TV Drama: School Play 1

 

School Play is the BBC TV drama that was broadcast in November 1979 and seems to have vanished completely since.

Here is the first of six excerpts to be uploaded over the coming holiday period.

The play is set in ‘1950ish’ and its author Frederic Raphael, says it’s based on his experiences as a boy at Charterhouse School in the late 1940s and early 1950s. All the schoolboys are played by adult actors. (Read more from Raphael here)

This scene is towards the start of the play where house monitors (prefects) are testing one of the new boys (called ‘grunts’) to see that he knows the rules of the House. James Lombard (the Head Monitor played by Jeremy Kemp) and Geoffrey Treasure (Denholm Elliott) do most of the questioning. The boy is Simon Julius Rose played by Michael Kitchen

Rose is asked: What happens if you are ‘festive’ (meaning cheeky). The answer is that your name is put in the book. If your name goes in the book 10 times in a term you get a ‘bumming’.

Timothy Perkins, a monitor played by Tim Piggott Smith, believes the whole House needs disciplining and they should bear down on the new grunts. (We’ll see later how that turns out).

Here's a larger version of the same clip.

Picture and video credits: BBC TV

 

For more TV drama, click here

For Movie Clips, click here

For more items involving Prefects, click here

 

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