"The Right Prospectus" was the second television play broadcast by the BBC under the title of "Play for Today", and the first in colour. It was written by John Osborne, one of his works for television. In the world of television drama, unlike the cinema, there is no concept of the auteur director; the "author" of a television play is generally taken to be the playwright who wrote the script.
The play opens with James and Pauline Newbold, a middle-aged couple, being shown round a boys' public school and then studying the prospectuses of other, similar, schools. We assume that they are looking for a school for their son, but we then learn that they have no children and that they are looking for a school for themselves. They eventually find one, and are taken on as pupils. I can only suppose that the action takes place in an alternate reality in which adult education and children's education take place in the same institutions and in which boys' public schools are happy to offer places to not only to middle-aged men but also to middle-aged women. This would not, however, explain why James and Pauline are the only adults in the school, nor why both the boys and the masters always treat them in the same way as they would treat any other pupil, not as adults.
Osborne was himself educated at a minor public school before being expelled- according to him for punching the headmaster- and the play might make more sense to those who attended such establishments. (I was at a state school). A lot of stress is placed upon Crampton's School's house system; James and Pauline are placed in separate houses, and he is treated to a lengthy monologue from his Head of House about the differences between the various houses within the school. (One house is, apparently, all about "lots of beefy hand-holding and buggery").
Unlike many "Plays for Today", which were mainly filmed in a studio, "The Right Prospectus" was shot entirely on location. The BBC were keen to film at a public school, but this proved difficult. Lindsay Anderson's "If...", made two years earlier and partly shot at Cheltenham College, had been widely seen as a satire on the public school system, and the Headmasters' Conference had issued instructions to its members not to cooperate with film-makers, but eventually West Buckland school in Devon broke ranks.
"If..." can be at times crude and over-the-top, but it is for the most part an effective piece of film-making and a powerful satire aimed not just at the public schools but at the British Establishment in general. Was Osborne aiming to produce a similar satire? That is a difficult question to answer, because I was never clear what he was aiming to do or what the purpose of the play was. According to one online review I have come across, Osborne "doesn't bother to waste time trying to come up with a satisfactory reason why two adults should want to return to school". Actually, if he had managed to come up with a satisfactory explanation, I would not have considered it a waste of time. Such an explanation might have enabled me to make sense of a play which is otherwise completely baffling. 4/10.
