TheCemented with LoveControversy: Sam Thompson and the BBC in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Cemented with Love, Sam Thompson’s play about a Westminster byelection in the fictional Northern Ireland town of Drumtory, was finally broadcast on BBC1 as the Wednesday Play for 5 May 1965. I say ‘finally’ because, despite the play having been scheduled to be shown in December 1964, the controversy which engulfed it not only delayed its broadcast until this date but also threatened to stop the play being shown at all. Cemented with Love offers a thoroughgoing satire on, as Thompson himself put it in the Belfast Newsletter, 14 December 1964, ‘everything that goes on here [in Northern Ireland] at election time’. It is a black comedy about bigotry and political corruption on both sides of the sectarian divide and the effect which these have upon the political culture of the province and the lives of individuals there. The BBC management in Belfast came to know about the intended broadcast of the play only in early November 1964, via a minute from a meeting in London of the Corporation’s publicity department which referred to ‘the play Cemented with Love by Sam Thompson about rigging of the Irish elections which is scheduled to be broadcast on December 9th and which will probably be controversial’.1 Action was then swiftly taken by the Belfast office to have the broadcast of the play postponed. The controversy which this postponement generated was to open up tensions within the BBC before spilling over into the press, until, under mounting pressure, it was agreed at the end of December to televise the play. Hagal Mengel in his book Sam Thompson and Modern Drama in Ulster (1986) offers a comprehensive analysis of Sam Thompson’s work in terms of the position which it occupies in the development of drama in Northern Ireland. However, Mengel does not discuss the controversy generated by Cemented with Love. In this article I want to examine this controversy with regard to the light which it casts on three themes – the