Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 2 of 3

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby

This essay continues from Part 1.

The play

BTVD_LeedsUnited_9
Early in Leeds United!, Annie (Teresa Anne Keegan, played by Josie Lane) walks along early morning streets, picking up a friend and arriving at the bus stop on her journey to work. An ambitious crane shot accompanies her walk, leaves her in order to reverse across a street and rises above outhouses to find her further on. As she walks, we hear a male voice-over set out her new contract, the terms of which have reduced her rights. This sequence “set the tone”, according to Clive James:

ably combining the humanist touch with the analytical glance. […] their company contracts were read out in plummy tones on voice-over. ‘The company has no contractual pension arrangements covering your employment.’ Which meant that you work for half a century and they scrap you.¹

This practice was so common that Welland heard about another example just a few weeks before the play was broadcast: “a 61-year-old seamstress who works in the same clothing factory as Colin Welland’s mother-in-law in Leeds was made redundant. She had worked in the same place for 25 years but because she was over retiring age she was not entitled to any redundancy pay.” Welland’s response: “Bastards, they are”.²

Continue reading “Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 2 of 3″ →

James, The Observer. ↩
Sheridan, ‘Tailor made for drama’. ↩

Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 1 of 3

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby

“When a woman looks at her wages and thinks of the hours she works and the conditions, she knows she is a slave…”

BTVD_LeedsUnited_1
Leeds United! dramatises the 1970 dispute in which over 25,000 clothing workers, the majority of them women, went on strike across Leeds, other parts of Yorkshire and the North East.¹ Katrina Honeyman, in her history of the Leeds clothing industry, argued that the strike symbolised “the response of women workers to several decades of oppression by both employers and the male union hierarchy” and showed the “talent of women for political organization, [which is] so often overlooked in labour history”.² Leeds United! reflects this talent in its methods of retelling, and reconstructing, the strike. According to director Roy Battersby in 2009, the play’s “ambition was to try to understand” how their “courageous” action took them to “the verge of winning” and how “within a few days that was turned into […] a miserable, heartbreaking compromise”.³

Continue reading “Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 1 of 3″ →

Play for Today: Leeds United!, tx. BBC1, 31 October 1974. ↩
Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 209. ↩
Roy Battersby, in Q&A with John Hill and Kenith Trodd at BFI Southbank on 25 November 2009, in the Radical Television Drama season. Available to view here. ↩

Cheer Up. It Might Never Happen: The Unborn (1980)

IAN GREAVES

Playhouse Writer: Philip Martin; Producer: Peter Ansorge; Director: Michael Custance

There isn’t a gag within a mile of this. On the face of it, the BBC-2 schedule for the evening of 16 May 1980 is a pretty unforgiving affair. Working back, we have the late-entry Outer Limits episode ‘Counterweight’ at 11.30pm, a fifty-minute wave of paranoia as an extraterrestrial light invades the passengers one-by-one on a long-haul space flight. Newsnight doubtless explored the political hotbed of an Afghan settlement, and as an appetiser, Louis Hellman’s cartoon Boom at 10.40pm chilled the unsuspecting viewer.

Continue reading “Cheer Up. It Might Never Happen: The Unborn (1980)” →

Underground (1958)

OLIVER WAKE

Armchair Theatre Writer: James Forsyth; Adapted from (novel): Harold Rein; Producer Sydney Newman; Director: William Kotcheff

This piece was substantially revised and updated in 2018.

When people talk about live television drama, and in particular the disasters that can befall live productions, actors forgetting their lines and technical faults loom large. Sometimes mention will be made of the incident in which a leading actor died during a performance. It sounds like it could be a dark joke or an industry myth, but it’s true. It’s a morbid story but a fascinating one.

The production in question was Underground, transmitted on Sunday 30 November 1958 as part of ITV company ABC’s popular Armchair Theatre drama anthology. It was directed by William (known as Ted) Kotcheff, one of ABC’s regular directors, then aged only 27, and produced by Sydney Newman, the company’s drama supervisor. The play was a television dramatisation by James Forsyth of Harold Rein’s 1955 novel Few Were Left. No recording of the play exists, so this account is based on various interviews and media reports about the play. There are several accounts of what happened which, though largely consistent on the main events, differ notably on the smaller details. In this essay I’ll try to separate the reality from the myth and distortion as far as is possible at this remove from the event itself.

Continue reading “Underground (1958)” →

(Times and) Spaces of Television – Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate (1981)

DAVID ROLINSON

Four parts. Writer: Stephen Gallagher; Producer: John Nathan-Turner; Director: Paul Joyce

WWA_scene_5
Warriors’ Gate was a visually inventive, conceptually ambitious and idiosyncratic Doctor Who serial, but also a fraught one for Paul Joyce, its director.¹ The disagreements behind the scenes have been well documented, and are often discussed as a marker or consequence of the serial’s ambition.² I’ve researched this serial in the BBC Written Archives Centre production file on Warriors’ Gate and the archive of writer Stephen Gallagher that is held by Hull History Centre,³ studying everything from multiple script drafts and notes on script meetings through to the specs for the set’s timber framed gimbal mirror and a list of supplementary payments for overtime and wig fittings (at productive moments in these archives it was of course difficult not to declare that “I’m finally getting something done!”⁴ ). However, this essay is not a blow-by-blow production history but a discussion of Joyce’s direction: partly showing how Joyce’s approach helps to convey the serial’s ideas, but mainly showing how debates about the future of Doctor Who’s production methods and the spaces of television circulated around Warriors’ Gate.

Continue reading “(Times and) Spaces of Television – Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate (1981)” →

Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate, tx. BBC1, 3-24 January 1981. ↩
See The Dreaming, a documentary on the Warriors’ Gate DVD (2009). The emphasis on creative ambition and vision differs from the ways in which other notably fraught Doctor Who productions have been discussed, such as Nightmare of Eden (1979). ↩
The BBC has made some basic documentation available online, including the Programme-as-Completed file on Warriors’ Gate. ↩
This is a line spoken with some intensity by the character Rorvik at a crucial moment. ↩