The Wednesday Play (TV Series) 3 Clear Sundays (1965) User Reviews

About capital punishment, a made for television film, broadcast at the time of the final debates in Parliament on the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom.

[RP174 · 8/10 · 5 November 2005]

This was one of Ken Loach's most powerful plays for television. I have not seen it since it was broadcast and was pleased to see that it has survived through the vagaries of the BBC policies of occasional and rather haphazard house cleaning.

The story tells of a young and naive petty criminal who is introduced to two other cell-mates in prison. They persuade him to attack a warder so that they will be released earlier for coming to the aid of the officer and thus all three will be released at the same time. The plot miscarries and the warder dies of his injuries. The remainder of the film deals with the inexorable process of the trial for murder and the "Three Clear Sundays" that were required to elapse for appeals to be heard between sentence and execution. The portrayal of the young man by Tony Selby, then a young actor at the beginning of his career, was deeply moving and the dreadful inevitability of the conclusion is further amplified by a sequence of texts that scrolled up the screen giving details of hangings that had been bungled and led to terrible pain and anguish of the condemned and the witnesses to the executions.

The play was written by an ex-convict, Jimmy O'Connor, who had himself had a death sentence commuted. He wrote from experience of the London criminal world of the time. As a teenager it made a great impression on me four decades ago and, with Losey's King and Country, cemented my views on the inhumanity of capital punishment. I would be most interested to see it again.

Semi-autobiographical BBC drama about Capital punishment - with a surprising streak of dark humour

[dr_clarke_2 · 7/10 · 4 September 2022]

'3 Clear Sundays' was director Ken Loach's third episode of the BBC's The Wednesday Play, and the second written by James O'Connor. A one-time petty thief turned professional writer, O'Connor was at one time accused of murder and sentenced to death, only to receive a last-minute reprieve. '3 Clear Sundays' is heavily inspired by that experience, which makes it all the more interesting.

The title '3 Clear Sundays' reflects a Home Office ruling that three clear Sundays were to elapse between a sentence of death and the execution. And thus is the case for Danny Lee, a young man sent to prison for a minor crime, only to be talked into attacking a prison guard. When the prison guard dies, Lee is sentenced to death. Crucially, Lee isn't very bright, raising questions about mitigation and diminished responsibility and was cajoled into hurting the guard, but didn't mean to kill him. Whether or not any of this is any excuse will likely depend on the individual viewer's opinions on the subject of capital punishment: O'Connor and Loach are clearly in favour of the abolitionist argument.

It makes for an interesting drama, and was very topical at the time it was broadcast, since capital punishment for murder in England was suspended in 1965 and finally abolished in 1969. In real life, O'Connor's conviction was later questioned due to weak evidence and the apparent confession of the real killer; by contrast, Lee is guilty - even if he didn't mean to kill anyone - which is perhaps why the writer doesn't give his character the same reprieve that he was granted. To further complicate the social drama, Danny's girlfriend is pregnant and his prison sentence leaves her unmarried, to his family's disapproval; Britannia Lee - Danny's mother - casually offers a home abortion.

Strikingly, for all the seriousness of the material, O'Connor's script is blackly comic, with a great deal of witty dialogue, notably during Prison Officer Johnson's relaxed, informal conversations with the prisoners, and most of Britannia's scenes. When Danny is led to the gallows, a drunken Britannia sobs, "'E forgot the eleventh commandment - thou shalt not plead guilty!" Equally funny - and slightly gobsmacking, under the circumstances - is the scene of Albert teaching his apprentice Charlie the finer points of the hangman's art and enthusing cheerfully about his profession.

Tony Selby gives a convincing and likeable performance as Danny, which encourages the audience to sympathise with his plight, whilst Rita Webb is great as Danny's devious mother, who uses all her charm and guile to garner support for her son's cause. The cast boasts several faces familiar to fans to British archive television: Glynn Edwards appears as Prison Officer Johnson, whilst George Sewell appears as Johnny May, a fellow prisoner and gangster who convinces Danny to attack a guard. Griffith Davies and Ken Jones are cast in small roles - both appear in several of Loach's episodes for The Wednesday Play.

Unlike much of Loach's later BBC dramas, '3 Clear Sundays' is shot in studio on a fairly low budget, but it still shows his burgeoning talent for directing. Typically, he makes extensive use of close-ups, which focuses on the actors. Not unusually for a BBC production at the time, the sets are also pretty convincing, and in an unusual but memorable touch, the score consists largely of songs (apparently sung by the cast) that play over dialogue-free moments and reflect what is happening in the story. The episode ends at the same moment as Danny's life - and the film concludes with some scrolling text accounts of death by hanging, a sombre final note that leaves the audience in no doubt as to where Loach stands on the issue of the death penalty.

Thoroughly depressing, but a powerful film for the time

[wellthatswhatithinkanyway · 9/10 · 23 February 2021]

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Danny (Tony Selby) is a simple man, who earns a living as a 'barrow boy' down the market, and has a pregnant girlfriend, Rita (Britannia Lee) in tow. But after a regrettable altercation with a local policeman down the pub, he ends up serving a spell inside, during which he's swayed in to taking part in an escapade where he is to hit a guard on the head. Going along with it, things go wrong and the guard is killed, for which Danny is sentenced to hang, leading to an unsuccessful campaign to free him.

After his more recent films have shone an effective light on current societal issues, I've found myself glancing through the larger, extensive back catalogue of director Ken Loach, and was perversely surprised to find this much older one that I didn't know existed before, another of the 'Wednesday Play' films he made, along with his groundbreaking Cathy Come Home in the early '60s. I had no idea he'd made a film about capital punishment, which was fittingly released in the year it was abolished in the UK.

Like with CCH, the editing sometimes feels a little erratic, and there are problems with focus and camera control. I also found the musical numbers, that seemed to serve as an introduction to each character a little hard to swallow, but I had to keep reminding myself this was a low budget, made for TV film, from a different time, with different norms (most uncomfortably portrayed it what was probably a throwaway scene then, with a black patron brazenly refused service at the bar while white clientele are present) and all this was probably par for the course at the time.

To be honest, Danny's character never really manages to feel fleshed out or developed enough for us to feel for him as much as we could, either, but it's the raw, unflinching power of Selby's performance when the realisation of his fate hits him that puts all the fuel in the fire. Loach doesn't hold back from his trademark realism, either, with no pretensions of any 'head held high' dignified execution, instead hitting us with the unpalatable reality of how most hangings probably went, an act of deceit gliding Danny to the gallows, it what ends up feeling uncomfortably like a gangland killing.

It all rounds up to a thoroughly depressing and unpleasant tale, as most films about capital punishment, but sadly relevant for its time and reflective of the style Loach would make his trademark (albeit, in 'less' maudlin tales.) ****

Anti-capital punishment

[westernone · 5/10 · 30 September 2014]

The anti-hero of this story, Danny, is a smiling, low IQ young man designed to pull sympathy. He's tricked (rather incredibly) into attacking a warder in the prison he's serving in. The attack becomes a murder, but since it was intended only to hurt or maim, we're asked to take that as less deserving of a murder's proscribed punishment.That he's not too bright is supposed to mitigate things. We're shown one of his follow prisoners on death row who's obviously quite mad.Maybe Danny is innocent by way of insanity? On the day of his sentence, guards ambush him in his cell to violently bind him up to take him to the gallows-then we cut to quotations from official papers describing just how terrible hangings can be.

Danny is a pretty obvious straw man- based on Timothy Evans, the illiterate falsely convicted and hanged murderer in 1950. We are never supposed to consider or sympathise with a murder victim. Is it any less horrific to have one's head opened with an iron pipe than to have a rope stretch one's neck? This sort of clouding the issue paid off, as really "3 Clear Sundays" is a post-mortem on the death penalty, this transmission coming eight months after the last hanging in Britain.