The left and "play for today" | thearticle

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 50th 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.