Alone among countless BBC Play for Todays I saw in the 1970s I never forgot this one for reasons I'll come to anon. Set in the benighted Britain of December 1974, the stock market, battered by chronic inflation, strikes, and oil price hikes, had fallen nearly three quarters in two and a half years. Even the US, with the additional trauma of Watergate, had done better by comparison.
Stockbroker Richard Elkinson (Peter Barkworth), aged 43, is in a loveless marriage with Jane (Sheila Gish) who is good looking but ice cold and snooty. The three children go to public schools, and the family finances have seen better days. Richard's boss Philip is played by John Welsh, ancient and patrician, he looks like a character out of The Forsyte Saga, which is unsurprising as he was.
Shortly before the Elkinson's time honoured Christmas party Philip calls on them to impart bad news. To save costs their firm is to merge with a larger one which will lose three of its fourteen partners, while their firm loses one out of five. The worse news is that Richard is the one. Trying to put a brave face on it they go ahead with their drink sodden party. The younger son David, old enough to understand things but too young for booze and birds, mopes alone in his bedroom. Richard tries to coax him downstairs, only to be woundingly told that if he'd been good enough they'd have kept him on. I won't reveal any more save that things go even further downhill for poor Richard.
Barkworth is perfectly cast as a certain type of English stockbroker. Middle class but not quite posh, agreeable but with a ruefulness born of the realisation that he is not the all knowing guru his more impressionable clients imagine. Of necessity the central premise of the story is unlikely. In reality Richard would almost certainly have been kept on, the cost cutting mostly made from culling the underpaid, unappreciated clerks toiling away in the back office. I know this because I was one of them, a mini Richard made a victim of the great mid 70s bear market. My only serious caveat is that the party dragged on too long, with a surfeit of bit part caricatures: lothario, chippy trade unionist, upper class oaf. But all in all a good play about bad times.
