User Reviews

'Up the Junction' was the fourth episode of The Wednesday Play directed by Ken Loach, with a screenplay written by Nell Dunn (reportedly with Loach's help), based on her own short story collection. Peter Collinson's later film version ended up becoming better known than this television Loach prototype, but that doesn't mean that this isn't worth watching.

Dunn, who was born to an upper class family, was inspired to write Up the Junction after moving to Battersea, making friends, and working in a sweet factory. The television version is an exercise in social realism and grittiness, with a botched back-street abortion, death in a motorcycle accident, and imprisonment for car theft, of the sort that one can easily imagining appealing to Loach (indeed, he would later adopt Dunn's novel Poor Cow as his first feature film). But whereas much of Loach's work has an often furious message about social injustice underlying it, there is an observational, matter-of-fact approach to 'Up the Junction' that probably stems from Dunn's status as an outsider relative to the working classes she wrote about. It is never patronising or condescending, it simply follows the lives of the main characters; the drama rises out of the trial and tribulations of their everyday lives.

The play concerns three young women living in North Battersea and Clapham, namely Rube, Sylvie and Eileen, as they meet three young men, Terry, Ron and Dave. They work, they drink, they dance, and in Dave's case, they cheat on their spouses and steal. They also get pregnant, have arguments, and endure tragedy. The play was quite controversial at the time, mainly due to the abortion scenes and some of the language used; television critics of the time often disliked being presented with depictions of real life hardship, or to be more accurate, the hardships of real life. If 'Up the Junction' lacks the usual single angry social message underpinning many of Loach's films, it nevertheless reportedly managed to contribute to the debate leading to the Abortion Act 1967, simply by showing its audience the reality of what back-street abortions involved and how dangerous they can be: it's positively harrowing during the abortion scene when the camera focuses on Rube's screaming, sweat-drenched face.

In contrast to Collinson's later theatrical version, Loach's 'Up the Junction' occasionally includes fake documentary elements such as an interview with a doctor that plays over scenes of the three women heading to see Winnie the abortionist. Most strikingly of all, there's a segment seemingly unconnected to the rest of the story, featuring George Sewell (who also appeared in Loach's '3 Clear Sundays', broadcast earlier the same year) as Barny the Tallyman, who breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to camera about his "profession". The docu-drama approach is not unusual in Loach's BBC work during the 1960s and brought its own minor controversy; for the most part however, the episode isn't shot like a documentary, with Loach again using multiple camera shots and techniques to bring a dynamic feel to the production. He blends studio filming, stock footage and location work to good effect, all accompanied by a contemporary pop soundtrack, and he also proves adept at handling action sequences, as the motorcycle crash scene demonstrates.

There's a very good cast, especially the three leads, with Carol White playing Sylvie and Geraldine Sherman as Rube, whilst Vickery Turner plays Eileen. Michael Standing plays Terry, Ray Barron plays Ron, and Tony Selby, who also appears in '3 Clear Sundays', as Dave. 'Up the Junction' lacks the bite and the bile of Loach's other work from this time, but then that reflects the scriptwriter he was working with as much as anything else. It doesn't need a pointed social message; like Dunn's original anthology, it just needs to document life, for better or for worse, and let it speak for itself. And it does: the final ten minutes is composed of short scenes that seem to give the message that life goes on regardless of what trials and tribulations it throws at us, making this - in the end - one of the most optimistic pieces of television that Loach ever directed.

Daughter of a baronet and granddaughter of an earl, Nell Dunn was an unlikely member of the "kitchen sink" literary movement of the fifties and sixties, which sought to chronicle contemporary working-class life. Despite her aristocratic background, however, she went to live in the working-class London district of Battersea, where she worked for a time in a sweet factory. In 1963 she published "Up the Junction", a collection of short stories depicting life in the area. The title has a double meaning; it is a reference to the railway station Clapham Junction which, despite its name, lies in Battersea rather than the neighbouring suburb of Clapham, but in British, specifically London, slang, the phrase "to be up the junction" means to be in deep trouble. (To those who, like me, were teenagers in the seventies and eighties, the phrase is indelibly associated with the 1979 song by the pop group Squeeze. That song, which also deals with working-class London life, was probably inspired by the film).

This television play, broadcast as part of the BBC's drama series "The Wednesday Play", was based upon Dunn's stories. (The same stories also served as the basis for a feature film from three years later, but as I have never seen that I am not in a position to make comparisons). It follows the fortunes of three young female factory workers from Battersea, Ruby, Sylvie and Eileen, and their boyfriends, Terry, Ron and Dave. None of these relationships works out happily. Ruby gets pregnant and has an illegal abortion, and her boyfriend Terry later dies in a motorbike accident. Sylvie and Ron get married, but the marriage proves to be an unhappy one. It turns out that Dave is already married, but Eileen stands by him, even after he is jailed for theft.

These stories are not told in a straightforward way. Dunn, who adapted her stories for the screenplay, and director Ken Loach make much use of documentary elements, especially mock-interviews, both of people in the street and of "talking heads", such as a "tallyman" who discusses his work as a debt collector and a doctor who calls for reform of Britain's abortion laws. The sixties saw a big increase win the number of people buying goods on credit, which led to a corresponding rise in debt problems; the period also saw a campaign for the legalisation of abortion in Britain, something finally achieved in 1967, and Dunn and Loach wanted to contribute to this debate. When the play was first broadcast in November 1965, these elements led many viewers to believe that they were watching either a factual documentary or a continuation of the evening news, which had been shown immediately before, but the story told is entirely fictitious and all the supposed "interviewees" were actors.

The best-known cast member is probably Carol White, who plays Sylvie. This was one of three films directed by Loach which brought her to public notice, the others being "Cathy Come Home", another Wednesday Play from 1966 written by Dunn's husband Jeremy Sandford, and the feature film "Poor Cow" from 1967, also based on a story by Dunn. This concentration upon social-realist drama won White the nickname "the Battersea Bardot", although she herself was from Hammersmith, on the opposite bank of the Thames. In the mid and late sixties she was hotly tipped as the next big star of the British cinema, although she never really achieved stardom, largely because of problems with drug and substance abuse.

The play is not as openly political as many of Loach's later dramas, except perhaps insofar as it concerns abortion. Nevertheless, it was highly controversial when first broadcast and inspired a record number of complaints, including (perhaps inevitably) one from the indefatigable Mary Whitehouse. Viewers in the mid sixties were not used to so much bad language or such frank discussion of sexual issues, either on television or in the cinema. Today the play has largely lost its power to shock, profane language (some of it much worse than anything heard here) and sexual frankness having become commonplace in the media. The semi-documentary structure, something new and unexpected in 1965, has now become mainstream. Yet, if it has lost its power to shock, it retains its power to hold our attention and to tell its story of working-class life to a new audience nearly sixty years after it first appeared. 7/10.