billie whitelaw

Two views of Liverpool

John Timbers

No Tram to Lime Street, with its celebrating sailors and a brief but warmly realistic love affair between one of them, Jack Hedley and the girl he picked up, Billie Whitelaw, drew some protests from local papers that the play gave a distorted view of Liverpool

But the other side of the picture was seen across the ITV Network when ABC’s Outside Broadcast Unit took TV cameras into Liverpool Cathedral for the first time to televise Holy Communion.

A recording of the service was later presented to the Cathedral

Bedford Studios

Accent on age

Although in ABC Television’s activities the accent has always been on youth, the elderly are not forgotten, and three Armchair Theatre playwrights last season reminded viewers that the root of the problem of dealing with the aged usually lies in ourselves

John Timbers

Alun Owen’s second play, After the Funeral, directed by William Kotcheff, centred round a fine old Welshman, Charles Carson and his grandson, Hugh David left, who wanted the old man to provide a genuine Welsh background for his home

Stanley Mann’s Fifth Floor People, directed by John Moxey, showed an old couple, Elizabeth Begley and J. G. Devlin, whose miserable existence in a dingy attic hung like a cloud over the future of their young neighbour downstairs, Billie Whitelaw

Bedford Studios

One of the most important playwrights of 1960 has been Clive Exton, whose first play under an ABC contract was Where I Live.

William Kotcheff directed this moving story of a housewife, Ruth Dunning, whose jealousy of her brother and sister-in-law, Lloyd Lamble and Madge Ryan, led her to destroy her own self-respect when she forced them to take their turn at housing her old father, Paul Curran

from TRANSDIFFUSION
1960 // THIS IS TRANSDIFFUSION