

Figure 6.

Screen-shot from The Bevellers. Joe (Paul Young) and The Rouger manhandle Norrie as part of his workplace initiation.

Figure 7.

Screen-shot from Not for the Likes of Us. Connie observes promotional posters in the cinema foyer.

While masculine pride in a single profession is wholly absent from the play – Connie’s White working-class husband (Terry Scully) finds neither thanks nor meaning in employment – Amrit’s (Veronique Choolhun) reference to her dad working all night at the bakery after ‘a full day’s work cutting coats’ reminds viewers that juggling multiple jobs was an expected way of life for men of colour alongside women.

Fatphobia, ageism and misogyny are depicted as exacerbating and exacerbated by the economic subordination of the working-class. Not just invisible to men or society, but to herself, Connie posing nude is arguably a chance to see herself; not through the caricature of her morphing out of a promotional photograph of a conventionally beautiful woman at the cinema; not through the web of illusion sold to her; but herself, naked, whole.

The play’s reception was mixed. Scathing quotes include Ronald Hastings’s claim (1980: 35) that the play culminated with ‘a haunting scene of self-humiliation’. The mysteriously cited ‘D.R.’ writes:

It was a night which severely strained the eye balls – didn’t it chaps? […] Connie’s drab existence overwhelmed everything else winning, no doubt, lots of sympathetic understanding from a host of matronly hearts across the land. It is only to be hoped her form of rebellion doesn’t catch on… (1980: 2)

Peter Fiddick (1980: 9) considers the more pressing question, above what Chris Dunkley (1980: 15) deems ‘female’ issues, to be: ‘What sort of liberation is it to be […] a bus driver on overtime with a wife working evenings?’.

NftLoU can be compared with Paula Milne’s PfT A Sudden Wrench (1982), which also follows a woman’s attempt to find agency and purpose in a male-dominated world, though that play looks at a male-dominated workplace as opposed to female-majority workplaces, dominated by one man.

There are numerous problematic moments in NftLoU where an escape from fatphobia, the class system and patriarchy is presented through fantasies which subordinate men of colour. The ineffectiveness of this dreaming and its relationship to power relations can be compared to the futility of escaping into a middle-class fantasy of safety and security in Charles Wood’s Do as I Say (1977). The only available escape afforded to Connie here is through images gifted to women by the cinema.

The Orientalist fantasies in NftLoU represent the comfort Connie takes in the separation between life and dreaming. She can only find the erotic through the ‘exotic’, requiring a safely unknown landscape in order to avoid being reminded of her real situation. Her fetish for power relies upon a process of othering and a reinstatement of other hierarchies, weaponising her Whiteness in (futile) attempt to escape her femininity. We might hope that today one could find other ways of representing this without recreating fetishisation for an audience.

1. How is it central to the play’s meanings that bodies are classed, gendered, and racialised?

2. How are embodied labour practices depicted differently in the two plays?

3. What is the relationship between cinema and television, or cinema and fantasy, in this play?

BS: The extent to which we enjoy and understand this play concerns the clash between representation of the quotidian and the fantastic. Watching it today, I find the quotidian world of 1979 fascinating. I’m continually distracted by the fabric of everyday life; scenes in supermarkets are particularly bad for the array of products. It’s very well realised, the representation of the characters’ everyday life, whereas the fantastic seems flat. In a charitable reading, this may represent the decline of cinema.

I agree with Joan Bakewell (1980: 10), that the play reaches its peak in the end section with Connie walking around The Tate, then attaining a sense of self-realisation through life modelling. Interestingly, those scenes are almost entirely wordless, achieving a synthesis between the quotidian and the fantastic. An interesting comparison is King of the Castle (1977), where urban squalor and difficulties are 16mm film, and all of the fantastic scenes are shot on highly artificial videotape: an incredible delineation between the two worlds.

SF: This play came about because W. Stephen Gilbert had been producing The Other Side (1979) anthology. Its last play, Ian McEwan’s Solid Geometry was pulled while in production, becoming a cause célèbre of 1979. As a result, he was sacked from the BBC, and then reinstated and moved to somewhere where he could be ‘given more supervision’. Ironically, he was moved to Bristol, where he couldn’t have had less supervision. This play was helicoptered in.

I think this is very under-cast. Pam St. Clement is wonderful, but I find the rest of the performances to be quite dull, struggling with some boring dialogue. While the fantasy sequences are prettier than the everyday, I agree it is fascinating looking at Seventies Britain.

The play seemed to be rather shy of talking about body image until the end. It only felt like a main complex of the play, and of Connie, when she overcame it.

KC: About the body: I don’t think it is a triumphant (or condescending) ‘she’s overcome her issues’ – rather that she isn’t entirely contained by the social expectations she seems depressed by.

IG: A critic noted how it’s trying to show different ‘accepted’ images of womanhood, projected through adverts and films, and she arrives at a much more positive body image at the end. The last 20 minutes are effective in bringing this together, but it takes a long time to make its points before that.

Tim King had done documentary work before: including Hospital (BBC2, 1977), an oddly forgotten documentary series. The cameraman Mike Southon told me they effectively lived in this hospital for weeks to the point where the staff forgot they were there. This is a useful experience to bring to drama, but I’m not sure that he cracked it here.

Billy’s King of the Castle connection occurred to me too, but more negatively. It looked like one of those drab, quite worthy, quite dull children’s serials of the time! But it has merits: Pam St. Clement’s fantastic; it’s got a powerful ending, which makes sense in an imagist thread through the play.

CG: Initially, my jaw dropped at the first fantasy sequence. I couldn’t believe that this had been shown on television in 1980, or any time! What Katie said about the nature of the fantasy and the relationship with Whiteness compensating for femininity was perceptive. We’ve spoken about tone in these discussions, and the fantasy sequences are so flat they’re almost interchangeable with the realist sequences. In fact, the realist sequences have more animation! A different mode of filming was needed to express them as fantasies.

KC: I think the flatness of the fantasies, based heavily in the art – mainly cinema – available to Connie, was the most interesting thing about them.

IG: I certainly read the flatness that way.

CG: Oddly, the script can be very upfront. She talks about how her life lacks satisfaction. She tells her husband she’s unhappy: ‘years of putting up with this, and what’s it for?’ But there’s also a substrata in the language. When the awful shop manager talks to Connie, there’s an undercurrent of racial prejudice, expressed indirectly. Some of the conversations are also quite violent. Connie, when she sees the boy on TV that her mother’s watching, says: ‘he deserves a good slap’! She also turns on her mother with a knife. The repressed violence in that family was more interesting than her directly expressed frustration.

A previewer, who liked it, quotes Pam St. Clement saying that, ‘Connie comes to terms with her life. So her fantasies can do her no harm’, which I thought was quite right, and one of the things that’s wrong with it (Anon, 1980: 18). We need fantasies to do someone a bit of harm somewhere.

It’s interesting that she wrote for Angels, because some of the representation, particularly of Amrit, was thoughtful. Connie says, ‘is your father pursuing this arranged marriage?’, and she turns around and responds: ‘why do you British always think that arranged marriage is going to be the problem?’ This echoes a complaint that was made about soaps later on like EastEnders. The view that ‘Asian people have this set of problems and Black people have this set of problems’ is quite neatly dealt with in the play.

SF: Ironically, Gilly Fraser was one of the writers of EastEnders’ arranged marriage storyline in 1985!

John Hill (JH): My understanding initially of the dichotomy between cinema and TV was that 1970s cinema was in a dire state: losing its audience, moving into pornography, Kung-Fu movies… The ‘talking back’ to the pornography scene is complemented by nostalgia for when strong women were available to watch, and identify with. For her, Ava Gardner. Thus, the fantasy sequences invoke her love of old Hollywood. However, now the group’s prevailing wisdom is that these scenes are flat, which raises the question as to whether this is an artistic failure on the part of the production to recreate the ‘magic’ of Hollywood, of which Connie dreams, or whether it involves a rather patronising critique of the banal fantasies popular cinema provides. I’m inclined to think, given Connie’s centrality, that we are invited to read these fantasies more positively.

TM: Molly Haskell’s arguments in 1974 about the decline in representations of women stars compared with the Studio System era came to mind…

CG: Ava Gardner is a slightly odd choice, not exactly a Bette Davis figure…

JH: This blending of realism and fantasy goes back to the British New Wave: in Billy Liar (1963), where Billy’s fantasies reflect his desire to escape the drabness of West Yorkshire and transcend the spaces he inhabits.

It also seems to be conscious of debates about the male gaze and the absence of the woman spectator in relationship to it. The visit to the art gallery was significant because of the images of women that Connie sees. They include Suzanne Valadon’s The Blue Room (1923), designed to constitute a ‘deconstruction’ of the male gaze by challenging the objectification of the female body. At the end, when Connie becomes a life model, it can be questioned how far this constitutes authentic self-fulfilment (or entails a form of self-objectification). However, I think this criticism is challenged by The Blue Room within the play, and its resistance to the norms of the male gaze, alongside Connie’s own active embrace of her body image.

IG: Strong as it is, I think there is supposed to be a final ambiguity: that she still ‘submits’ to the needs of others.

KC: I was thinking about the symbolism of taking off clothing, the clothing we see often being uniforms. But does nudity become a new uniform, if she is paid to life model?

TM: Armstrong uses Studio A in The Bevellers to show a claustrophobic work environment engendering fraught relationships in Ibsen naturalism style. Scenes in NftLoU’s Rex Cinema have a lingering pace, immersing us in its seedy atmosphere, while inviting distanced intellectual scrutiny of this rundown, unglamorous place.

56 PfTs had casts with 80% or higher male actors, while just one PfT, Ladies (1980), shows the reverse. The Bevellers is one of the 56. There are bleak, sometimes comic, representations of dysfunctional masculinity across recent PfTs we’ve discussed. In Fraser’s play, the bus driver husband, Stan, tells Connie she needs calming down with valium. In The Bevellers, men still have an industrial job for life, just about. Here, Connie represents women’s increasing participation in the workforce by 1980. People doing multiple, often unfulfilling jobs and failing to achieve a work-life balance is intensely relevant today.

JW: Every city had such films on all the time, in fleapit cinemas: which were on borrowed time, just as the bevellers’ workplace is threatened by automation. I enjoyed the scenes in the cinema more. In The Bevellers they’re all specialists – in the cinema, apart from the projectionist, they wander around doing any job that anybody feels like picking up, because the staff are in danger of outnumbering the audience!

Having the free run of this cinema that was formerly grand, prefigured earlier by Connie’s reference to the Tooting Granada, was interesting. I used to live in Tooting, and it’s a Bingo Hall now. It’s an amazing, Grade I listed building, and I think that was deliberately evoked. Connie used to get away from home and family by staying there as long as she could.

SF: The cinema they used as the Rex closed a year later. Demolished now.

JW: What cinema was influencing Connie’s fantasies? Maybe she saw Rudolph Valentino films. Then, you could pay your shilling and sit there as the films went through their cycle on repeat: which might be why those images last in her head. Now, the TV gets on Connie’s nerves… Her fantasies sometimes fitted into the flow, being astonishingly reminiscent of the Turkish Delight TV advert, which was shown for about thirty years, unchanged…

JH: On the ‘cinema’ fantasies, there is an argument that Connie moves from devalued low culture to high culture (represented by the art gallery), which could be regarded as a problematic view of working-class culture, for all the play’s concern with class issues.

CG: Female critics were generally warmer towards it. The Daily Mirror has a letter from a woman in Hull, saying ‘it was a winner for women in our office’ (Masters, 1980: 18). Alison Hennegan (1980: 20) in Gay News talks about the humour of the writing, visually witty direction, feminist understanding, the difference between synthetic sexiness and real women’s sexuality. Jennifer Selway (1980: 20) talks about a terrific script: ‘naturalism gives way to some exuberant fantasy sequences’. She references the swimming baths scene which appears within Connie’s conversation with her husband about what she needs, when he ‘serves her breakfast in bed, as if that’s what she needs’, and then tells Paul ‘your mother’s not herself’. We cut to a scene of this woman in a white dress in a swimming pool, who then swims off as if she’s free (see Figures 4–5).

JH: If I read it correctly, that is a riff on John Everett Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia (1851–52), so high culture is itself constraining… Although it’s not straightforward, you do feel that there is a kind of journey from Rice Krispie ads on TV to ‘proper art’ and painting, and she’s finding some escape from her class and gender positions through an access to high culture. Though Millais’s image is hardly liberating.

CG: She’s a good deal more animated than poor Ophelia floating down the river…

JH: She breaks free by throwing off the dress and swimming. This is an active moment of liberation, which contrasts with the ending where Connie is identified with a more passive image.

SF: In the cinema, some of the posters are for real films. I wondered if we were seeing an actual porn film, which would have been groundbreaking on prime-time TV… Maybe it was just well done to look like a drab, totally un-erotic Seventies sex film…?

KC: Critics more outraged by Pam St. Clement in the nude than actual porn…

TM: NftLoU sometimes tells rather than shows, though the Tate sequence is an exception. Its initial talkiness does feel necessary, as a rare sharing of women’s opinions and desires.

KC: Contra critics’ condemnation of women’s talk, I often find long conversations interesting. And PfT is referred to as ‘a writer’s medium’…

TM: Another class-conscious PfT Beryl Bainbridge’s Tiptoe Through the Tulips (1976) is a nimbler predecessor, with its studio intimacy and a few fantastical filmed inserts. This is a valuable follow-up.

BBC1 Controller Bill Cotton, described NftLoU as ‘an effective and entertaining play’ and was sorry that Dunkley wrote about it in such a ‘liverish way’ (BBC, 1980a). I think he was right there!

The Bevellers was watched by 4.39 million people, lowest of late 1974 PfT. Its Reaction Index of 49 shows a mixed audience reception. Some viewers expressed the difficulty in understanding the ‘broad’ Glasgow dialect, which ‘seemed to consist of offensive language and workshop vulgarity’ (BBC, 1974b). While a minority found Fraser’s play ‘crude’, it gained a higher RI of 63. Some in its large 6.73 million audience disliked the fantasy elements, the ending, or found it boring, but rather more found it realistic, the acting ‘so natural’ and Pam St. Clement ‘superb’ as the ‘deeply relatable’ Connie (BBC, 1980b). Some viewers added that they hoped to see more of her. They certainly would.

JH: In The Bevellers, the old-school beveller (McMillan), nostalgic for craftsmanship, is contrasted to the younger, more aggressive, less conscientious workers. Both dramas contain an intimation of the decline of traditional working-class labour.

IG: Interestingly, about men in NftLoU: Connie could have access to art and lots of things if her husband wasn’t watching football all the time, or her children weren’t controlling the TV… She might have been able to watch a rather good Simon Gray play three days later! ( Festival : The Rear Column).

BS: Quite hard to watch football all the time in 1979!

...

Overall, opinion was more divided on NftLoU than The Bevellers, with many participants commending Pam St. Clement’s performance but feeling this was not matched by the actors surrounding her, or always well showcased by the writing and direction. Some disagreed, championing Gilly Fraser’s realist dialogue, nuanced approach to writing difference, and use of symbolism; and Tim King’s explorative uses of the cinema and The Tate. Most found the fantasy sequences lacklustre, but there was disagreement on whether this was a formal choice or an artistic failing.

Conclusions

Before we draw any comparative conclusions about these two discussions, their insights or their methodologies, our limitations as a group must be stated. As mentioned in this article’s introduction, the PfT Viewing Group is predominantly White and male. Not infrequently, there are more participants in a given session named John than there are women and people of colour. This is symptomatic of the state of academia, wherein historians of the single play appear to belong to one of the worst offending sub-disciplines: as proposed earlier, we might suppose this to be, in part, due to the ways the single play strand has been written and thought about over time, with a high percentage of publications on the subject focussing either positively or critically on the same few plays by the same few writers and directors. It is our hope that this discussion evidences that this sorry fact does not correlate with the object of study. The single play is a site of interest in numerous directions, including to feminist theorists; analysts of precarious labour; and scholars seeking aesthetic forms that can serve large audiences of varied viewers and stimulate discourse pertinent across methodologies, from content analysis to textual analysis to historiography.

More work can and must always be done to deepen the commitment of all television scholars, irrespective of identity, to explore histories of ignored work on screen. We must continue to address the false notion that there is ‘feminist’ media history and ‘feminist’ television which is interested in the domestic, the personal-as-political, the social; and there is structural, big-P ‘Political’ television and scholarship that explores work and economics, by and about men: as if these represent two mutually exclusive spheres. The Bevellers has here evidenced that plays about ‘male’ labour can also be interested in questions of gender, society and emotion, and NftLoU has demonstrated an equally dual focus on gendered expectations and the interaction between womanhood and labour.

The Viewing Group explored the theatrical inheritance of The Bevellers, situated in a studio, which exacerbates the claustrophobia of working in an ever-shrinking profession day-in, day-out, with the same faces and a repetition of tasks, however artful. We also discussed the inverse – NftLoU's exposé of fantasy rooted in a dying culture of cinema-going, and the use of film stock to capture a variation of locations, where labour, paid and unpaid, awaits our protagonist wherever she goes. The two transcripts capture a sense of these relations to theatre/studio and cinema/film, respectively, as enhancing the thematic resonance of gender difference and shifting labour practices across the texts. The cramped and demarcated spaces containing dangerous action and aggressive invective in The Bevellers (see Figure 6) commune with the empty spaces for talking and talking back to the screen in NftLoU (see Figure 7): highlighting the ‘risks’ of different labour practices as primarily physical in the earlier play and chiefly psychological in the latter text, though bodies and minds are worn down in both.

Significantly, this kind of textual analysis can only be performed when analysing texts comparatively: methodologically, we have reunified the Play for Today strand as a strand – not treating the plays as disparate works, but exploring their relations. Thus, a regular viewing group where many academics with different research specialisms and approaches cumulatively watch tens of plays from one strand offers a rich, unique experience and critical space that one-off events or collaborations cannot. While some participants have explained they feel that the methodological variety and depth of focus on plays’ and their creators’ background and context can inhibit extensive textual discussion – indicating that even more time could be spent discussing each play – participants generally felt that the group’s regularity and broad scope has been insightful and fruitful. We hope that the future of Play for Today studies, and television studies writ large, will benefit from such sustained engagement with long-running strands, especially in exploring beyond the canon and illuminating thematic resonances beyond the obvious and well-trodden.

The Play for Today Viewing Group is not an exercise in consensus forming, or an airtight method for conceiving of one ‘correct’, holistic interpretation of PfT or its specific plays. Rather, disagreement is an accepted part of the process of interpretation: Christine Geraghty and John Hill above share differing interpretations regarding The Death of Ophelia. This appears to be a core, hitherto unspoken, principle of the group; though the term ‘principle’ is somewhat oxymoronic given the content of the notion is to embrace disagreement. Arguments about evaluation often occurred due to the inevitable conflict in methodologies: whether the quality of performances was to be a guiding criteria, or the perceived authenticity of production design, or the artfulness of camerawork, or the socio-political thrust of a play. Such arguments, while often intractable, helpfully stopped us from committing resolutely to one singular way of seeing and interpreting a play, instead forcing to us grapple with unfamiliar lenses.

The Play for Today Viewing Group provides a space scarce within contemporary academia for academics and researchers to – for free – ask one another questions. The group allows, as the transcripts show, for a coming together of knowledges, disciplines, experiences and methodologies in a way rarely observable outside of taught education. What regular spaces, other than the BA/MA seminar rooms that we know to be at risk presently, do we have for this kind of discourse? These spaces are few and far between, making the duty to protect the remaining few all the more pressing. The tradition of seminars, discussions and roundtables in screen studies depends on a rich history, popularised in part by such practices at Cahiers du Cinéma and Screen. University of Reading’s ‘Sewing Circle’, wherein postgraduate students and staff in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television mostly discuss a single text in detail, for example, is about to turn thirty this year. The Play for Today Viewing Group is distinct from such spaces through its comparative, cumulative nature; members think through texts in depth as the group gathers and shares collective knowledge on Play for Today, inviting insightful parallels, comparisons and contrasts, as this article demonstrates.

The form of the video-call in particular allowed for an interesting experiment in collaborative theory-making, in the sessions as in this article itself. For example, the chat function allowed for a blend of multi-author writing to run alongside the verbal discussion, granting participants both immediacy and right to reply (or even interrupt), but also time to process thoughts at their own pace and write reflections down, edit them, and then post, during the spoken conversation. Similarly, likes on comments quickly gauge consensus, and replies (made public to the group or privately addressed to individual participants) carried on threads, almost like a collaborative footnote system emerging as we spoke. These are just a few of the ways that the virtual viewing group format can facilitate a plurality of voices and produce work, across difference (including differences in gender, age or neurotype), using different parts of our bodies, from voice, to our typing hands, to our listening ears, our furrowing brows, or our virtual thumbs up: more than a happy coincidence with the title of this article.

Liberating PfT from its constrictive canon and longstanding assumptions about realism, outside of traditional spaces in academia, the group continues to develop, addressing issues that remain pertinent in television studies, taking a multidimensional approach to questions that have remained unresolved long after 1984.