During the 1970s the BBC had several different one-off anthology drama series. BBC1's "Play for Today", which aired weekly, mostly consisted of dramas between 50 and 100 minutes long, generally specially written for television and dealing with some aspect of contemporary British life, although there were exceptions. "Play of the Month", as its title suggests, was broadcast monthly, and mostly consisted of adaptations for television of stage plays or novels; many of them dealt with historical subjects. "Play of the Week", which borrowed the title of a defunct ITV series, was a short-lived series which ran between 1976 and 1978; its content was similar to that of "Play for Today" but was broadcast on BBC2. (In the seventies the two channels, although both part of the overall BBC structure, had different identities). And "Second City Firsts", like its predecessor "Thirty Minute Theatre", also dealt with contemporary British life, but its offerings were much shorter, at around half and hour in length. The title derives from the fact that the plays were filmed at the BBC's studios in Birmingham, the UK's second-largest city, and were being shown on television for the first time. (Many were the first plays written by their authors).
"Second City Firsts" suffered badly from the BBC's short-sighted policy of wiping old videotapes; out of a total of 53 episodes, 25 are currently missing. Perhaps their very brevity made the Beeb feel that they were not worth keeping; out of more than a hundred "Plays for Today" made during the same period only seven are missing.
The Jamaican-born Mrs Jordan and her boyfriend, Jim, run a Birmingham nightclub called "Club Havana". Mrs Jordan's son David, from an earlier marriage, arrives in England to study at university, with ambitions of becoming a teacher. Much to his mother's annoyance, David becomes romantically involved with Terry, a barmaid working in his mother's club. Mrs Jordan essentially objects to Terry on three grounds, namely (i) that she is white, (ii) that she is working-class and (iii) that she is both white and working class. It is this third ground which is by far the strongest. Mrs Jordan might accept a middle-class white girl or a working-class black girl as her son's girlfriend; a working-class white girl, never.
In her eyes a good-looking, well-educated, cultured black man like David who dates an uneducated white girl like Terry is betraying his people by unconsciously accepting that "the lowest of them is still higher than the highest of us". David, naturally, does not see matters in the same way. He holds left-wing political views, and believes that black people and the white working-class are both victims of "the system". In his eyes, therefore, there is no contradiction involved in his dating a girl like Terry.
This play marked a first screen appearance for Julie Walters, later to become a leading light of the British acting profession. Julie has become known for her mastery of English regional accents- Liverpudlian ("Educating Rita"), Cockney ("Buster"), Geordie ("Billy Elliot") and Yorkshire ("Calendar Girls"). Here she gets to use her native Birmingham accent, and gives a splendid performance as Terry, a girl who knows that she has not made the most of her life, failing at school and ending up in a succession of dead-end jobs, and who sees David as her passport to something better. There are equally good performances from Mona Hammond as Mrs Jordan, who shows that you don't have to be white to be a racist snob, and from Don Warrington as David, caught between two formidable women.
"Club Havana" is an examination of complicated and tangled relationship between the politics of social class and those of race. Programmes about the politics of social class were common in seventies Britain, indeed probably commoner than they are today. Programmes about race relations were not as common then as they are today; like "A Hole in Babylon", a "Play for Today" from two years later, "Club Havana" is one of the exceptions. The author Barry Reckord (himself Jamaica-born) shows that it is possible to get a surprisingly complex amount of material into a thirty-minute slot. There can be much in little. 8/10.
"Second City Firsts" suffered badly from the BBC's short-sighted policy of wiping old videotapes; out of a total of 53 episodes, 25 are currently missing. Perhaps their very brevity made the Beeb feel that they were not worth keeping; out of more than a hundred "Plays for Today" made during the same period only seven are missing.
The Jamaican-born Mrs Jordan and her boyfriend, Jim, run a Birmingham nightclub called "Club Havana". Mrs Jordan's son David, from an earlier marriage, arrives in England to study at university, with ambitions of becoming a teacher. Much to his mother's annoyance, David becomes romantically involved with Terry, a barmaid working in his mother's club. Mrs Jordan essentially objects to Terry on three grounds, namely (i) that she is white, (ii) that she is working-class and (iii) that she is both white and working class. It is this third ground which is by far the strongest. Mrs Jordan might accept a middle-class white girl or a working-class black girl as her son's girlfriend; a working-class white girl, never.
In her eyes a good-looking, well-educated, cultured black man like David who dates an uneducated white girl like Terry is betraying his people by unconsciously accepting that "the lowest of them is still higher than the highest of us". David, naturally, does not see matters in the same way. He holds left-wing political views, and believes that black people and the white working-class are both victims of "the system". In his eyes, therefore, there is no contradiction involved in his dating a girl like Terry.
This play marked a first screen appearance for Julie Walters, later to become a leading light of the British acting profession. Julie has become known for her mastery of English regional accents- Liverpudlian ("Educating Rita"), Cockney ("Buster"), Geordie ("Billy Elliot") and Yorkshire ("Calendar Girls"). Here she gets to use her native Birmingham accent, and gives a splendid performance as Terry, a girl who knows that she has not made the most of her life, failing at school and ending up in a succession of dead-end jobs, and who sees David as her passport to something better. There are equally good performances from Mona Hammond as Mrs Jordan, who shows that you don't have to be white to be a racist snob, and from Don Warrington as David, caught between two formidable women.
"Club Havana" is an examination of complicated and tangled relationship between the politics of social class and those of race. Programmes about the politics of social class were common in seventies Britain, indeed probably commoner than they are today. Programmes about race relations were not as common then as they are today; like "A Hole in Babylon", a "Play for Today" from two years later, "Club Havana" is one of the exceptions. The author Barry Reckord (himself Jamaica-born) shows that it is possible to get a surprisingly complex amount of material into a thirty-minute slot. There can be much in little. 8/10.
