The Wednesday Play

A CBC production first broadcast by CBC under Festival, 23 October 1963.

Fable is a British television play, shown on 27 January 1965 as an episode of The Wednesday Play series on BBC 1. Written by John Hopkins, the play is set in a parallel totalitarian Britain where those in authority are black people, and white people are their social underdogs - a reversal of the situation in contemporary apartheid South Africa. It was directed by Christopher Morahan and produced by James MacTaggart.

A play by John Hopkins that takes an original look at the eternal triangle.

The story is of a young man, Danny Lee, imprisoned for six months after attacking a police officer. In prison he is talked into attacking a warden by two more experienced criminals so that they can come to the warden's rescue and obtain an early release. The warden dies, and the protagonist is sentenced to death by hanging. Three clear Sundays refers to the time that must elapse between a sentence to death and execution. The writer, James O'Connor, had previously been sentenced to death but was given a reprieve.

This episode is about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Episode writer Dennis Potter mixed biographical drama with a psychological profile to explore the roots of Dodgson's creativity. Dodgson tells stories to ten-year-old Alice Liddell. What follows are recreations of scenes adapted from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, designed to resemble the Sir John Tenniel illustrations.

A study of schizophrenia. Kate, a young woman, is denied any expression of her own individuality by her repressive, suburban family. But the psychiatric methods of the time choose to ignore this important factor of mental illness.

Following the Devlin Report, a dispute about decasualisation in the Liverpool docks leads to a strike. Six weeks into the dispute, the Strike Committee reject the employers' demands for a return to work pending negotiations, and decide to escalate the industrial action into the political - the workers occupy the docks and commence to run the operation themselves. This occupation, though violently suppressed by the state and the owners, is nonetheless conceived as a gesture of possibility to the nation's workers; Jack Regan, the chief organiser of the occupation, envisages a "big flame" of political feeling igniting across the land.