STAN BARSTOW RADIO PLAYS

STAN BARSTOW writes:
The first money I earned by writing was for readings of my short stories on air from the BBC Studio in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds in the middle 1950s. Some years later I was led into radio drama at that same studio by the legendary Alfred Bradley who directed almost everything I wrote for the medium over nearly thirty years.

When in London in those years of the middle 1960s, I would sometimes call in for an early evening drink at the BBC Club in the Langham, across Portland Place from Broadcasting House. The Langham had been a hotel and, in the 1980s, was sold for that use again. I had no membership card at that time. If Alfred Bradley was in town, there was no problem; if not, I would think of someone else I knew and have him called over the tannoy to come and sign me in.

Still to be seen there were many veterans for whom radio would always be the centre of broadcast features and drama, their great names, Louis McNiece, DG Bridson, Reggie Smith, Nesta Pain, Giles Cooper, Frederick Bradnum, Henry Reed and others. It was being introduced to Douglas Cleverdon, and hearing (though not from him) how he had pursued Dylan Thomas for UNDER MILK WOOD, that set me musing upon what it must have felt like to be pushed from the top of the heap by the upstarts who populated the Television Centre miles away at Wood Lane and served the great mass of the public who were glad that radio had finally acquired pictures.

Stan Barstow

(taken from my autobiography:
IN MY OWN GOOD TIME,
published by Smith Settle)

Extract from the obituary programme "Last Word", in the week when Stan Barstow died (2010):

Stan Barstow was the son of a Yorkshire miner. He left grammar school at 16 to become an engineering draughtsman but that bored him and he spent most of his spare time reading in the public library. His first published novel was his most famous - "A Kind Of Loving", made into a film starring Alan Bates told the story of Vic Brown, a young man trapped in a loveless marriage. Stan's stories of working-class life were notable among other things for their frankness about sex.

SB (extract from recorded interview some years earlier):
"I picked up a book of stories by H.E.Bates and I realized to my astonishment that they were about fairly inarticulate people; it was as if he'd taken me to another window in the house and said 'you've been looking in the wrong place all the time; that's where you should be looking", and suddenly I was seeing all the life around me. I was seeing the magic in Barnsley - the equivalent of it, in people, and that was the moment when I became a writer.

Diana Griffiths:
"He was looking for a hobby, and he was reading stories in women's magazines, and he thought 'I could do better than that', and hestarted writing short stories. At the very start he thought they were probably easy to write, but he soon found out they're not. He set about educating himself; he went to the public libraries and read everything he could lay his hands on. He told me that when his father died he inherited his father's scooter, and he used to roam around Yorkshire looking at things.

SB: (recorded extract)
"The story which I'd alloted to the elder brother, Vic, which was one of the oldest cliches in fiction (older brother gets a girl in the family way, has to marry her, and so on) .... and I thought - has anyone ever actually written about this, absolutely close-in, under the magnifying glass? I thought 'no, they haven't'.

RADIO PLAYS
A Kind of Loving*
The Desperadoes 1964
Ask Me Tomorrow 1965
The Pity of it All 1967
Bright Day (from JB Priestley) 1968
The Watchers on the Shore 1971
Stringer's Last Stand 1972
We Could always Fit a Sidecar* 1974 (Won the Writers' Guild Radio Drama Award)
The Right True End* 1978
The Apples of Paradise* 1988
Foreign Parts 1990
My Son, My Son (five episodes from Howard Spring) 1993
A Kind Of Loving (new production 2010, dram. Diana Griffiths)


NOTES

THE RIGHT TRUE END....1978
Adapted for radio by Stan Barstow from his 1976 novel. Produced in Manchester by Alfred Bradley. 17 Jun 78.

The final story in the Vic Brown trilogy. Vic is now successful. After a series of rather grubby affairs, he becomes determined to track down the only woman with whom he felt he had something real.

Cast:
Victor..................................Brian Peck
Ingrid..................................June Barry
Donna.................................Fiona Walker
Conroy..........................Kenneth Farringdon
Mr. Brown............................Harry Markham
Mrs. Brown......................Elizabeth McKenzie
Christine..............................Beth Harris
Jim................................Michael Stirrup
Fleur...............................Vivienne Dixon
Miriam and Millie........................Jane Lowe
Tom and Janice........................Judy Bennett
Carter and Michael...................Peter Wheeler
Graham................................Paul Webster
Ben.................................Geoffrey Banks

A KIND OF LOVING....2010
A fiftieth anniversary remake of Stan Barstow's classic. It's set in fifties Yorkshire, published in 1960. An humorous and poignant account of 20-year-old Vic Brown's infatuation for Ingrid. Dramatised by Diana Griffiths, with Lee Ingleby, Rebecca Callard, Kate Layden, Fine Time Fontayne, Stephen Hoyle, Jake Norton, Seamus O'Neill, Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson. Producer Pauline Harris. Woman's hour serial, 10 episodes. July 2010.

A comment from the BBC messageboard read:

Acting is spot on and in so many ways the dilemmas of male/female relationships as explored by Barstow seem little changed since then...

I had forgotten this was the first of a trilogy so I'm now going to read the others.

Stan Barstow's website, set up and run by Martin Benson, is at:

http://www.stanbarstow.info/

Many thanks to Stan for supplying the biographical notes and the list of his plays.

Nigel Deacon / Diversity website.

Asterisked plays in VRPCC collections

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