TV drama: This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You
This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You, was a British television play and (as far as I can see) is long forgotten. I stumbled across this review from the Newcastle Journal, 28 March 1969. Beyond that I know nothing more ....
Punishing
the delinquent
By
Jennifer Wilde
“This isn’t a public school it’s a home for delinquent
boys,” was one man’s cry on TV last night as we saw a delinquent in an approved
school held down by a master, his head between the man’s
knees and beaten by his headmaster.
Terence Dudley’s ‘This Hurts Me More Than
It Hurts You’ was BBC-1’s answer to Lindsay Anderson’s
explosive anti-establishment film “If,” set
in an English public school.
Surprisingly though, last night’s play came as one of
‘The First Lady’ series with Thora Hird
as Sarah Danby, the councillor with a conscience.
A 16-year-old boy absconds from an approved school
after witnessing the brutal ritual of caning practiced by the headmaster, Sarah
sympathises and offers him good wholesome affection, but for once she remains
in the background as an onlooker.
Blake, the deputy headmaster, is the one man who can
help. He believes in stimulating the boys not by physical brutality, but by
giving each a chance to develop as individuals, something the headmaster’s
ideas on “justice” will not allow.
Dudley shows clearly how violence only breeds
violence. With Sarah Danby always in the background we, the viewers, cannot fail
to think of this brutality except in everyday terms. This could, in fact,
happen to anyone’s son. And, of course, this makes it too much like reality for
comfortable disbelief.
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