The Wednesday Play
| The Wednesday Play | |
|---|---|
Cathy Come Home (1966)
|
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| Genre | Anthology, television plays |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC 1 |
| Original release | October 1964 – May 1970 |
The Wednesday Play is an anthology series of British television plays which ran on BBC1 from October 1964 to May 1970. The plays were usually written for television, although adaptations from other sources also featured. The series gained a reputation for presenting contemporary social dramas, and for bringing issues to the attention of a mass audience that would not otherwise have been discussed on screen.
The series was suggested to the BBC's Head of Drama Sydney Newman, by the corporation's director of television Kenneth Adam after his cancellation of the two previous series of single plays. Newman had been persuaded to join the BBC following the success of the similar programme Armchair Theatre, which he had produced while Head of Drama at ABC Television from 1958 to 1962. Armchair Theatre had tackled many difficult and socially relevant subjects in the then-popular 'kitchen sink' style, and still managed to gain a mass audience on the ITV network, and Newman wanted a programme that would be able to tackle similar issues with a broad appeal. Newman also wanted to get away from the BBC's reputation of producing safe and unchallenging drama programmes, to produce something with more bite and vigour, what Newman called "agitational contemporaneity".
The Wednesday Play succeeded in meeting this aim, and the BBC quickly developed the practice of stockpiling six or seven Wednesday Plays in case there were problems with individual works. One production, The War Game (1965), was withdrawn from broadcast by a nervous BBC under pressure from the government, while John Hopkins' Fable (20 January 1965), an inversion of South Africa's Apartheid system, was delayed for several weeks over fears that it would incite racial tensions.
Intended as a vehicle for new writers, several careers began thanks to the series. Television programmes had a much shorter lead time in this era, and Dennis Potter's first four accepted television plays were shown during the course of 1965. The two Nigel Barton plays (8 and 15 December 1965) first brought him to widespread public attention and the slightly earlier Alice (13 October 1965), about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, developed themes to which Potter would return.
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