Play for Today: Speech Day

I had probably best start by apologising for this blog post in advance, since it’s partly driven by sheer irritation at the plot summary on IMDB and so I’m feeling a bit ratty. The plot summary is ‘Three underachievers have fun at a school speech day’. Honestly, they’d have been better leaving it blank because the only way you could come up with that as a summary of this play is by either writing it without watching it or volitionally missing the entire point of the play. What this play actually is is a play about a school speech day in which the real point is society and the class system. I’m also going to have one of my discursions away from the subject of the blog post onto Jerusalem, driven by irritation at the Wikipedia page.

After an easily-missed tiny scene in which a family are eating, we are straight on to the National Anthem. I’m not making this up.

Actually the societal and class subject of the play is highlighted in the easily-missed prologue by the father (with a Yorkshire accent) quoting Cromwell telling his men that they could pray if they liked but should keep their powder dry. And thus we are straight into class struggle, civil war and crown vs parliament. I’m just sorry he didn’t use the Cromwell quote about keeping your bowels open. I would have done.

Obviously moving straight from this to the National Anthem is making a point. The reason we hear it is the mum of the family is ironing her son’s uniform ready for the school speech day the next day and the National Anthem is playing during close down on the BBC. We then see the outside of the building and the camera pans over the block of flats, which happens to be the famous Hyde Park flats (pictured) in Sheffield. It was one of two absolute behemoths of social housing in Sheffield, but has now been demolished. The other one, Park Hill, is still standing and English Heritage did the absolutely unthinkable and listed it, making it the biggest listed building in Europe, to the visible fury of the city council who had spent years running it down ready to demolish it. If you fancy it I highly recommend a documentary called Streets in the Sky, all about Park Hill. In fact if you fancy a trip to Sheffield, Park Hill is a seriously sexy building which leaves its mark on everyone who encounters it and I highly recommend a visit. Anyway, the anthem praying God to save the monarch is playing in social housing at the other end of the social scale.

Given that this is a TV blog you lucky people get the behind the scenes making of the shut down video that I have found down the back of the internet, with a definitely pre-CGI spinning globe.

Of course the significance of Sheffield as the setting is that it is the Steel City and we see scenes of work in the steelworks. Another point about class.

I have to say that I think the school is a rather odd one, probably deliberately so for the purpose of the play, in that it is clearly a normal comprehensive school, attended by all sorts of pupils, some of whom are largely uneducatable, others can’t afford the uniform, and so on. Yet it obviously has aspirations to be a much posher sort of school. This disjoint is largely the point of the play: (most of) the staff go along with this fantasy which is almost based in unreality. The kids are expected to be in uniform with white shirts for the day, despite some of them not having these things. The mayor is the one presenting the prizes, despite the fact that he himself also worked in the steelworks for years. The vice chancellor of a university is giving a speech, and let me tell you very few if any of those kids would ever have seen the inside of a university except as employee in the 1970s. Finally most of the teacher wear academic gowns and hoods for the speech day. I don’t think you needed to have a degree to be a teacher at this time, and I’m certain gowns and hoods would not have been the norm. The school is largely a fantasy. This is not a play about having fun, it’s about who benefits and how the structures of society and state aren’t quite real.

The boy who is mainly the protagonist is the one who lives in the modern flat and goes to see his grandfather who still lives in a virtually derelict terraced house, and who is coded as the voice of reality in this situation. He doesn’t believe that the future will be positive, is convinced that the social strata will never change, and so on.

One of the boys gets thrown out of the speech day for laughing and goes to talk to the school gardener, who is another voice of reason in this play. During this sequence the entire school sings the unofficial anthem of England, Jerusalem, by England’s maddest poet William Blake, and set to music and gifted to the suffragette movement by Parry. During this we see further industrial scenes appropriate to the words of the hymn about satanic mills.

So this is the bit where I leave the subject of the blog post far behind, because I made the mistake of going on to Wikipedia to check the idea I’ve got in my head that Blake’s dark satanic mills can be understood to be a reference to the Church of England.

I found that the Wikipedia page for Jerusalem is dominated by folklorist A W Smith’s opinion that the hymn is about a mythical visit to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea alone, rather than the other mythical visit of Jesus to Britain with Joseph, and I’m afraid this opinion has set me off. It is clearly arrant nonsense, and the poem clearly refers to the mythical visit of the Divine Child to this island. I can tell you this for a fact because of the way the words go: ‘And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?’ etc. This cannot refer to Joseph of Arimathea alone because there is no tradition of Christianity in which he is called the Lamb of God, also his face cannot be described as divine. The only person in Christianity who both had human feet to walk on England’s mountains, is also divine and referred to as the Lamb of God is Jesus himself. I’m not about to get involved in a Wikipedia war, and I’m not one of those people who look down on Wikipedia, but I think that page has gone very wrong. I also didn’t find confirmation for my idea that the mills were intended to refer to the Church of England.

Back to the subject of the blog post, I have to say that this is an excellent drama. Every character is drawm in detail and comes out loud and clear. The schoolboys are just the right degree of revolting and the contrast with the utter fantasy of the school is perfectly drawn.

In fact while I do try to be critical I’m so desperate for a criticism of this play that the only one I can think of is that the school sings Jerusalem slightly too fast in my opinion. You may take this as a marker of what quality this play is.

But wait, before you go, you all knew I was going to go there.

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