"Thank god I'm not a parent!

ordinary play; indeed it was so skilfully realized that one was scarcely conscious of watching a play at all.

It was emphatically not another play about a 'social problem', but rather an indictment of the impersonal forces which crush workers' children into the harsh mould capitalism has prepared for them.

Filmed on location in a Manchester secondary school, the play shows the tensions and misery which are an integral part of this process, and conditioned by the class context in which the school operates-a context in which boys are herded together in preparation for a lifetime's work on the conveyor belts of the local factories.

Emotion

Nobody, staff or pupils, can buck the system, and the play's great merit is the complete absence of sentimentality and cheap emotion.

The stafi, worn cynical by years spent feeding capital's demand tor labour, all hnd some way of adapting themselves to the routine.

They sit in the staffroom grumbling, or gloating over confiscated sex magazines, they time serve with resignation and take out their own frustrations and inadequacies on the pupils.

Prime target is Peter Latimer, whose homosexual tendencies make him a butt for the other boys. Latimer, portrayed matter-of-fact by Frank Heaton, is a creep and a talebearer, disliked by the teachers and terrorized by the boys.

Ted Crampton, the reactionary headmaster, thinks it his duty to hound Latimer in an effort to make him or break him. For Crampton, _Latimer is 'the odd one who gets through the net' in a school of 500 boys.

The hypocrisy of Crampton's relentless insistence that Latimer be put through the mill only encourages the other masters to take it out on Latimer.

The boy's position is intolerable, but there is no way out, and the film brings home all the claustrophobic pressures which finaly drive him to run a neighbour's motor cycle into a wall in the hope of 'getting put away.

He is not a victim of individuals, but precisely of the impersonal spite of a brutalizing system.

Fodder

The school's job is the production of factory fodder-the looming power station round the playing fields help to drive this vividly home-and anyone who won't bend to this fate has to be broken.

There is no rebellion about Latimer, nothing heroic about his situation, but he has to be broken nonetheless.

The teachers, too, cannot escape. They're part of the system. Keeping the conveyor belts supplied. Turning out human labour.

Nobody, not even the "progressive' art master, immune.

His efforts to help Latimer understand himself fail, because the boy sees the hopelessness of his situation and seeks a hopeless way out.

Welland's characters are ordinary people, and he has a

Abridged

For workers and their children, capitalism provides 'education' only in its most bastardized and truncated form. The secondary modern school, which epitomizes this type of schooling for the majority of workers, is now being reintroduced in another form by the Tories as part of their systematic attack on workers' rights.

• the last analysis, the teachers are reduced to the role of warders—as one of the staff comments at the end of the play.

To the wall

Crampton ploughs grimly and insensitively on trying to force Latimer to, conform. Privately, in any case, he considers that boys like him should be 'sent to the wall'.

The absurd assembly where Crampton issucs a solemn warning, about 'fithy practices' light and harpsichord music with a special greeting for the girls of some school in the Surrey stockbroker belt.

Extension

Even the carefully-prepared Christmas party, with its organized games and its regimented queues for cakes and orangeade, is only an extension ! of the same process. Latimer, knowing he will be bullied there, wants to CALVIN stars as Henry In BBC's 'Hallelujah Handshake'.

avoid attending the party. The art master backs him up. But Crampton insists: It's a wicked world, he says, and Latimer must learn to live in it.

So the boy goes and is inevitably picked out by the master in charge of games, a man with an unreasoning prejudice against 'poofs'.

The whip He is singled out for some particularly violent game 'the whip'-and hits his head. Knocked out, he is taken home by the art master, but his sympathy over tea at Latimer's home — where he lives with his grandmotheronly angers the boy more.

There are no easy solutions. Nobody comes off best, and the film ends in a violent staff-room argument, where the art master is accused of 'protecting queers'.

He walks out, and his parting words sum up the film: 'Thank God I'm not a parent.

Again

This was an uncompromising play, which it is to be hoped left viewers angry and upset.

Directed by Roy Battersby, 'Roll on Four O'Clock' should be shown again as soon as possible.

Colin Welland's other play this week, 'Hallelujah Handshake' (BBC Thursday, December 17. 9.20 p.m.) was not on the same level as 'Four O'Clock'.

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It dealt with another oddman-out, a mild schizophrenic who comes to the religion seeking the affection he has been denied.

The non-conformist minister accepts him, uses him for a while as a general dogsbody, and then warns him off after complaints from parents about his familiarity with their children.

Lack

He moves on to the High Anglican church, whose minister is delighted at his conversion and will not listen to his colleague's warnings.

Inevitably, the victim walks off with the cash-box and is unceremoniously abandoned by his priest to the tender mercies of the law.

The play was a neat study of clerical hypocrisy, but it lacked the detailed personal knowledge Welland put into 'Four O'Clock'. . 70 THE Way the World' column in the 'Daily Telegraph', signed by 'Peter Simple', is well known, as one of the most reactionary. pieces of journalism in the British press.

No • opportunity • is lost to attack the working class, to vilify socialism or to defend racialist propagandists-—all under cover of 'satire'.

Mr 'Simple'

It was interesting to see how unenthusiastic Mr 'Simple' was about the movement of the Polish workers. On Friday he referred to 'the Poles, once again, struggling desperately and hopelessly in their chains'.

All he can see happening in Poland is 'looting and uncoordinated violence'. In this, he echoes Gomulka's own Stalinist spokesmen.

As with the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the capitalist press works as hard as the Stalinists to prove that the movement is both 'anti-communists' and hopeless.