northern ireland and pre-troubles bbc television drama

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Northern Ireland and pre-Troubles BBCTelevision DramaAndrew HillPublished online: 22 Aug 2006.

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NORTHERN IRELAND AND PRE-TROUBLES

BBC TELEVISION DRAMA

Andrew Hill

Introduction

The BBC began broadcasting from Belfast in September 1924, around eighteen

months after the partitioning of Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a

separate province and a part of the United Kingdom. From its early broadcasts through to

the present day the Corporation has occupied a prominent position in the province. Much

has been written about the role played by the BBC in the history of Northern Ireland, in

particular in regard to its coverage of the Troubles. In terms of television drama, the most

celebrated and best known drama produced by both the BBC and independent television

has been that which has portrayed lives caught up in or set against the backdrop of the

conflict. Little attention though has been paid to television drama about Northern Ireland

from prior to the outbreak of the Troubles.1

In this paper I want to focus specifically upon BBC television drama from the pre-

Troubles period. During this time independent television companies did produce a small

number of television dramas set in Northern Ireland.2 However, these dramas were

produced in a very different context from those of the BBC. As the United Kingdom’s

national, public service broadcaster with a long-running and high profile presence in the

Province, the BBC has occupied a particularly significant position in regard to the history

and politics of Northern Ireland. The number of television dramas about the province

produced by the BBC in the pre-Troubles period is not large. Between 1960 and 1965 the

Corporation produced five dramas of which three were set in the province-The Randy

Dandy, The Big Donkey and Cemented with Love, with two other plays written by Alun

Owen-The Ruffians and Progress to the Park-that whilst located outside Northern Ireland

directly addressed the political and sectarian divisions of the province. Despite the limited

number of works, this body of drama is worthy of further attention in two significant

respects, that I will be exploring in this piece.

Firstly, the planning, the discussions and debates that took place inside the BBC

around these dramas casts light on a series of issues to do with the nature of the

Corporation at this point in time. This includes the regional demand for televised drama

production at a point when television drama was acquiring an unprecedented prestige

and profile. The institutional discourse around these dramas also serves to illuminate

the variation in attitudes between different sectors of the BBC as to the type of drama

the Corporation should be producing, as well as furthering our understanding of the

position of the BBC in regard to the politics of Northern Ireland at this time.3 Secondly,

the dramas are interesting in terms of their content-what they appear to show us about

Northern Ireland at this historical juncture, and the way in which they do this. These

dramas were produced and broadcast at a critical moment in the history of the province-

the period immediately prior to the eruption of the Troubles, and they offer us a series of

perspectives on the condition of the province, in a way that has yet to have been

scrutinised in any degree of detail.

Media History, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2006ISSN 1368-8804 print/1469-9729 online/06/010047�14

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Before coming on to discuss each of these dramas in turn, I want to firstly elucidate

the historical and institutional context in which they were produced and broadcast.

Pre-Troubles Northern Ireland

As I have just suggested, the period in which these dramas were produced and

shown was a pivotal one in the history of Northern Ireland. Since partitioning, the Unionist

Party had vigorously asserted the status of the province as a part of the United Kingdom

and as separate from the Irish Free State (or Republic of Ireland as it became in 1949). The

opposition of the province’s minority Catholic-Nationalist community to partitioning was

suppressed, with the systematic marginalisation of this community from much of the

public life of the province. The period around which these dramas were made and

broadcast witnessed an important shift in Unionist politics though, with in March 1963

Terence O’Neill succeeding Lord Brookeborough as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. The

succession marked a move towards an apparently more progressive and conciliatory form

of Unionist politics, with O’Neill working to develop improved relations between the

province’s two communities and with the Republic of Ireland. O’Neill’s premiership was to

end in failure though. His, albeit limited, gestures towards conciliation with the Nationalist

community generated a backlash within Unionism amongst those who feared the longer

term outcome of such developments, with this period witnessing the rise as a political

force of Ian Paisley and his brand of staunchly Unionist sectarianism. By the time of

O’Neill’s resignation in April 1969 the opening scenes in the Troubles were already being

played out. With hindsight, the period of O’Neill’s premiership can be seen as the moment

when the course of reconciliation and reform was rejected and the province set en route

to the confrontations that were to mark the coming decades.

These dramas derive from the period of O’Neill’s premiership, or the moment

immediately prior to it, and as will become evident, they serve to illuminate a series of key

issues to do with the challenges and obstacles faced by the province at this point in its

history. As I will be coming on to discuss, in the case of Cemented with Love the

controversy around the play was to become directly linked to disagreement over the

extent and efficacy of O’Neill’s reforms and achievements.

Television Drama Production and the BBC in Northern Ireland

These dramas, then, are about Northern Ireland (and in the case of Owen’s plays, the

way in which the politics and sectarianism of the province spread beyond its geographical

borders), but they were not produced in Northern Ireland. The BBC in Northern Ireland has

a rich tradition of producing radio drama that stretches back to its earliest period of

activity, but it was not to start producing its own television drama until The Squad in 1976.

During the 1960s the possibility of the region producing television drama was discussed

intermittently, with competition from Ulster Television, which had begun broadcasting in

Northern Ireland in 1959, providing one incentive to develop this type of programming.4

However, a lack of resources and financing were repeatedly identified as obstacles to this.5

The type of drama that might have been financially feasible, using only three or four actors

and very limited sets, was never developed, and would not have been considered suitable

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for network broadcast 6 � a significant issue at a time when the regions of the BBC were

facing considerable pressure to maximise the use of their resources by producing

television output for the whole network (Briggs 651�652). The expense of producing

television drama is highlighted by figures that point to the comparative low-cost of

programmes produced in Northern Ireland with other regions, and the expensiveness of

television drama production-it was the most costly type of programming to produce.7

Northern Ireland was not alone though in its frustration at being unable to produce

television drama. Whilst the Northern Ireland region was comparatively the least well

financed of the BBC regions, other regions also found the demands of producing this type

of drama beyond them, at a point when the growth and development in regional

television output was running up against severe financial constraints (Briggs 649�650). As

Sydney Newman, the person perhaps above all responsible for the development of

television drama at this time in the United Kingdom and the Head of the BBC’s Drama

Group Television emphasised in his address to the Northern Ireland region in June 1966, all

the regions had a similar complaint, but due to the ‘enormous expense’ of mounting plays

outside London the production of television drama had to be focused upon the capital.8

Whilst the period in which these dramas were produced and broadcast was a pivotal

moment in the history of the province, it was also a highly significant one in the

development of television drama in the United Kingdom. It stands, depending on the

precise dating taken, at the beginning, or a relatively early stage in the ‘Golden Age’ of

television drama, when ‘serious’ drama,9 principally in the form of the single author play,

was coming to achieve a profile unseen before or since in the United Kingdom. This was a

period that saw television drama addressing head-on the marked socio-political changes

of the 1960s and 1970s, bringing these to the attention of a national audience in the way

that only broadcasting was able to do. The need for drama to take on such issues, to be

‘progressive’, ‘challenging’ and ‘controversial’ was identified within the BBC as a key

feature of the type of contemporary drama that the Corporation’s Drama Department

should be producing, despite the controversy this at times generated (Caughie

‘Progressive Television’ 13�15).

As the history of the BBC in Northern Ireland suggests, this type of output was

almost bound to run into difficulties in Northern Ireland if it turned its attention to life in

the province. From the beginning of the BBC’s broadcasts in Northern Ireland through to

the Second World War the Corporation played a significant role in helping to establish and

disseminate the version of the province advocated by the Unionist political establishment

(Cathcart 11�105; McIntosh 69�102). The BBC almost wholly ignored the province’s

sectarian divisions, the opposition of the province’s Catholic-Nationalist community to

partitioning, and the systematic marginalisation of this community from much of the

public life of the province.

Across the 1950s and into the 1960s the BBC’s output in Northern Ireland did, to a

limited extent, move away from the pattern of close conformity to the demands of the

Unionist establishment, in part thanks to the coming of television to the province

(commencing in the spring of 1953), and the exposure of the region to BBC broadcasts

from elsewhere in the United Kingdom this brought (Cathcart 170�202, McIntosh 94�95).

Whilst the BBC in Belfast did become more ready to acknowledge the existence of two

quite distinct communities within the province, the negative aspects of these divisions-the

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sectarianism and discrimination that surrounded them, remained largely excluded from

the BBC’s output. And throughout this period the BBC in Belfast remained highly sensitive

to pressure not to stray far from the vision of the province endorsed by the Unionist elite.

This is evident most clearly in two events from 1959-when an episode of Tonight featuring

a report on Northern Ireland by Alan Whicker, and an edition of the talk show Small World

which had included the actress Siobhan McKeena condemning partitioning and the

treatment of men recently arrested for IRA activity, had deeply offended the Unionist

establishment These incidents resulted in a reissuing of a Director General’s directive

dating back to 1940, which provided the Controller Northern Ireland with the power to

amend and suppress any material to do with Northern Ireland that he wanted to.10

As I will be coming on to discuss, a major question mark hangs over, whether, if it

had been left to the BBC in Belfast Northern Ireland to produce television drama, the type

of dramas I discuss here might ever have been made, even if the funding and resources

had been available.

The Dramas

Of course, these dramas do not simply offer the ‘reality’ of life in Northern Ireland to

their audience. They present a series of mediated representations or ‘ways of seeing’ the

province at this moment in its history. What then are the principal features of the type of

representations they offer?

The dramas conform closely to the chief modes and conventions identified with

television drama from this period (Caughie Television Drama 67�87; Cooke 44, 47, 64;

McLoone ‘Boxed in?’ 96�97). They are marked by an affinity with the contemporary

theatre, one that privileges literary effect over more visual qualities. In the main they

display a naturalism that was dominant in theatre at this time, one aspect of which was a

focus upon working and lower middle class life.11 They rely heavily upon the actors to

confer meaning upon the events taking place, rather than deploying more visually based

techniques. And, as evident in Progress to the Park, there is typically little sense of depth to

the mise-en-scene, which is marked by a certain flatness and ‘interiority’.12 To acknowl-

edge these aspects of these dramas is to broach one type of methodological issue that

arises in relating this body of drama to contemporary Northern Ireland. Another rather

different methodological issue also hangs over these dramas that pervades research on

the history of television more broadly. Out of the five plays I discuss here a recording exists

of only Progress to the Park (hence my comment on this play as being suggestive of the

rather depthless mise-en-scene displayed in these dramas). Recordings of the others have

either been lost, binned or erased, a situation still typical during this period (Bryant 5�21).

As Caughie puts it, writing about ‘early television drama’ (prior to the mid-1950s), this

should not constitute ‘an academic alibi’ (Caughie ‘Before the Golden Age’ 25) for failing to

engage with this output. Rather, as Caughie, and Jacobs (8�10) in his book-length study of

television drama from pre-1955, argue, the researcher is faced with having to utilise the

material* including shooting scripts and production notes*to reconstruct a sense of

what the broadcast version of the play might have been like. Even then the researcher is

confronted with the limited nature of this type of ‘secondary’ material-in the case of these

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dramas far greater material of this nature exists for Cemented with Love than the other

plays.

In discussing these dramas I want to proceed along broadly chronological lines, by

firstly exploring the two plays by Stewart Love, then the two Alun Owen plays, before

looking at the controversy around Sam Thompson’s Cemented with Love, which brings

together most clearly the type of sectarian and political tensions faced by the province at

this time, and casts the sharpest light on the position of the BBC in regard to the politics of

the province.

Stewart Love’s The Randy Dandy and The Big Donkey

Both plays by the young Belfast schoolteacher Stewart Love take as their central

character a shipyard worker, perhaps the archetypal figure of industrial, male, Protestant,

working class Belfast (- Protestant as it was this community which after a series of sectarian

clashes had come to dominate the industry).

The Randy Dandy, was initially staged by the Ulster Group Theatre and produced as a

radio play by the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service, before being shown as a television

play on 14th September 1961. One member of the BBC Drama Department commented

that The Randy Dandy offers ‘an Ulster Look Back in Anger’,13 with Dandy Jordan (played by

James Ellis) a typical ‘angry young man’, who stages a private rebellion against the

constraints of class and social convention. He rejects his wife’s consumerist aspirations,

centred on acquiring a new council house. He refuses the demands of his colleagues to

strike when he does not believe it right to. And he embarks on the beginning of an affair

with an attractive young social worker, Brenda, who seems to embody the type of better

life he desires, but ultimately rejects her as ‘shallow’. The play ends with Dandy

announcing to his wife that he is leaving, taking-off in search of something more,

something unknowable and probably unobtainable.

There is little in the play that speaks distinctly of Belfast or Northern Ireland. The

opening titles feature a montage of shots of the city’s dockyards, and in a scene where

Dandy elopes with Brenda, they are shown sitting by Belfast Lough, where a conversation

about the ships they are watching, turns into a reflection on the type of man Dandy wants

to become. Apart however from the limited use of these background settings there is little

in the play that resonates with the specificities of the locale. The play could have been set

in any number of other working class districts of an industrial city.

In contrast, in The Big Donkey, shown as the Sunday Play for 31st March 1963, the

Belfast setting is much more central to the play, and in turn the play offers a far richer and

more distinctive perspective on the city.14

The central theme of The Big Donkey is unemployment and the damage it does to

the lives of a community, and in particular Joey (played by Tom Bell), the ‘Big Donkey’ of

the title. At the opening of the play Joey is laid off from his job in the shipyards, and the

play then proceeds through a series of scenes in which Joey, in an ever more desperate

and humiliating struggle to find work, ends up stealing a job from the friend who had

been the best-man at his wedding.

In confronting the issue of unemployment The Big Donkey was addressing a

particular contemporary concern for Northern Ireland. Unemployment had figured as a


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persistent problem for the province, with levels of joblessness historically higher than

elsewhere in the United Kingdom (Lee 412�413; O’Leary and McGarry 161�162; Simpson

81)- a fact that in part explains why the province has been (and still is) one of the least

affluent areas of the United Kingdom. The late Fifties and early Sixties-the contemporary

context for the play-was a period of particularly acute unemployment, with jobless totals

five times higher in Northern Ireland than the rest of the United Kingdom (Harkness 127;

Lawrence 101). Comparisons are drawn in the play between the contemporary experience

of unemployment and that of the Depression,15 with Joey’s father citing what happened

in the latter as a warning of what might happen again. The experience of the Depression

was indeed in many ways worse in absolute terms, but in relation to the rest of the

United Kingdom Northern Ireland’s experience of joblessness in the late Fifties and

early Sixties was comparatively more acute (Simpson 81). Whilst the play was praised

by the Unionist The Belfast Newsletter for the way in which it addressed ‘the terrible

malaise of Belfast unemployment’ (1st April 1963, p.6), it is marked by an absence-its

failure to confront the sectarian dimension to this malaise. In taking as its focus the effect

of unemployment upon shipyard workers The Big Donkey foregrounds the experience of

unemployment amongst the Protestant community. Unemployment amongst the

Catholic-Nationalist community in the province has historically been far worse (Simpson

100�107) � a situation the play fails to address in any form.

Across the play the tanker the Imperial Rose develops into a symbol of the plight of

the shipbuilding industry and the economy of the province. A strike is called in response

to the number of workers being laid off in the shipyards and action is taken to stop the

ship being launched. When Joey hears that the Imperial Rose has eventually been allowed

to take to sea he is angry, declaring that:

I would have left that ship on the slip. I would have left her to rot and rust until she was

nothing but a mass of red metal. I would have left her there until her plates were so

paper thin a man could punch a hole through them with his fist. I would then have

dressed that ship with Union Jacks and left her there as a monument to the industrial

stagnation of Northern Ireland.

Indeed, in its handling of the economic condition of the province, the play is about

more than a passing episode of high unemployment-it is suggestive of the decline of an

industry and a way of life. As Joey declares when his wife attempts to mollify him by telling

him things will get better:

You haven’t got it straight yet. Very few of the men who were paid off tonight will ever

work in the Queen’s Island again. It’s not just a casual lay-off for a month or two. The

whole face of shipping has changed. I doubt if Belfast will ever build the like of the

Southern Cross again. It’s a pity but there it is. And anybody that’s paid off this time will

stay out.16

With hindsight, what the play achieves is to highlight an issue that came to

dominate Unionist politics at a critical moment in the history of the province. High levels

of unemployment were a key factor in the crisis of the Unionist Party around this time,

creating an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction with the Party and O’Neill’s govern-

ment-an administration that had made economic development a priority. (The tensions

between the imperatives of development and tradition form the central theme of the two

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independent television adaptations of John D. Stewart’s plays-Danger, Men Working and

Boatman, do not tarry). On one hand this led to the rise in the popularity of the Northern

Ireland Labour Party (O’Leary and McGarry 162). On the other it encouraged the growth of

more extreme forms of Unionism such as that represented by Ian Paisley. As such the

question has been raised of the extent to which unemployment contributed to the

tensions that were to develop into the Troubles (Simpson).

Alun Owen-sectarian Liverpool (or Northern Ireland on the Mersey)

As a television dramatist Alun Owen’s broadcast work spanned the period 1959 to

1990. Much of his early work is set in Liverpool, the city where he grew up after moving

from Wales. The Ruffians and Progress to the Park transplant the politics and sectarianism of

Northern Ireland over the Irish Sea to Liverpool, locating them within the context of the

city’s large Irish immigrant population.

The Ruffians, shown as the The Sunday Night Play for 9th October 1960 and written

specifically for television. The plot centres on the arrival at the Green Harp pub of Martin

Brodie (played by Patrick Magee), an Irish Republican ‘gunman’ who has just escaped from

prison, and is seeking a hiding place for a few hours in the backroom of the pub whose

landlord was a former accomplice. His arrival coincides with the appearance of a gang of

young ‘ruffians’, who stumble upon the fact that Brodie is using the pub as a hiding place,

precipitating a confrontation between themselves and Brodie that results in the latter

killing one of them and in turn being shot dead by the police.

The play was produced and broadcast against the backdrop of the IRA campaign of

1956�62, and it is possible to relate it to a quite specific event-a break-out from Wakefield

prison in February 1959, organised not by the IRA but a Nationalist splinter group also

active during this period-Saor Uladh (‘Free Ulster’), in which one man escaped (Bowyer Bell

374).

In December 1956 the IRA announced a new campaign against partition. The

campaign was not a success, in part due to a lack of the kind of popular support the

organisation had received during the 1920s, and the actions of authorities on both sides of

the border (Bowyer Bell 341�397; Harkness 130�132). This sense of futility and

desperation runs throughout the play, coming to a head in Brodie’s confrontation with

his estranged wife, Mary, who wants nothing more to do with Brodie for herself or their

young son:

Mary: D’you think I want my children meeting a man whose only concern is killing. It’d be

a fine thing for a child to know he’d a killer for a father!

Brodie: A soldier for a father! A Republican soldier . . . fighting for Ireland!

Mary: For you it was always easier to kill for Ireland than to live for your wife and

family!

Brodie: It was to make Ireland a fit place for my wife and children to live in!

Mary: All that sort of talk doesn’t mean a thing to me, Martin, I’ve heard it all before.

You’ve been kidding me for years!

The Ruffians presents us with the first portrayal of a Republican gunman on British

television, although this figure had long been established in the cinema (Hill). Many of the

typical characteristics of the way this figure has been portrayed on film can be identified


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with Brodie, including his proclivity for violence, and the sense that he is an unstable,

unmanageable character. The play is typical in another respect as well though, in that it

fails to engage in any real depth with why Brodie has turned to violence, beyond the

cursory declaration he makes that he is ‘fighting for Ireland’. Furthermore, in the shooting

of Brodie by the police the play closes with an invocation of the way in which the

legitimate violence of the state is necessary to maintain the social order-a plot device that

Hill identifies as a typical feature of films on this theme (Hill 159). What the play does

achieve that is distinctive, is to take the Republican gunman out of his typical setting of

the North or South of Ireland, presenting us with the relatively unusual spectacle at this

point in time (including in cinematic representations), of this figure present on ‘the

mainland’. In this respect the play is prescient, with the presence of this figure on ‘the

other side’ of the Irish Sea coming, in the following decade with the extension of the IRA’s

campaign to England, to haunt the popular imagination.

The second of Owen’s plays to deal with the politics and sectarianism of Northern

Ireland via a Liverpool location is Progress to the Park. This had initially been a stage play,

first performed in London in May 1961, before being adapted by Owen for television and

shown as a ninety minute Theatre 625 production on BBC2 on 14th March 1965.17

In Progress to the Park Owen’s chief concern is with the way in which the politics of

sectarianism are sustained across the Irish Sea and come to shape the lives of a generation

of sons and daughters of immigrants. The play opens with a scene that foregrounds these

issues. Two men are putting up flags in preparation for the arrival of a Duchess who is

coming to open a new block of council flats. They discuss how their decorations won’t

compare with those of the Chinese community and one of the men asks, ‘Do they have

any Protestants and Catholics amongst them?’ to which the reply comes, ‘Don’t be so daft,

they’re all Buddhists’. This exchange is followed by a sequence in which a game of bowls in

the backyard of a pub sparks sectarian wrangling over the allocation of the new council

housing to Protestant and Catholic families, which degenerates into a street fight. The

focus of the play though is upon a group of four young men who have just arrived back in

Liverpool, three of whom are sailors. The group includes Bobby, whose parents are

Protestant Ulstermen, and the Welsh Liverpudlian Teifion-back from London for a few

days, who possesses strong autobiographical resonances, being a writer who has just sold

a few scripts for television.

The group continue the arguments of the older generation, rowing about the

allocation of council flats, but at the heart of the play stands the possibilities of a reignited

love affair between Bobby and Mag-the daughter of Catholic-Irish parents. At the moment

when it appears as if they are about to re-establish their feelings for one another, Bobby is

perturbed by Mag’s admission of sexual promiscuity and a row develops between them.

Teifion tries to reason with Bobby, pointing out how Mag had been waiting for him to

return from sea for five years, and reminding him that if he had not listened to his father

before they might already be together. But Bobby can only think in terms of his father’s

bigotry and what he has been told about Catholics. When one of his friends tells him,

‘You’re drunk, You’re talking like a bloomin’ Orangeman!’ he replies, ‘Well . . . what’s the

matter with that? I am one, aren’t I? And it’s a damned sight easier to be one and all’.

Bobby’s father appears and insists he joins a demonstration that is forming against the

allocation of the new council flats. We do not see what happens to Bobby, but the play

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closes with Teifion predicting that he is condemned to follow in his father’s shadow, and

that love will founder on the rocks of a sectarianism that has the strength to move across

generations and settings.

As McLoone has suggested, Progress to the Park presents the type of Romeo and

Juliet scenario, a tale of love across the barricades, that is ‘a hardy perennial of Northern

Ireland drama’ (McLoone ‘Drama out of a crisis’ 78). It is easy to see why such a scenario

should appeal to playwrights, with the dynamics of this situation providing ready material

for the dramatic currencies of love and hate, unity and conflict. As McLoone argues

though, the portrait Progress to the Park offers of a divided community is constrained by its

limited portrayal of the historico-political background to the sectarian tensions it presents

us with. This Romeo and Juliet scenario was to be deployed, in historically and politically

richer fashion, and to far great controversy, in Cemented with Love.

The Cemented with Love controversy

The plays I have discussed so far provoked no obvious controversy either within the

BBC or between the BBC and the Unionist government. However, in the case of Cemented

with Love, tensions between the BBC in Belfast and the Drama Department in London

around the type of material that might be broadcast about Northern Ireland were to come

very much to the fore.18

The BBC had played an instrumental role in developing the career of Cemented with

Love’s writer, Sam Thompson, a former shipyard worker, commissioning a series of radio

pieces about life in East Belfast and the shipyards that provided Thompson with a

springboard for his first stage play-Over the Bridge. This was to become something of a

landmark in the history of Northern Ireland theatre when staged in 1959, for the way it

confronted the sectarian tensions of the province. Over the Bridge was subsequently

produced in a television version by Granada in 1961, and with some controversy in a radio

version by the Northern Ireland Home Service, with the latter establishing Sam Thompson

as a controversial figure in the eyes of the BBC hierarchy in Belfast.

Cemented with Love was developed through close liaison between Thompson and

the Drama Department in London, and in particular the producer Peter Luke. Thompson

was encouraged to deliver a controversial piece, that Luke was anxious to intensify the

impact of still further by having it broadcast in an election year, (with a general election

taking place in October).19 Thompson was to achieve the type of impact Luke had hoped

for, by submitting a satire about a by-election in a fictional Ulster constituency, in which a

long-time Unionist MP and leading Orangeman, John Kerr, has been forced for ‘health

reasons’ (actually corrupt business activities), to resign his seat, and his son, William, has

returned from Canada to contest the election as his father’s successor. William wishes to

distance himself from the bigoted, sectarian politics of his father, and the gamut of corrupt

election tactics, including gerrymandering, personation and bribery his father has

previously employed to ensure his electoral successes. Thompson juxtaposes the attitudes

and tactics of the Unionist party with the equally bigoted views and corrupt practices

employed by the Nationalists. Both candidates are double crossed by insiders, but what

decides the election result is the revelation that the wife William Kerr has back in Canada is

Catholic. The shock this registers hands victory to the Nationalists.


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The BBC in Belfast had no idea about what Thompson was working on until

November 1964, a month prior to the intended broadcast of the play. A copy of the script

was then swiftly requested by the Northern Ireland Controller, Robert McCall, ‘for the

necessary checking’ in line, as McCall emphasised, with the Director General’s directive of

1959, that as I noted above, effectively provided the Controller of the Northern Ireland

region with the power to amend and suppress any material to do with the province.20

McCall soon wrote to the Director of Television, and the Drama Group, in London,

informing them that he had now read the script and:

. . . came to the conclusion that the play would involve the BBC in a considerable reaction

from the principal political parties here and from the two principal sections of the

community, and that it was a burlesque of everything that has happened in the forty

years of Northern Ireland’s existence. . . . In the present atmosphere where at least more

liberal thought is becoming apparent and the community seems to be becoming more

tolerant . . . this play is bound to be offensive.21

This reference to ‘more liberal thought’ can be read as a referring to O’Neill’s arrival

as Prime Minister of the province, and his attempts to foster better relations between the

province’s two communities and with the Republic of Ireland. McCall was deeply

uncomfortable with the BBC giving broadcast time to a play that stood so counter to

these developments. His memo continued:

It [the play] appears to be an insult, possibly calculated, to viewers in this part of the

world. In my opinion the consequences of it being done are likely to be disastrous, not

only as a reflection-which it is not-of the present state of the community but also to the

image of the BBC as an accurate reporter of what is going on.

This pressure from McCall resulted in the broadcast of the play being postponed. In

London, Peter Luke, as the play’s producer, was quick to respond to these developments,

issuing a series of memos calling for the play’s reinstatement,22 that serve to highlight the

gulf between the ‘progressive’ elements of the BBC in London, and the attitude of

conservatism and deference that marked the BBC in Belfast. Luke emphasised the

relevance of the play to contemporary Northern Ireland, asserting that ‘There is no play

worth writing about Northern Ireland today that does not concern religion or politics’.23

He refuted the claims by McCall that the election practices depicted in the play were

misleading, highlighting how ‘allegations of ‘Gerrymandering’ and ‘Personating’ in the

Northern Ireland Elections have been fully discussed and reported on last month in The

Observer and The New Statesman’.24 And he emphasised the timeliness of the play, noting

how ‘the subject of political chicanery in Northern Ireland has been much discussed lately:

on Viewpoint and This Week25 and in the weeklies and heavy Sundays’, and adding that,

‘Obviously, therefore, the play would suffer on this score if delayed indefinitely’.26 Luke

was drawing attention to some important concerns. The question of electoral practices,

and Unionist attempts to ensure their political domination of the province through their

manipulation, was one of the first issues around which the nascent Nationalist Civil Rights

movement was to coalesce, and was to feature as a key point of contention in the early

stages of the Troubles.

Luke went on to highlight the difference in attitude between different parts of the

Corporation by directly accusing the BBC in Northern Ireland of attempting to censor the

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play for political reasons, asserting that, ‘the hierarchy of BBC Northern Ireland are

notorious time-servers devoted to the Unionist cause. (The Unionist have been returned to

Westminster uninterrupted for the last 41 years.) I would therefore object most strongly to

submitting a script to the Controller, Northern Ireland for censorship’.27 Luke asserted

instead that the play would constitute a ‘legitimate piece of political caricature’.28 This

sense of Cemented with Love being a satire and a black comedy seems to be utterly

ignored by McCall, who appears above all to be concerned with assessing the play in

terms of its verisimilitude. This myopia could be taken as inimical of an inability to

countenance broadcasting anything that was critical of the political situation in the

province, even if this took the form of laughing at it. Luke also raised a further issue that

the press were also to pick up on, namely, that the play was to be broadcast on the

network, and that whether it should be shown should not simply be decided by objections

made from one region, with such an outcome being tantamount to allowing the Belfast

office to censor the output of the network generally.29 The press in Belfast and London

were quick to pick up on the controversy, and in May 1965 the play was broadcast to a

strongly positive audience reaction. By now though, Thompson, who had long been

suffering from a heart condition, had passed away.

The controversy around Cemented with Love highlights the sensitivities of the BBC in

Northern Ireland to any work that would draw attention to the nature of sectarian tensions

in the province, even in the ‘special case’ of drama. ‘Even’, because as I suggested above,

drama was, at least in the eyes of the Drama Department in London, given licence to

confront difficult contemporary concerns. In fact, the controversy around Cemented with

Love presents a first instance of drama about Northern Ireland being caught up in a debate

about censorship. With the onset of the Troubles drama was to become repeatedly and

regularly subject to various forms of censorship (Braun; Curtis; Moloney). In this respect

Cemented with Love was prescient of future developments, just as in the vision it presents

of the obduracy of sectarian hatred, the play highlights the tensions that were to surface

so dramatically a few years later with the onset of the Troubles.

Conclusion

The controversy around Cemented with Love made clear the difference in attitude

between the BBC in Belfast and the Drama Department in London over the type of

material that should be broadcast about the province, offering a stark illustration of the

way in which different sectors of the Corporation were responding to the changes of the

period. At the same time the controversy around Cemented with Love also serves to raise

the broader question of-if it had been left to the BBC in Northern Ireland to produce

television drama, would the other dramas I discuss here have been made, even if the

funding and resources had been available? Alun Owen’s two plays, in addressing sectarian

tension and the Republican cause, are likely to have been considered ‘inappropriate’ in

their highlighting of issues that the Unionist establishment wished to avoid drawing

attention to. It would be overstating the case to claim that any conscious decision was

taken by the BBC to use these plays of Owen’s as a way of exploring issues of sectarianism

and the politics of Northern Ireland without incurring the wrath of the Unionists, but, by

setting the plays in Liverpool these problems were circumvented and these issues could


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be explored in a much more open way than the controversy around Cemented with Love

suggests would have been possible had they been set in the province. In regard to Stewart

Love’s two plays, and in particularly The Big Donkey, the vision they present of a Northern

Ireland riven by industrial dispute, personal dissatisfaction and chronic unemployment, are

likely to have presented too negative a portrayal of the province for broadcast across the

United Kingdom, at a time when the Northern Ireland government was acutely sensitive as

to how the province was portrayed beyond its borders (Cathcart 170�202). Indeed the

Northern Ireland government was anxious to use any contributions the region could make

to network programming to present a positive profile of the province (Cathcart 174).

What these dramas achieve, in confronting the type of issues that would have

proved distasteful to the Unionist government, is to expose a number of the faultlines that

would come to erupt at the end of the decade with the onset of the Troubles. Indeed, with

the benefit of hindsight, these dramas can be taken as providing a series of parables on

the fate of this society. It was not to be until 1976 that the Northern Ireland region would

begin to produce its own television drama. By then the position of the BBC in the province

had changed to the extent that the Corporation could no longer ignore the reality of the

province’s divisions, and these dramas would reflect this, contributing a succession of

powerful engagements with the horror of what was taking place.

Notes

1. McLoone ‘Drama out of a crisis’ presents the only work to include a discussion of any of

these plays, focusing upon Owen’s Progress to the Park.

2. More specifically three dramas-see Pettitt (231�232). Granada produced a version of Sam

Thompson’s Over the Bridge in 1961. ATV produced a version of James D. Stewart’s

Danger, Men Working in 1961. Ulster Television produced Stewart’s Boatman, do not tarry

in 1968.

3. In regard to this material from the BBC’s Written Archive has been crucial, allowing one to

monitor the internal workings of the Corporation at this time.

4. ‘Northern Ireland Development’, 21.1.1964, T16/222/3. (This and similarly coded references

refer to files held at the BBC Written Archive, Caversham Park, UK.). Ulster Television in

fact went on to produce very little in the way of television drama, in part due to the cost

of this type of programming.

5. Minutes of the meetings of Advisory Council Northern Ireland, 23.4.1965; 24.6.1966;

19.11.968, R6/253/2.

6. Minutes of the meeting of Advisory Council Northern Ireland, 23.4.1965, R6/253/2; Memo

from Assistant Controller, Programme Services, Television to Director of Television

17.12.1965, T16/222/3.

7. Figures from 1962 show that out of all the BBC regions the Northern Ireland region made

on average the least expensive programmes per hour, costing on average £2200 per

hour. On average television drama was the most expensive type of programming to

produce, costing £7700 per hour. See untitled document, dated January�March 1962

Quarter, T16/230/5.

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8. Minutes of Northern Ireland Advisory Council, 24.6.1966, R6/253/2.

9. For the use of the term ‘serious’ in this context see Caughie Television Drama 3�6.

10. ‘Northern Ireland and Eire’-Director General’s Directive, 20.10.1959, NI20/15/1.

11. I say ‘in the main’ as Cemented with Love displays a more satirical tone.

12. It is almost certainly the case that the other dramas also display these particular features,

see Sexton 440�441.

13. Letter from Ronald Mason (Drama Producer) to Stewart Love, 22.1.1960, NI20/5/1.

14. The Big Donkey presents a rare example of a work that was first broadcast on television

before being adapted by the playwright for a version staged by the Ulster Group Theatre.

15. As they were in other plays, such as Sam Thompson’s Brush in Hand (first broadcast on the

BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1956), and Over the Bridge (first staged in 1960).

16. The Southern Cross was a twenty thousand tonne liner launched in August 1954.

17. Progress to the Park was followed by No Trams to Lime Street and A Little Winter Love on the

following two Sundays. It should be noted that Progress to the Park was not shown in

Northern Ireland, with BBC2 yet to have reached the province. (This does not dictate that

the Unionist establishment would simply have ignored the play had it been set in

Northern Ireland. The province’s profile across the United Kingdom and further afield was

a major concern at the time).

18. The nature of this controversy was that it produced a body of documents that do not exist

for the other plays discussed in this piece.

19. Letter from Peter Luke to Thompson, 10.8.1964, T5/968/1. Luke was himself a significant

figure in the development of television drama at this time, having been appointed in

1958 to the newly created role of Story Editor of ITV’s innovative Armchair Theatre by

Sydney Newman, with the role of finding new writers to provide contemporary plays.

20. Memo from Controller Northern Ireland to Head of Drama Group Television, 5.11.1964,

NI20/15/1. McCall was Controller Northern Ireland from 1956 to 1966. Along with his

predecessor Richard Marriott he has been identified as pursuing a policy of ‘reducing the

constraints’ upon the BBC’s activity in the province, see Cathcart 170. Despite this the

reaction he led to Cemented with Love emphasises the persisting fear at Broadcasting

House, Belfast of confronting sectarianism and offending the Unionist establishment.

21. Memo from Controller Northern Ireland to Director of Television, 20.11.1964, NI20/15/1.

22. Memos from Peter Luke to Head of Programme Development Television, 11.11.1964;

23.11.1964; and from Peter Luke to Head of Drama Group Television, 14.12.1964, T5/968/

1.

23. Memo from Peter Luke to Head of Programme Development Television, 11.11.1964, T5/

968/1.

24. Ibid.

25. Viewpoint was a BBC1 current affairs programme, This Week a Thames Television

production.

26. Memo from Peter Luke to Head of Drama Group Television, 14.12.1964, T5/968/1.


968/1.


968/1.

29. Memo from Peter Luke to Head of Drama Group Television, 14.12.1964, T5/968/1.


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