The Land of Green Ginger is a street in the old town of Hull; how it acquired that name has long been disputed. It has lent its name to at least three works of literature; a novel by the East Yorkshire writer Winifred Holtby, a children's story by Noel Langley and this play by Alan Plater, broadcast as part of the BBC's "Play for Today" series. Plater was born in the north-east, but his family moved to Hull when he was only three years old, and this play is set in the city. A young woman named Sally Brown returns to her home town of Hull from London, where she has been working. The company she works for want to transfer her to a job abroad, and Sally is not keen, largely because this would mean longer separations from her family and from her boyfriend Mike, all of whom still live in Hull.
At under 50 minutes, "The Land of Green Ginger" is relatively short for a "Play for Today". Most plays in the series weighed in at, on average, around 75 minutes, longer than the normal 60-minute TV drama but shorter than most feature films. The plot is also a simple one, with much of the play consisting of Sally and Mike walking around Hull discussing their future. Mike is a trawlerman who hopes to be promoted to captain, but Sally would prefer him to get a shore job, which she regards as both physically safer and more financially secure. (She has recently met a former neighbour who lost his job as a trawler skipper after a run of bad luck).
Despite its brevity and apparent simplicity, however, there is a lot going on in this play under the surface. In Holtby's novel the significance of the romantic-sounding name "Land of Green Ginger" is that it symbolises for her heroine Joanna the exotic foreign countries which she longs to visit. In Plater's play the significance is rather different. For Sally it represents the Hull of her childhood, and yet her "Land of Green Ginger" is as unattainable as the remote ends of the earth were for Joanna, because the city she once knew has changed immeasurably in a relatively brief span of time.
We never learn precisely what job Sally does in London, but it is implied that she has a middle-class, white-collar career, although she is originally from a working-class background. She grew up in the Hessle Road district, a traditional working-class community, but her childhood home has been demolished and her parents rehoused in a tower block on an isolated estate in another part of the city. Mike and his family still live in Hessle Road, but their home is likely to meet the same fate as the Browns'. There is a sense that, despite these hasty redevelopment schemes, or perhaps partly because of them, Hull, and the fishing industry upon which many local jobs depend, are in decline. Mike hopes that the new Humber Bridge, planned but not yet begun in 1973, will help regenerate the area, but with the benefit of hindsight we know that the bridge turned out to be something of a white elephant. (By the time it was completed in 1981, the M62 and M18 motorways had connected Hull to the national motorway network, which bypasses the bridge and leaves it little used compared to other major estuary crossings).
Plater was criticised by the Hull city authorities, who felt that his play concentrated too much on civic decline, but he replied that he was a playwright, not a PR copywriter, and that his function was to provide an honest picture of the city he loved and lived in. He is helped by the photography of the city by director Brian Parker and by two excellent performances from Gwen Taylor and John Flanagan, two actors I had not previously come across, as Sally and Mike. (Gwen, 34 in 1973 but looking considerably younger, reminded me of how naturally attractive young women were in the sixties, seventies and eighties before the modern vogue for tattoos, piercings and Polyfilla lips took hold).
Mention must also be made of the musical score provided by the folk band The Watersons who use traditional songs which often reflect the story. For example, Sally's train journey from London to Hull is accompanied by the song "The Oak and the Ash", which starts with the lines:-
"A North Country maid up to London had strayed,
Although with her nature it did not agree".
Sally has likewise strayed up to London, and the dilemma she faces is whether she should return to Hull and make a life with Mike, or stay in London, which holds out better prospects for her career and for her finances but does not really agree with her nature.
"The Land of Green Ginger" does what Plays for Today often did well, providing a picture of a particular part of Britain at a particular point in time. It is not, however, a snapshot but a moving picture, because the play is also a meditation upon the processes of change- not just socio-economic change, although that is part of it, but change in general. One of the better plays in the series. It is time that the BBC either showed it again on television or released it on DVD. 8/10.
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