In March 1977, BBC One screened Spend, Spend, Spend, a single drama about a woman whose husband won the pools, a weekly competition to guess football scores. This week, Channel 5 will show Big Winners, a one-off play about the national lottery turning a couple into multimillionaires.<\/p>\n
The parallel, intentional or not, is appropriate. Jack Rosenthal\u2019s Spend, Spend, Spend, which won a Bafta, was one of the standout successes of Play for Today, the prime-time drama strand that ran on the BBC\u2019s main channel from 1970 to 1984. Big Winners, written by Martha Watson Allpress, is included in 5\u2019s four-play revival of the Play for Today franchise.<\/p>\n
With only three channels available for watching (until the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982), the original BBC series reached many millions. It is often remembered as a slot for new TV writers and did develop several \u2013 including David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff \u2013 but also drew on established TV dramatists (Dennis Potter, Alan Plater), famous stage playwrights (John Osborne) and novelists (Fay Weldon, Ian McEwan, William Trevor). From its opening sample, the new run showcases newer writing talent.<\/p>\n
Under Ben Frow, its director of programming, 5 has taken to rebooting shows from the last century to court an older audience that the first four British terrestrial channels may be neglecting. Remakes include All Creatures Great and Small, Dalgliesh and Challenge Anneka. But while those revivals looked very similar to the originals, Play for Today\u2019s relationship with its ancestor is more complicated. As well as Spend, Spend, Spend\/Big Winners, each of the 2025 quartet has a twin in the earlier collection.<\/p>\n
A joy \u2026 Anita Dobson and Nigel Havers in Never Too Late. Photograph: Dan Fearon Designs\/5\/Vertigo Films<\/p>\n
The four new dramas start on 13 November with Never Too Late, written by Simon Warne and Lydia Marchant, in which Anita Dobson plays a widow encountering flirtation in a rest home. It\u2019s a more mature version of the plot of Colin Welland\u2019s 1973 Play for Today, Kisses at Fifty. David Whitehouse\u2019s new drama A Knock at the Door, which casts Alan Davies as a \u201cnational treasure\u201d visited by a young, accusatory male, has a tense premise similar to Barrie Keeffe\u2019s 1977 Gotcha , in which a pupil locks his bully of a PE teacher in a cupboard and threatens to set him on fire. And Special Measures by Lee Thompson, with Jessica Plummer as a teacher juggling extreme pressures on the day of an Ofsted inspection, might be a grandchild of John Challen\u2019s Headmaster (1974), in which a traditional head tries to adapt to a changing education system.<\/p>\n
If not a deliberate shadowing, these parallels most likely arose because any shortlist of mainstream viewer concerns, then and now, includes money, sex, violence and education. And there is a significant difference between yesterday\u2019s Play for Today and today\u2019s. The first version was politically ideological to the degree that rightwingers satirically called it \u201cPlays for Trotskyists\u201d. Several memorable editions \u2013 Jim Allen\u2019s The Spongers (1978) and United Kingdom (1981), and Trevor Griffiths\u2019 All Good Men (1974) and Country (1981) \u2013 were explicitly socialist critiques of British society.<\/p>\n
Admirers of the original series will crave plays about asylum seekers or a group of Tory voters who have defected to Reform. But the days of such narratives in peak-time TV are probably over. The four new plays focus on the well-heeled middle classes and feel essentially apolitical. That reflects a broader change in culture; political drama tends more towards even-handedness, as represented by the work of James Graham.<\/p>\n
Cash grab! \u2026 Paul Copley and Sue Johnston in Big Winners. Photograph: Joel Pammenter & Karl Livingstone\/5 Broadcasting\/LA Productions<\/p>\n
Two of the four new plays \u2013 Big Winners and Never Too Late \u2013 count women among their writers, a proportion that differs significantly from the original. Play for Today\u2019s writers were predominantly male, although some women \u2013 Paula Milne, Julia Jones, Carol Bunyan, among others \u2013 made significant contributions when allowed.<\/p>\n
Another potential departure from the BBC series is the possibility that this is not focused solely on one-off plays. Certainly, the opener, Never Too Late, ends with a plot twist, moving the story to a new location, that could seed a six-part comedy-drama at the very least. And viewers might be lured to it, given the cast attached: Dobson, Nigel Havers and Tracy-Ann Oberman, the latter in a small role with potential to expand. Big Winners and Special Measures also have series potential, although they would bump into the memory of ITV\u2019s At Home With the Braithwaites (2000-03) and the BBC\u2019s Waterloo Road (2006-15, 21-present). Perhaps, though, Frow wants to add versions of those to his nostalgic roster of old hit shows.<\/p>\n
The original Plays for Today certainly featured a few shows that went on to have a longer life. Among the 300 or more instalments were John Mortimer\u2019s story of a shabby barrister, Rumpole of the Bailey (1975); Alan Bleasdale\u2019s story of Liverpudlian road-layers, The Black Stuff (1980), and his teenage drama Scully\u2019s New Year\u2019s Eve (1978); Philip Martin\u2019s Gangsters (1975), featuring civil war between Brummie thugs; and Challen\u2019s Headmaster, an early warning of Britain\u2019s dangerous educational inequalities. All became series, with Rumpole running to seven seasons, although on ITV rather than the BBC.<\/p>\n
Curiously, two Plays for Today later became West End musicals: Spend, Spend, Spend and Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), both by Rosenthal, a colossus of the slot who also wrote the poignant wartime piece The Evacuees. And the most revered Play for Today ever \u2013 Mike Leigh\u2019s Abigail\u2019s Party (1977) \u2013 started as a stage play, as did another Leigh contribution to the series, almost as popular: Nuts in May (1976).<\/p>\n
Juggling it all \u2026 Austin Haynes and Jessica Plummer in Special Measures. Photograph: Joel Pammenter & Karl Livingstone\/5 Broadcasting Limited\/LA Productions<\/p>\n
If the aim is for the four new Plays for Today to remain as one-shot dramas, it would be daringly contrary to the prevailing TV culture. Streamers want \u201clong content\u201d to sustain subscriptions and feed multi-season box sets on websites. Even a four-parter, such as Adolescence, was considered worryingly short by Netflix until that quartet of episodes made such a spectacular impact.<\/p>\n
The original Play for Today was remarkable for its scale: 20 or so dramas a year for 14 years. Inevitably, with that volume, the \u201cright to fail\u201d \u2013 a popular concept in culture at the time \u2013 was frequently claimed. This was how TV worked in those times of financial and artistic freedom, and it was important: if each series producer had been asked in advance to pick the six from each annual 20 that were really good, plays now feted would never have been made, because hits are often unpredictable.<\/p>\n
Menacing \u2026 Nikki Amuka-Bird in A Knock at the Door. Photograph: Joseph Conway\/Vertigo Films\/Channel 5<\/p>\n
However, if Frow announced he was making 20 single plays in 2025 or 26, his bosses would send him to a doctor. The four we have are an impressive start: in particular, the acting and writing in Never Too Late are a joy, and A Knock at the Door has a menacing premise.<\/p>\n
Given 5\u2019s positioning as 1980s TV in exile, it\u2019s unsurprising that two of the main characters are octogenarians and two septuagenarians. This is demographically sensible and a commendable stand against ageism \u2013 although, if it persists, it may become a limitation. Cinematography is also frank about the realities of some older bodies. Davies in A Knock At The Door and Michael Fenton Stevens in Never Too Late boldly take their shirts off, camera angles sparing nothing, the latter scene leading to a lovely punchline.<\/p>\n
As long as not too many of the scripts are pilots in disguise, the revival of a strand that was once a symbol of British television drama\u2019s ambition and confidence feels welcome.<\/p>\n
Play for Today: Never Too Late airs on Channel 5 on 13 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March 1977, BBC One screened Spend, Spend, Spend, a single drama about a woman whose husband won…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-131691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}