"Mad Jack": a Wednesday Play

In Britain, The Wednesday Play was a series of original dramas broadcast by the BBC on - you've guessed it - Wednesday nights, between 1964 and 1970. At home, it usually signalled the turning off of the TV, and for many years that was my bedtime. The Wednesday Play and its successor, Play for Today (which was on a Thursday) were usually deemed "unsuitable for children" because they contained references to sex or worse. Some of them, such as the famous "Cathy Come Home", dealt with social issues; another, "The War Game", dealt so realistically with the threat of nuclear war that it was not broadcast on television until 1985. More often, the plays were simply what my mother used to call "way out".

I do not think my parents watched "Mad Jack", the play about Siegfried Sassoon that was broadcast in 1970, only three years after the death of the man himself. They would certainly not have thought it suitable for children, although I was fifteen by then and would probably have been allowed to watch it had I expressed a wish to do so. But I didn't, either because I didn't know what it was about or because I simply wasn't interested.

The play was written by a moderately successful screenwriter called Tom Clarke, who died in 1993. Clarke was born a few days before the end of the First World War, which may well explain his interest in the subject. In the Second World War, he had served in both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Artillery. His obituary suggests that he was something of a "character" and perhaps had a few personality traits in common with Sassoon. I doubt that they ever met.

In this production, the role of Sassoon is played by Michael Jayston, who at the time was an up-and-coming TV actor of 35. He spends much of the action staring into the middle distance on a beach, listening to the voice in his head, and the effect of this is oddly moving. Jayston has done great things in his career, but I would never have thought of him for Sassoon - he has a kind of gravitas that I suspect did not come naturally to the real Siegfried, though no doubt he was able to put it on when required, just as he could assume a false jollity in the company of his wartime comrades - which we also witness in the play. In the scenes where he approaches other hotel guests talking random nonsense summoned up by his nightmares, we see the more excitable, neurotic side of the character and we begin to understand the reasons why he was sent to Craiglockhart, but there is no denouement as such. We never get to meet Rivers or find out what happened next.

Nor do we ever get under the skin of Robert Graves, played by Michael Pennington (a former pupil of Dennis Silk and now a patron of the SSF). Pennington was then 27 but looked considerably younger, like the overgrown schoolboy Graves was in real life. Since Graves himself was still living, the character is disguised under the name "Geoffrey Cromlech". Cromlech spends his time observing the other officers with a mildly cynical air, and only comes into his own in the later scenes when he arrives to persuade Sassoon to go before a medical board. His motivation remains unclear.

Knowing as much as we do, from Sassoon's own account, about the real events behind the action, we might have expected more from the play, but the author may have been restricted by the sensibilities of Sassoon's family and friends. The performances of the two lead actors are difficult to fault, and several of the poems are worked neatly into the action. The play is currently available on Youtube. How long the BBC will allow it to stay there is anyone's guess. Make the most of the opportunity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ZZ134kjnY

The Joy of Podcasts

Whenever we have a long car journey ahead of us, my husband usually gets out his iPod (or whatever you call it) and connects it to the in-car power supply so that we can listen to his huge collection of podcasts en route. Our interests don't exactly coincide so we sometimes begin with an argument about which one to listen to.

On one recent occasion, I favoured "Bess of Hardwick" but Husband liked the sound of "Indians in World War I". Was he surprised when, on hearing the speaker's voice, I immediately said "That sounds like Santanu Das"! As the podcast continued, he was discomfited to find Santanu's talk, focusing on the experiences of Indians who fought in, or were affected by, the First World War, veering away from the subject of military history into the realms of social history and even, dare I say it, literature.

Santanu Das is, of course, an old friend of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. His book, India, Empire and First World War Culture, was published in 2018, and you can actually still hear the podcast we listened to by going to https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/indians-in-world-war-one/  (you have to get past a short advert first). If you do, you will understand why I found it so fascinating and what makes Santanu such a valued member of the war poetry community of scholars.

The experiences of the Indian sepoys are in many ways typical of First World War infantrymen as a whole, but there are important differences. Without going into too much detail, one important difference is the way they were looked on by their white commanding officers and comrades, often with a kind of condescending affection, much like the feelings recorded by junior officers like Sassoon about the working-class soldiers under their command. It is easy for the mind of an educated 21st century reader to be disapproving of some of their comments and attitudes, but to forgive Sassoon and his generation, we have to understand something of the world they lived in.

Jared Diamond is an American historian and anthropologist you may not have heard of. His contribution to the set of podcasts describes his approach to analysing historical events through psychology, but his best-known work is 1997's Guns, Germs and Steel, a trans-disciplinary work which won a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Diamond explained why certain civilisations have dominated and survived where others have failed. Diamond's analyses of the influences that cause societies around the world to react differently to crises are well worth examining.

Also interesting, and in some ways a natural progression from Santanu Das and Jared Diamond, was a podcast recorded some time ago by former politician and soldier, the late Paddy Ashdown, who had at the time just published his last book, Nein!: Standing Up to Hitler 1935-1944, which dealt with the numerous failed attempts to unseat the Fascist dictator before he could destroy the future of Europe.

Lord Ashdown's credentials as a warrior were second to none; perhaps it was because of this that he understood the political landscape, both international and domestic, better than most. Having been born in British India and spent part of his childhood in Northern Ireland, he recognised the colonial mindset and its inevitable consequences. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear him say that, had he grown up as a Roman Catholic in the province during the 1950s and 1960s, he might well have become a member of the IRA; he understood the circumstances that led to the Troubles.

Siegfried was acquainted with an earlier Ireland, one that was beset by its own troubles and heading towards the long-denied independence, but he did not become a rebel until 1917. It was not in his nature to defy authority unless he was moved to do so by personal experience, and the losses of so many friends, combined with what we would now call PTSD, pushed him into his protest. Who can say whether, under other circumstances, he might ever have considered more drastic action?