BBC100: The Nigel Barton Plays (1965)

For more on this BBC100 series of posts, read this introduction.

Very few things change overnight in television. Sometimes, it takes decades.

We’ve just talked about Nineteen Eighty-Four, a drama broadcast live to the nation in 1954, just because that’s just how things were done. Over the following few years, recording your programmes beforehand began to become a thing you could sensibly do. But it took a very long time for live drama to go away entirely. As late as 1983, BBC Two broadcast a run of five weekly plays, live from Pebble Mill in Birmingham.¹

But there became a tipping point where live drama, once the norm, became markedly less common. By the time of The Wednesday Play (1964-70), an anthology series of mostly-original single stories, every episode of the programme was pre-recorded. But live or not, it’s the scripts that matter, and enough scripts were needed to create a valuable opportunity for writers new to television. Stand up, a certain Dennis Potter.

Dennis Potter became that rare breed of television writer: one who a normal person who isn’t obsessed with TV might actually have heard of. The son of a coal miner, he ended up writing some of the most acclaimed drama serials British television has ever produced: Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). Outside of these, he is perhaps best remembered now for his startling Without Walls interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994, candidly discussing his work, his childhood, and his terminal cancer.

But his very first scripts for television were for The Wednesday Play in 1965. Alas, as ever with programmes of this vintage, we come up against the spectre of wiping. So much of this era of television simply doesn’t survive; the master tapes were considered simply too valuable not to be reused. Which means that Dennis Potter’s very first television work, The Confidence Course – a satire of Dale Carnegie and his self-improvement mantras – no longer exists. His second play Alice, about Lewis Carroll, luckily survives. But it was with his final two plays of the year, Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, that Potter hit creative paydirt.

Both plays are highly autobiographical, as Potter was wont to do throughout his career; but even by those standards Stand Up, Nigel Barton – broadcast on the 8th December 1965 – is probably most autobiographical thing he ever wrote. The play details the early years of the eponymous Nigel Barton, and directly mirrors Potter’s journey from a working-class kid growing up in the Forest of Dean, to his years at Oxford University. Here was a play which really did get a brand new voice out there to the viewing public, telling a story that really hadn’t been told in this way before. Class is, of course, at the heart of the piece, but not in a way which gives us easy heroes or villains. Potter resolutely refuses to condemn or romanticise his working-class roots; the point he makes is that the pain he felt moving between classes is something worth acknowledging and examining, rather than being something to hide.

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, broadcast just a week later, has nearly a completely different cast: the wonderful Keith Barron as Nigel is the only link. Again, the play is autobiographical; this time, under examination is Potter’s experiences the previous year as a parliamentary candidate. What’s striking is that the play’s essential theme – pragmatism versus idealism in politics – isn’t the only part of the play relevant today; so are many of the details. The character of Jack Hay, Barton’s political confidant, is still endlessly seen in political satire decades later. There is surely a direct line between Jack’s brutal pragmatism, and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.

In both plays, Potter sets out his stall for the years to come. His obsessions with class and childhood are obvious, but we also have the beginnings of his distrust of pure realism in drama. And if his breaking the fourth wall seems more tame today than at the time, it’s still startling to see Nigel’s childhood portrayed not by using a cast of kids, but with a cast of adults. All sitting in a classroom as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

And then there’s the music. Potter eventually became well-known for his use of pop tunes in his work, with seemingly whole serials built around the idea. Yet somehow, his use of a contemporary song by The Animals to underline Nigel’s despair at his roots is still one of the most powerful examples of all. “We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do…”

Despite most of his well-known work today being multi-episode serials rather than single plays, Potter wrote further single scripts for Play for Today, the successor to The Wednesday Play. (His most famous was Brimstone and Treacle, made in 1976, but so controversial internally at the BBC that it wasn’t aired until 1987.) But just as live drama slowly disappeared over the decades, so too did the single play, replaced with those limited run serials, or full continuing series. We can point to the odd exception, but that’s precisely the point: they’re an exception. Even the most convincing example – the brilliant Inside No. 9 – is written by the same two people every week, rather than being a way of new writers to make their mark.

We hear a lot about the need for diversity in television, and let’s be clear: that aim is both correct and laudable. But at the same time, television makes it more difficult for those new and diverse voices to make it to the screen. Bringing back the single play on a proper, permanent basis would be a way of increasing the opportunities for new, diverse writers. Do we want to actually bring those new voices to the screen, much like The Wednesday Play did with Dennis Potter?

Or do we just want to talk about it instead, and merely pretend we’re doing something?

1. These were The Battle of Waterloo, Redundant!, Night Kids, Cargo Kings and Japanese Style, and aired from the 13th February 1983. ↩

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