Land of Green Ginger
- Episode aired Jan 15, 1973
- 49m
Faced with the prospect of being sent to work abroad, Sally Brown returns home from London to Hull, to see if she still feels the same attachment for her home town - and for her old boyfrien... Read allFaced with the prospect of being sent to work abroad, Sally Brown returns home from London to Hull, to see if she still feels the same attachment for her home town - and for her old boyfriend Mike Thurlow. Will she decide to take the job abroad or return to live with Mike in Hull... Read allFaced with the prospect of being sent to work abroad, Sally Brown returns home from London to Hull, to see if she still feels the same attachment for her home town - and for her old boyfriend Mike Thurlow. Will she decide to take the job abroad or return to live with Mike in Hull?
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Did you know
- TriviaDespite its fairy-tale-like name, there really is a street in Hull called Land of Green Ginger.
- Quotes
[on the train to Hull]
Reynolds: Are you travelling to Hull?
Sally Brown: Yes.
Reynolds: Going back home?
Sally Brown: Just for the weekend. How did you guess?
Reynolds: Experience... plus instinct. People from Hull, they all have this mysterious northern mist behind their eyes.
Sally Brown: You must be clever.
Reynolds: Not really.
Sally Brown: It takes a clever feller to talk rubbish like that.
Reynolds: No, what it is, it's envy.
Sally Brown: [ironically] Fancy.
Reynolds: I've lived in about a dozen places. You get to envy people who know where home is.
Sally Brown: "Promised Land", they call it.
- ConnectionsFeatured in Timeshift: Alan Plater: Hearing the Music (2005)
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.
- JamesHitchcock
- Sep 14, 2021
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- King's Cross Station, King's Cross, London, England, UK(Opening shot)
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