Cirrus@Austlit

'For Jan Dirksen, Mayor of Kriekville, an insult offered to the Town's founder is also offered to the whole European community. Retribution is sweet, especially if the culprit is a Bantu.'

Source:

Radio Times, 21 September 1961, p.25.

'It starts with a chance meeting in a Paris bar at three in the morning. He is an American journalist who has come back to Paris in the probably delusive hope of writing at last that great novel; she is half French, half Algerian, and on the run from someone. But from whom?'

Source:

'A Not So Simple Mystery Story', The Times, 17 October 1961, p.16.

'It concerns an unfortunate Russian woman who married an American soldier, and as a penalty for this breach of Soviet etiquette, spent eight years in a forced labour camp. Prematurely aged she comes to London, where her cause us ardently espoused by a newspaper whose hard-bitten girl reporter and flinty editor (Blunt by name) track down the husband to a United States Air Force base. In vain. He has remarried and refuses point blank even to meet his first wife again; there is nothing for the unhappy woman to do but to press Blunt's hand in silent gratitude and embark for Russia.'

Source:

'The Uninvited', The Times, 24 November 1958, p.12.

A 'whodunit' exploring the ramifications of the European currency systems.

An occupied village in Brittany must decide whether to hide a wounded British airman or hand him over to the German troops.

According to a contemporary review in The Times:

'The emphasis is placed upon the schoolchildren. It is out of them that the British officer in hiding (Mr. Terence Longdon) and the French school teacher (Miss Lisa Daniely) create the resistance movement, and it is they who at the end draw their own parents and the whole village into it.'

Source:

'Marjolaine', The Times, 8 February 1957, p.5.

'Setting out at first to illustrate how a discontented young industrialist can be seduced by Communist trade unionists, he enlivens this austere topic by implanting Pringle, the young man, in a devout Catholic family.

'Having thus touched domestic conflict alight, Mr. MacCormick displays Pringle's loyal girlfriend waiting wanly over cups of coffee while he attends wicked meetings, and confronting him, when he arrives, with a gaze of mute accusation. Quite the strongest of the situations is the one in which Pringle's eldest brother brutally unmasks himself as the hardened party member responsible for all the previous agitation'.

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 17 June 1957, p.3.

'Sandy Robinson, a commissioner in the district of Dalpore, has orders to maintain the peace while natives are pouring in both directions over the India-Pakistan border. Lacking men and transport of his own, he manages to secure a shaky alliance with the local leaders, and reduces the amount of bloodshed in spite of skirmishes by a Communist faction. The leaders, as Mr. MacCormick depicts them, are unprincipled politicians over whom Robinson towers, like a reproving father, sorrowfully convinced that they are not ready for self-government.

'Having the balance tilted all one way need not, of course, vitiate the play's effectiveness. But apart from the scenes of political squabbling, with the right always on one side, the play diverges into domestic and romance byways inhabited by the commissioner's humdrum wife and his ivory-skulled son who courts an Indian girl with quotations from Kipling.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 18 November 1957, p.3.

According to contemporary reviews in The Times, 'It has two subjects–the fight against disease in India, and the end of individualism among the British Raj. Mr. MacCormick relates these themes by taking as his central figure a doctor who, after struggling hopelessly against epidemics, comes at length to join a Government hospital.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 11 November 1957, p.3.

'The period is 30 years after the Mutiny, the theme of the first play, and Mr. MacCormick now turns to affairs that were then overshadowed by immediate crisis. The central figure, Jock Robinson, is the son of the military hero of the first play; and he illustrates the theme of service in the life of a district officer. Jock is a more effective hero than his predecessor because he is a greater fanatic. His one concern is to improve conditions in his district. To this end he neglects his hot-blooded wife, endangers his career by flouting regulations, and finally secures victory by blackmail.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 4 November 1957, p.3.

'There are no crowds, no violence, and action is confined to a single set–the house of a commander of native infantry. Although some disturbance has taken place in the district before the play opens, it is not in the thick of the uprising, and the house serves as an outpost where there is still leisure for discussion. But discussion is made urgent by the knowledge that attack may at any time be renewed: there is no division between plot and comment on India at large.

'Three groups are represented–Indian troops, British officers and British civilians. Of these, the civilians are the least convincing. One is a fledgling memsahib whose part is limited to voicing obtuse snobbery; the other, an altogether too enlightened Scots girl, acts almost as Mr. MacCormick's raisonneur by stepping outside the action and speaking in glowing terms of Britain's role in India.'

Source:

'B.B.C. Television', The Times, 28 October 1957, p.5.

A television-play cycle, following the rise and fall of English colonial rule in India from 1857 to 1947.

The Times called it the 'most ambitious serial produced in the past year', noting that

Technically, the cycle is compact, calling for only one set–a colonial official's house occupied successively by members of the Robinson family whose contribution to Indian development conveys Mr. MacCormick's message on the theme of service.

Towards the end of the cycle this theme gains the upper hand in a distastefully didactic fashion; Indian leaders are presented as squabbling power-seekers foolishly disregarding the advice of the district commissioner, who towers over them with the oppressive goodness of a reproving father. But in the earlier plays Mr. MacCormick does not proclaim his partisanship so openly, and they display his masterly facility in taking political history as a springboard for dramatic invention.

Source:

'Family Gathering Round the Television Set', The Times, 1 January 1958, p.10.

Little is known about the plot of this television play.

The sacrifices made by a mother allow her family, Polish refugees, to reach Canada.

In an Italian village, two woodcarvers plot to create a wooden Madonna who weeps tears of camphor, ether, and water. But when a lonely child (their daughter / niece) confides in the Madonna, she begins to weep real tears, setting off recriminations and misunderstandings with the local policemen, representative of the church, and a chemical analyst.

For a review of the play, see 'A Religious Comedy on B.B.C. Television', The Times, 9 January 1956, p.5.

'Mr. Iain MacCormick [...] tried in The Safe Haven to marry a skeleton out of the cupboard of Victorian melodrama with the nonchalance and colloquialism and intimacy of modern domestic comedy. Into a Scottish country house of the present day, ruled by a very career-minded young businesswoman, there saunters from nowhere an old man (Mr. Finlay Currie), who turns out to be none other than the profligate father of her Canadian husband and his wastrel brother. Ignobly, they contrive to keep the dreadful fact a secret, but–thanks to an affectionate child (Miss Carole Lorimer)–paternity must out, and the wife (Miss Pamela Alan) is distressingly confronted by her father-in-law.'

Source:

'Creative Material for Television', The Times, 26 April 1955, p.16.

Little is known about the plot of this television play.

In 1964, one of the soldiers from The Liberators returns to the farmhouse in Italy that he occupied in 1945.

Set in a Catholic mission that has been overtaken by Chinese forces.