Play for Today (TV Series) Leeds United! (1974) User Reviews

Leeds - United!

[Prismark10 · 7/10 · 5 November 2020]

At the turn of the 21st century. Local councils up and down the UK had to set aside money to settle historic Equal Pay claims.

Put simply. When the councils and trade union reps were discussing pay negotiations. They threw the female employees who would had been canteen staff, cleaners or care home workers under a metaphorical bus. The union reps were likely to be men and they got better pay deals for the male union members.

Leeds - United! written by Colin Welland is a docu-drama that shows that female workers did not fare any better in private industry.

Inspired by the true events of an unofficial strike amongst female textile workers in Leeds in February 1970. The women demanded the same pay as the men.

Mollie (Lynne Perrie) and Maggie (Elizabeth Spriggs) lead the women out on strike, they are followed by workers from other factories in Leeds.

Initially they are supported by a rabble rouser called Harry Gridley. Later Gridley in connivance with the trade union sell out the women. He is involved in clandestine negotiations with the factory owners to get the women back to work without their demands being met.

Filmed in stark black and white. There is a reportage documentary look about this drama. It is raw and earthy. There are voice overs as workers discuss their work conditions and low pay.

The big centrepiece of the drama is the women marching on strike which brings panic to the big bosses and the union reps.

Some of the performers were new to television although they would now be deemed to be familiar faces. Perrie went on to play Ivy Tilsley in Coronation Street.

At almost two hours it is overlong with probably too many speeches being made. Director Roy Battersby added some touches of humour like an obese factory owner being carried off stage.

Writer Colin Welland highlighted just how little union bosses cared about the pay disparities with women workers.

Is it any different now almost 50 years after the event? Take a look at the current crop of white male beer sipping union bosses who want to go back to life as it was in 1970.

Women union members now fare better. Only because the unions have other minorities to throw under the bus.

More like a documentary than a drama

[andynwlad · 7/10 · 7 December 2020]

Has a very "real life" feel to it and the style in which the story is told is like a fly on the wall style documentary. The fact that it is in black and white makes it appear older than it is. The only downside to it is that it is overlong and could easily have been condensed to 90 minutes or less. Plenty of stalwarts of British TV are featured, some before they became more famous.

Fossil from Another Age

[JamesHitchcock · 6/10 · 24 November 2020]

Leeds United were one of England's top football teams during the late sixties and early seventies, but this play has nothing to do with football. The seventies in Britain were a period of high levels of inflation and high levels of industrial unrest. These two phenomena were connected, although the exact nature of the connection was a matter of political controversy. British industry and the political Right, especially the Conservative government of 1970-1974, claimed that inflation was being fuelled by excessive wage demands backed up by the threat of strike action. The trades unions, backed by elements of the political Left, claimed that their wage claims were necessary to prevent their members' living standards being eroded by inflation. The result was a decade dominated by strikes, most famously the miners' strike of 1974 (which helped bring down Ted Heath's Conservative government) and the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978/9 (which did the same for Jim Callaghan's Labour government).

"Leeds - United!" is a fictionalised dramatisation of another strike from the period, one which took place amongst the garment workers of Leeds in February 1970. The employers had offered a rise of fourpence an hour to female workers and fivepence an hour (roughly 2p in modern currency) to male ones. This offer had been accepted by the union but was rejected by the workers themselves who wanted a rise of a shilling (5p in modern currency) an hour across the board and came out on strike. (Because the workers were defying their union, the strike was known as "unofficial"). The strike was largely led by the female workers, who earned less than their male colleagues to begin with.

Modern viewers will doubtless find it incredible that workers were prepared to strike over what today seem like paltry sums, but this would be to ignore changes in the value of money over the last fifty years. An increase of a shilling an hour amounted to two pounds extra a week- a significant sum at a time when some young apprentice workers earned as little as five pounds a week. Even for experienced, skilled workers, who could take home over twenty pounds a week, a two-pound raise would have represented a considerable benefit.

Dramatist Colin Welland's mother-in-law was involved in the strike, and his sympathies are clearly with the strikers. The play was originally written for Granada Television, part of the ITV network, but in the end was filmed by the BBC and shown as part of the "Play for Today" series. Granada ostensibly rejected Welland's script on financial grounds, but the real reason seems to have been that they feared its anti-capitalist stance would antagonise their advertisers. The film was not, however, just perceived as anti-capitalist; it was also denounced by the "Morning Star", the organ of Britain's Communist Party, as anti-communist. What upset the communists was Welland's negative portrayal of trade unionism. The union officials, especially Harry Gridley, a card-carrying Communist Party member, are depicted as hypocritical careerists, unwilling to fight for their members' interests if to do so would upset their cosy relationship with the employers.

This is very much an example of ensemble film-making with no star actors; Welland may have wanted to emphasise that industrial action is, of necessity, collective rather than individual. At around two hours, about the same as the average feature film, it is considerably longer than most "Plays for Today" which were around 70-80 minutes in length, shorter than a feature film but longer than the standard hour-long TV drama. I felt, in fact, that it could profitably have been shortened. Too much time seemed to be taken up with lengthy speeches and repetitive scenes of women marching through the streets chanting slogans.

Colour television came to Britain in 1967 and nearly all programmes were made in colour after about 1969/70. It is therefore unusual to find a prime-time programme made in black-and-white as late as 1974. Director Roy Battersby may have been deliberately harking back to the "kitchen sink" cinema of the late fifties and sixties, and possibly also some of the television plays of that period from "Play for Today's" predecessor series, "The Wednesday Play", and trying to capture their gritty social-realist look.

Its monochrome photography probably made "Leeds- United!" seem rather old-fashioned in terms of looks, even when first broadcast, but its theme was very topical for the period. (It was shown on 31st October 1974, a few months after the miner's strike had ended and three weeks after a General Election which had seen the Labour government returned to power, partly because of dissatisfaction with the way Heath had handled that strike). Today, however, that theme of seventies industrial unrest makes it look (like a number of other "Plays for Today" rooted in the politics of the decade) like a fossil from another age. It retains a certain power, but no longer speaks to us in the way it once did. 6/10