Plays for Yesterday

PLAY OF THE MONTH - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1976)
PLAY FOR TODAY - A PHOTOGRAPH (1977)
PLAY FOR TODAY - RED SHIFT (1978)

Peter Firth and Judi Bowker toil within the Victorian façade of

PLAY OF THE MONTH - THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.

THE only novel written by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the Aesthetic Art movement as drama; that is, art over intellectualism. While observing Basil Hallward (Jeremy Brett) painting a portrait of Dorian Gray (Peter Firth), Lord Henry Wotton (John Gielgud) preaches his world view of beauty being the only aspect of life worth pursuing. This prompts Dorian to wish that his canvas would age instead of himself, and he consequently explores his sensuality, starting with a courtship of actress Sibyl Vane (Judi Bowker). But after a poor performance Dorian rejects Sibyl as the acting profession was her beauty; and on returning home, Gray notices that his painting has started to deteriorate. After receiving news that Sibyl has committed suicide, Dorian begins to exploit his looks for a debauched life. In anger, Dorian blames his fate on Basil, and stabs him to death. Deciding that only full confession will absolve him, Dorian destroys the last vestige of his conscience; stabbing the picture, Gray recoils bloodied on the floor, aging rapidly while the painting regains its original form.

A critical success and labelled the "most Wildean," this feature-length BBC DRAMA OF THE MONTH - written by playwright John Osborne - also includes definitive portrayals of the hedonistic Gray, aristocratic dandy Wotton, and infatuated artist Hallward. Lord Henry seduces Dorian through a poisonous wit that aims to shock; though naïve, Wotton's radical theories send Dorian in a tailspin, Gray's early insecurities making him the perfect clay for the Lord's willing hands. This version also accentuates the gay subtext more than most, especially in the relationship between Dorian and Alan (Nicholas Clay), when the latter is asked to draw on his chemical experience to dispose of Basil's body. Such homoerotica plays a large role structurally: Basil’s painting depends upon his adoration of Dorian; similarly, Lord Henry is overcome with the desire to seduce Gray and mould him in his own image. As a homosexual living in an intolerant society, Wilde asserted this philosophy partially in an attempt to justify his own lifestyle. For although beauty and youth remain of utmost importance at the end, the price one must pay for them is exceedingly high.

John Stride plays a beleaguered husband in the sinisterly subdued

PLAY FOR TODAY - A PHOTOGRAPH.

The BBC's successor to THE WEDNESDAY PLAY, PLAY FOR TODAY would be transmitted between 1970 and 1984 and become the flagship for respected anthology drama, specialising in social realism but also dabbling in everything from biopics to science fiction. John Bowen's A PHOTOGRAPH touches on the dark underbelly of rural intervention, were The Otways - upper crust Radio 3 presenter Michael (John Stride) and working class schoolteacher Gillian (Stephanie Turner) - are a dysfunctional couple living in the city where their festering resentments cover work, Gillian's mental state and an under-performing sex life. When Michael receives a strange photograph in the post depicting two girls in front of a caravan, it is only the beginning of a journey that will see Gillian and her family - including mother Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford) - control Michael's guilt ("That's country wine, that is.") Very much a companion to Bowen's other rural terror for the strand ROBIN REDBREAST - where Bamford appears as the same matriarchal manipulator - A PHOTOGRAPH pitches Gillian's spiralling depression against Michael's increasing determination to solve the puzzle.

Alan Garner's adaptation of his own semi-mystical 1973 novel for RED SHIFT in essence deals with similar themes to A PHOTOGRAPH - that of the indispensable quality of locations and relationships - but is a fragmented and ambitious exploration on a cosmic scale. At the core of RED SHIFT's narrative is the neuropsychological notion of engrams, or how the brain stores memory. This elemental and subconscious notion is theorised to affect behaviour over time and repetition, and here we see the lives of three men living in the same part of Cheshire – one in the present, one in the seventeenth century, and one during the Roman occupation – with their existences linked by common circumstance and the appearance of a talismanic stone axe head.

PLAY FOR TODAY - RED SHIFT's billing in the Radio Times asks "what links the destinies of three couples separated by time, but living in the same place? Is there a force drawing them together - or is it driving them apart?"

The present day relationship between Tom (Stephen Petcher) and Jan (Lesley Dunlop) is solidly written and played, taking in the difficulties of a long-distance relationship and the generational, blinkered sexual views of Tom's parents (Bernard Gallagher and Stella Tanner); in contrast the historical sequences suffer badly from stilted dialogue and budgetary restraints. While Tom obsesses over astrology he declares that he is too "blue" and needs a "red shift"; since cosmological red shifts result from galaxies moving away from each other, this can be read as a metaphor for his need to re-evaluate his life. But there are also many occurrences of red in the story; after a massacre, Macey (Andrew Byett)'s skin is painted red by the tribal girl using dye from alder bark, marking him a "redman" and an ancient symbol of rebirth.

Ghost Stories Not for Christmas

A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - STIGMA (1977)
A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - THE ICE HOUSE (1978)

The woman who bled to death: STIGMA moves the BBC Ghost Story strand uncomfortably into the modern era.

FOR the 1977 BBC GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS, director Lawrence Gordon Clark wanted to adapt M.R. James' Count Magnus, but instead made STIGMA on a freelance basis. Scripted by Clive Exton, it concerns a family who remove an ancient standing stone from their back garden. As the menhir is lifted a curse is unleashed, causing mother Katherine (Kate Binchy) to bleed uncontrollably. This body horror trapping made STIGMA a controversial departure, with its shift to a modern setting and loss of period detail lacking the resonance previously created by the series; it also results in a more mechanical tale, away from the myth and tension created by, say, time shifts between researchers and protagonists in more polished entries such as THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER and THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS.

STIGMA can too easily be labelled as a meditation on the male fear of menstruation, but nothing can disguise the fact that it is pretty nasty story; the first image the viewer sees is an out-of-focus red dot which morphs into the family's red Citroen 2CV, predicting the blood to come. Katherine's nude scene is unsettling rather than salacious, as she frantically tries to stop the endless flow, but there is a more unnerving sequence when husband Peter (Peter Bowles) is awakened to find a strange communion between an onion and a knife, hinting at the vegetable's role in pagan folklore as a symbol of protection and purification. The tale ends openly, as Katherine dies on route to hospital, and it is hinted that daughter Verity (Maxine Gordon) may be converting to the black arts.

Geoffrey Burridge comforts John Stride in THE ICE HOUSE.

If STIGMA is a straightforward horror story, it is difficult to describe THE ICE HOUSE other than a hazy, pretentious muddle. Directed by Derek Lister and written by John Bowen, it brought the original GHOST STORY strand to an oblique close before its short-lived revival in 2005, 2006 and 2013. The most experimental yet maligned of all the episodes, Paul (John Stride) has recently parted from his wife and moved to a residential health spa located in a country house. The disappearance of a masseur and the behaviour of the brother and sister who run operations (Clovis and Jessica, played by Geoffrey Burridge and Elizabeth Romilly) seem to be governed by a strange vine growing in an ice house. While the older residents go about their stately business, Paul is the centre of attention for the siblings; why is never made clear, perhaps he is just the latest in a line of guests for which they draw vitality (Jessica enjoys "having people"). Clovis and Jessica's connection to the overpowering scent of the vine is also open to interpretation; in fact the duo remind of pod-people with their otherworldy directness.

Green and Unpleasant Land

PLAY FOR TODAY - ROBIN REDBREAST (1970)
THE SHOUT (1978)
THE MAD DEATH (1983)

Esteemed TV players Bernard Hepton and Anna Cropper's different world's collide in the rural horror ROBIN REDBREAST.

BROADCAST as part of the BBC's PLAY FOR TODAY strand, ROBIN REDBREAST is a folk horror rarity that acts as a precursor and influence to the more hard-hitting THE WICKER MAN and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW. Written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart, it is the story of Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), a London-based TV script editor who temporarily escapes to the country in order to recuperate after a break-up. But with mice scurrying in the walls, birds coming down the chimney and local eccentrics like housekeeper Mrs Vigo (Freda Bamford) and Mr Fisher (Bernard Hepton) dispensing weird customs, Anna becomes increasingly isolated and lost within her new environment. When she falls pregnant after a one-night stand with SS-obsessed gamekeeper Rob (Andrew Bradford) - who she first encounters practising karate in the woods wearing only his underpants - Anna is embroidered in a conspiracy to prevent her leaving the village.

The class struggle theme is amplified by Anna being such a liberated, modern woman and Rob a himbo who looks to the history of the Third Reich to generate monosymbolic conversation. They have nothing in common but sleep together in the onset of fear, instincts which adhere to the programme's yearning to turn back to more straightforward times. The countryside may be full of shunned micro societies, but can the urban development of "civilised" post-war Britain - and the intrusion of the outsider - really ever erode the colour of tradition and ritual from a brutal prehistory? Talky but engrossing, ROBIN REDBREAST's slow burning dictum - and the inclusion of snobbish London friends Madge (Amanda Walker) and Jake (Julian Holloway) - makes a case that our green and unpleasant land will always govern our prudish endeavours.

The soul of a housewife is manipulated by a magical stranger in THE SHOUT; reverting to an Aboriginal state, Rachel scuttles on all fours through her cluttered kitchen.

Though THE SHOUT is connected with Aboriginal Outback culture, and was the first British film of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, Englishness seeps through every frame. Shot in and around Braunton Burrows and Saunton Sands in North Devon - a stone's throw from this writer's home - the film shows a cricket match between the staff and inmates of an asylum. One of the patients, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates), is running the scoring hut, where he tells Robert (Tim Curry) a strange story ("every word of what I'm going to tell you is true. Although I'm telling it in a different way, it's always the same story … I vary it a little because I like to keep it alive.") Told in flashback, we see married couple Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel (Susannah York); Anthony is a Church organist/composer, and Rachel a staid housewife. Crossley appears and announces that he has returned from eighteen years in the Australian outback, where he lived among the Aborigines and studied their magic. Even though the stranger tells the couple of him killing his own children, Crossley moves in with Anthony and Rachel permanently, establishing a spell over the household.

An ambitious but ultimately perplexing film, THE SHOUT opens with the featured couple asleep on a beach, both having the same dream of a witch doctor in a tailcoat. Crossley explains this was one of his teachers, and we learn more about the strangers powers: the ability to take another man's wife by simply keeping an item of her clothing - in this case a sandal buckle - and the secret of The Shout, a cry so despairing that it can kill. Crossley creates a disquieting, intimate awkwardness, made the more terrifying because his incantations are introduced naturally into country village life. The production's otherworldly quality is further enhanced by its use of an electronic and avant-garde score by Genesis linchpins Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. In fact the film's haunting central theme 'From the Undertow' was the opening track on Banks' solo debut album A Curious Feeling released a year later.

The THREADS of the Rabies world, the BBC Scotland drama THE MAD DEATH was made two years before its eventual transmission date.

In this age of bird flu and ebola, it is easy to forget that in the 80's Rabies was the virulent virus. The BBC had already featured the condition in a third season episode of SURVIVORS - MAD DOG by Don Shaw, screened in 1977 - which provided the already decimated population with another catastrophe, but THE MAD DEATH tackles Rabies full-on. Based on the Nigel Slater book of the same name, writer Sean Hignett and director Robert Young examine the effects of a notional outbreak of "the mad death" on our shores. Opening with a titles sequence where a voice whispers 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' over a distorted image of a fox, the terror begins when an infected cat is smuggled by her owner from France into Scotland. When the feline is run over by a car, its body is eaten by a fox. The spread amongst the animal population goes undetected until the first human, womanising American businessman Tom Siegler (Ed Bishop), befriends the infected animal. After Siegler is confirmed with the disease in hospital, the government calls in leading Rabies specialist Michael Hilliard (Richard Heffer) and Doctor Anne Maitland (Barbara Kellerman). Maitland's jealous partner Johnny Dalry (Richard Morant) creates a tepid love triangle which fails to hold interest against a number of alarmingly brutal scenes.

By addressing humanity's fear of disease with a love of animals, THE MAD DEATH has a solid premise. While most commentators mention the shopping centre containment in episode two as the highlight, the slow-burning demise of Tom in the first part is more dramatically satisfying. Benefitting from focuses on the declining health of the businessman for a continuous large portion of running time, we follow Siegler through the various stages of the disease, starting off with headaches, disorientation, and blurred vision; and in medical care, having hallucinations of being strangled, as hydrophobia takes hold. If the story seems pedestrian after the shopping centre sequence, it only serves as a foundation to the barnstorming final act, which depicts a still difficult to watch cull and creepy scenes within the home of Miss Stonecroft (Brenda Bruce) - the obligatory demented pet-obsessed loner - which includes the capture of Maitland and Stonecroft's attempt to feed her cat food and milk. Of the performances, Bishop shines as the charismatic American, as confident and chatty as the English cast are reserved and stiff upper-lipped. 

"What a strange evening it is"

A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS (1972)
A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS - LOST HEARTS (1973)

Peter Vaughan plays a treasure hunter stalked by an ancient protector in A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS.

EACH Christmas from 1971 to 1978, the BBC broadcast late night, self-contained supernatural dramas which would become known under the umbrella of A GHOST STORY FOR CHRISTMAS. The first five episodes were all based on stories by M.R. James - THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER, A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS, LOST HEARTS, THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS and THE ASH TREE. Charles Dickens' THE SIGNALMAN was chosen for the 1976 episode, but the final two installments were original teleplays in contemporary settings: Clive Exton's STIGMA and John Bowen's THE ICE HOUSE. The first seven entries were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and the transmissions under consideration here are two of the most fondly remembered and pivotal in the evolution of the series. A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS is a masterpiece and, considering it was broadcast between 11.05 and 11.55pm on Christmas Eve 1972, attracted an astonishing nine million viewers. Because of its critical and public success, all subsequent entries were shifted from General Features to the BBC's Drama department proper, and as Clark has lamented, despite larger budgets, his vision for the tales was suddenly imposed upon by screenwriters and script editors.

A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS tells of Mr Paxton (Peter Vaughan) - a clerk who has lost his job in the great depression - travelling to the East Anglian coast hoping to discover a last surviving Saxon crown, one of three that were put in place to protect England from invasion. Following in the footsteps of an archaeologist who was murdered twelve years previously searching for the crown, Paxton boards in a hotel which only has one other guest, Dr Black (Clive Swift, playing a returning character from THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER). Increasingly haunted by a mysterious figure, which may be the ghost of William Ager whose job was to guard the relics, Paxton actually finds then - with the aid of Dr Black - returns the crown, only to be bludgeoned to death at the point of excavation. Black leaves on a train, with the station guard opening the carriage door under the misapprehension that there was someone wishing to board the same compartment...

LOST HEARTS ghost children Giovanni and Phoebe - played by Christopher Davis and Michelle Foster - peer through windows with their Chinaman's Fingernails, drawing on the age-old fallacy that fingernails continue to grow after death.

Inspired by the bleak open beaches and dreamy isolation of Jonathan Miller's OMNIBUS adaptation of James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,' A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS works both as a classic ghost story and as an enduring piece of drama. As David Kerekes notes in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book Volume 1, the chilling shot of a man hunched over in Paxton's hotel room predates the finale of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT by close on thirty years, and the sequence where Paxton encounters a machete-bearing farmer is an illustration of how an effectively-staged scene can win over anything effects-laden. What makes Paxton's demise all the more starling is that you feel for a man who just wants to make a name for himself, driven by hurt pride rather than by any malicious intent. Surprisingly, the biggest change from the source story is Paxton himself: far from Vaughan's down-trodden, working-class adventurer, the Paxton of the original tale - first published in 1925 - is young and scholarly, but without personal connection. This leaves another layer to the printed story's undertones of post-WWI invasion and young lives lost.

LOST HEARTS, written by Robin Chapman, is based on one of James' earliest and less subtle tales. In fact, the writer once told his illustrator James McBryde that he "didn't care much about it," and the story was only included in his first collection at the insistence of the publisher. Stephen (Simon Gripps-Kent), a young orphan, is sent to live with his eccentric relative Mr Abney (Joseph O’Conor). Stephen is haunted by the spirits of two children - both orphans like himself who had briefly lived at the house - and learns that Abney dabbles in ritual sacrifice to seek immortality. The ghostly children are wondrous, swaying in unison to ethereal hurdy-gurdy music, but away from the obvious Faustian element there is a child abuse sub-text that won't go away, no matter how often Clark denies this oft-made reading. Instead, the director sees it as a children's fear of monsters and that "[their] father or mother may turn into an ogre or a witch."