As with any legend, there is more than a  grain  of truth to this view of the past, but also a considerable amount of misty idealization. The Wednesday  Play arose, in fact, not as a benign gift of liberal  broadcasters but as a desperate attempt by the head of BBC-TV drama, Sydney Newman, to save the single play from being axed from the BBC's premier channel (BBC  1), due to poor ratings. Newman, who had been impressed by Scots director James MacTaggart's work on the earlier experimental play strands Storyboard (1961) and Teletale (1963), hired him as  producer of the new  BBC 1 play slot, handing him a brief to commission a  popu­lar series of plays.

     Newman's stipulations were significant. He wanted a play slot that would be relevant to the lives of a mainstream popular audience and that would reflect the "turning points" of society: the relationship between a son and a father; a parishioner and his priest; a trade union official and his boss. He also wanted plays that would be fast-not only telling an exciting narrative sparsely, rather than building up mood, but also hooking the audience's attention by way of an intriguing pretitles "teaser" sequence. Borrowing from the techniques of the popular series that was threatening to displace the single play in the schedules, Newman wanted the slot to have a recognizable "house style," so that audiences knew that if they tuned in each week, they could expect to see a certain type of show. Finally, mimicking his own success in commercial television several years earlier (on ITV's Armchair Theatre slot), Newman prioritized a search for material that would more accurately reflect the experience of the audience, by instituting a system of story editors whose task it was to bring fresh new writers to television.

     MacTaggart absorbed Newman's guidelines but translated them in his own way, not least by appointing as his story editor a young writer and actor with whom he had worked on Teletale: Roger Smith. It was with Smith's help that the play slot soon came to acquire the reputation for "controversy" and "outrage" that would mark its subsequent history. The script commissioned for MacTaggart and Smith's very first Wednesday Play outing in January 1965 set the seal for what would follow. Written by a convicted murderer (James O'Con­nor) and depicting the cynical progress of a villain from gangster to baronet, A Tap on the Shoulder marked a conscious break with the conventions of the polite, "well-made" TV play.

     Its determination to break new ground came to characterize The Wednesday Play ethos as a whole-from the first crucial season in 1965 to the last in 1970. The slot also acted as a showcase for new talent, in keeping with Newman's original vision. Many well-known practitioners gained their first big break on The Wednesday Play, including Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd (recruited by Smith as assistant story editors), Dennis Potter, and Ken Loach, director of A Tap, whose contributions to the slot eventually numbered some of the most seminal TV plays of the 1960s: the "docudramas" Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966).

     As The Wednesday Play developed, shifts in emphasis, however, took place. Under the first season of MacTaggart and Smith, the plays were much more "expressionist" in style and concerned with exploiting the resources of the television studio, as the earlier Teletale had done. It is significant that the slot's first nonnaturalistic dramas, from such writers as Dennis Potter and David Mercer, were commissioned at this time. In later seasons, however, after MacTaggart and Smith had departed and Tony Garnett was named chief story editor, many of the plays became noticeably more "documentary," reflecting a determination to transcend the confines of the TV studio in order to record more faithfully the rapidly changing character of life in 1960s Britain. Having gained access to lightweight 16-millimeter filming equipment, Garnett and his collaborator Loach abandoned the studio for location shooting, and their form of filmed documentary realism became one of the most familiar hallmarks of The Wednesday Play.

     The Loach-Garnett documentary style also became quite controversial and was criticized both outside and within the BBC for unacceptably blurring the distinctions between fictional drama and factual current affairs. Meanwhile, the play slot itself came under attack from some quarters for its general "filth" and "squalor." "Clean-Up TV" campaigner Mary White­ house hailed it for what she saw as its gross sexual immorality, although the effect of her attacks was simply to boost publicity and the all-important ratings. Audiences climbed from I million to 8 million, as people tuned in each week to see for themselves the latest play trailed as "controversial" in the press. For one of the very few times  in TV  history,  Newman's dream of a popular series of plays became reality. By the end of the 1960s, however. it was clear the slot had become a victim of its own past reputation: its perceived "permissiveness" and antiestablishment bias had inspired a negative reaction among significant proportions of the audience. who were now deliberately not tuning in. Accordingly, Newman's successor as head of drama, Shaun Sutton, tried to win new audiences by giving the BBC's contemporary play slot a new time and title. In 1970 he altered the title to become Play for Today, thereby inadvertently creating the legend of the lost "golden age" that The Wednesday Play has become.