Sex, money and hackers? The groundbreaking drama series Play for Today | television

IIn March 1977, BBC One showed Spend, Spend, Spend, a singles drama about a woman whose husband wins at Pools, a weekly football score-guessing competition. This week, Channel 5 will show Big Winners, a one-off play about the National Lottery that turns a couple into millionaires.

The parallelism, whether intentional or not, is appropriate. Jack Rosenthal’s Spend, Spend, Spend, which won a BAFTA, was one of the notable successes of Play for Today, a prime-time drama series that ran on the main BBC channel from 1970 to 1984. Big Winners, written by Martha Watson Allpress, is included in a revival of the four-play Play for Today series.

With only three channels available to watch (until the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982), the original BBC series reached a multi-million audience. It is often remembered as a place for new television writers and developed many of them – including David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff – but it also drew on established television dramatists (Denis Potter, Alan Plater), celebrated playwrights (John Osborne) and novelists (Fay Weldon, Ian McEwan, William Trevor). From the opening sample, the new show showcases newer writing talent.

Under the leadership of Program Director Ben Frew, 5 has turned to reruns of programs from the last century to attract an older audience perhaps neglected by the top four British terrestrial channels. New releases include All Creatures Great and Small, Dalglish, and Annika’s Challenge. But while those revivals seemed very similar to the originals, Play for Today’s relationship with its predecessor is more complicated. In addition to the spend, spend, spend/big winners, each of the 2025 quartets has a twin in the previous group.

The four new dramas begin on November 13 with Never Too Late, written by Simon Warren and Lydia Marchant, in which Anita Dobson plays a widow who faces a flirtation at a rest home. It’s a more mature version of the plot of Colin Welland’s 1973 play “Play for Today, Kisses at Fifty.” David Whitehouse’s new drama “A Knock at the Door,” which depicts Alan Davies as a “national treasure” visited by an accusatory young man, has a tense premise similar to Barry Keefe’s 1977 film “Gotcha,” A student locks the physical education teacher’s bully in a closet and threatens to set him on fire. And Special Measures by Lee Thompson, with Jessica Plummer as a teacher coping with intense pressures on the day of an Ofsted inspection, may be Headteacher John Challen’s Granddaughter (1974), as the traditional headteacher tries to adapt to a changing education system.

If not intentional shading, these similarities likely arose because any shortlist of mainstream viewers’ concerns, then and now, includes money, sex, violence, and education. There is a big difference between yesterday’s game and today’s game. The first version was so politically ideological that right-wingers derisively called it “plays for the Trotskyists.” Several of the most memorable editions – Jim Allen’s The Spongers (1978) and The United Kingdom (1981), Trevor Griffiths’ All Good Men (1974) and Country (1981) – were overt socialist critiques of British society.

Fans of the original series will crave plays about asylum seekers or a group of Tory voters who defect from Reform. But the days of such narratives on prime-time television may be over. The four new plays focus on the affluent middle classes and feel fundamentally apolitical. This reflects a broader change in culture; Political drama leans more toward fairness, as exemplified by the work of James Graham.

Two of the four new plays – “The Big Winners” and “It’s Never Too Late” – count women among their writers, a proportion that differs dramatically from the original. The writers of Playing for Today were predominantly male, although some women – Paula Milne, Julia Jones, and Carol Bunyan, among others – made significant contributions when allowed to do so.

Another potential departure from the BBC series is the possibility that this will not focus solely on individual plays. Sure enough, the opener, Never Too Late, ends with a plot twist, taking the story to a new location, one that could lead to a six-part comedy-drama at the very least. Viewers may be drawn to it, given the actors attached to it: Dobson, Nigel Havers, and Tracey-Anne Oberman, the latter of whom has a small role with potential for expansion. Big Winners and Special Measures also have series potential, although they will clash with the memory of ITV’s At Home with the Braithwaites (2000-03) and BBC’s Waterloo Road (2006-15, 21-present). Maybe, though, Frow wants to add versions of those to his list of nostalgic old shows.

The original plays of the day certainly included some performances that endured longer lives. Among the 300 or so sequels were John Mortimer’s tale of a crumbling lawyer, Rumpole of the Bailey (1975); Alan Bleasdale’s tale of Liverpool’s road classes, The Black Stuff (1980), and his teenage drama Scully’s New Year’s Eve (1978); Philip Martin’s Gangsters (1975), which features the civil war between Brummie thugs; And the headmaster of Challen School, an early warning of the danger of educational inequality in Britain. They all became soaps, with Rumpole running for seven seasons, although shown on ITV rather than the BBC.

Curiously, two plays of the day later became West End musicals: Spend, Spend, Spend and Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), both by Rosenthal, the slot giant who also wrote the poignant wartime piece The Evacues. And the most revered play of all time to this day – Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (1977) – began as a play, as did another of Lee’s contributions to the series, which was almost as popular: Nuts in May (1976).

If the goal is for today’s four new plays to remain one-off dramas, it would be blatantly at odds with mainstream television culture. Streamers want “long-form content” to maintain subscriptions and feed multi-season box sets on websites. Even a four-part series, like Adolescent, was considered alarmingly short by Netflix until that quartet of episodes made such a stunning impact.

The original Play of the Day was impressive in its scale: 20 or so dramas a year for 14 years. With this volume, it was inevitable that the “right to fail” principle – a common concept in the culture of the time – would be repeatedly called for. This was the way television worked in those times of financial and artistic freedom, and it was important: if every serial producer had been asked in advance to select the six out of every twenty annual plays that were really good, the plays that are appreciated now would never have been shown, because the successful results were often unexpected.

However, if Frew announces that he will make 20 one-man plays in 2025 or 26, his bosses will send him to the doctor. The four we have are off to an impressive start: in particular, the acting and writing in Never Too Late are fun, and A Knock at the Door has a serious premise.

Given that Series 5 originated as an 1980s exile television series, it is not surprising that two of the main characters are octogenarians and two are septuagenarians. This is a demographically reasonable and commendable stance against ageism – although if it persists it may become a liability. The cinematography is also frank about the reality of some older bodies. Davies in A Knock At The Door and Michael Fenton Stevens in Never Too Late boldly remove their shirts, the camera angles spare nothing, and the final scene leads to a great line.

As long as many of the scripts are not pilots in disguise, the revival of a series that was once a symbol of the ambition and confidence of British TV drama is welcome.