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From Socialist Worker, No. 121, 8 May 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
THE OLD ADAGE ‘I don’t go to the theatre to see violence, rape and incest, I can get all that at home’ is a bit ironic with reference to the BBC’s latest self-preoccupation, the place of violence in its programmes.
Talkback has discussed it, with middle-class drearies begging ‘more gentle programmes’ and telly trendies justifying 405-line violence as being really terribly moral.
The Mrs Whitewash gang, indeed, seem to verge from complaining that they can’t understand plays to complaining (even more virulently) that when they see brutality in Vietnam or revolution in The Big Flame they understand it only too well.
Of course, the BBC high-ups are very shot on their role as leaders of taste, the creators of new forms. The ghoulish delight in which they built up the Thirty-minute Theatre production Invasion as being the new departure to end all new departures was really very funny.
The show turned out to be a few well-known ‘personalities’ having dinner while a television set showed newsreels of Vietnam atrocities with which the company gradually became involved.
The dialogue was unscripted. The ‘personalities’ chatted away about their clothes, the latest jollities at the Roundhouse, and the meal they were eating, while one by one they got killed off, symbolically by the presence of the television images. It was hailed as a triumph, a revolution in television technique.
The fact that improvisation (which was the only new departure) has figured in the modern (let alone the classical) theatre for years didn’t seem to matter. Nor did it matter that the ‘message’ (that the tension between our ordinary lives and the horrors of Vietnam, if allowed to cohabit, would be unbearable) had already been effectively done to death many times down the road in the Aldwych, the last nail in the coffin being Peter Brook’s US, which rivalled this programme in pretentiousness and self-proclaimed modernity.
The sad fact is that the BBC, while hippily revamping old theatrical and cinematic forms like improvisation and documentary (Piscator was showing films on stage as part of plays while television was still a dirty gleam in James Baird’s eye), is determined to stamp on new content, without which really new forms cannot emerge.
It took Jim Allen a year to get Wheldon and his bureaucratic groovies to show The Big Flame, and the Wednesday play is constantly hampered and diluted by the big boys upstairs.
The new wave of TV drama that Cathy Come Home initiated, dependent on location shooting, has now been effectively castrated by the imposition of a film limit in drama presentations.
After the glimmer of creative and committed drama by writers like Jim Allen and Alan Plater, the Whitewashes (for whom ‘moral’ censorship is merely a cover for political censorship – to show violence as part of a violent age is more dangerous than the intrigues of Galsworthian Edwardia) are winning the day.
The impotence of Invasion was its refusal to view violence as being in any way connected with the way society conducts its affairs. It’s a very nice way of looking at violence, as a fact as disconnected from your and my life and behaviour as an earthquake.
But it is an approach which is sterile, myopic, indulgent and wrong. The BBC’s attempt to wrap its drama in a vast, disinfected polythene bag is social irresponsibility of the first water.
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Last updated on 16 January 2021