As the writer of Cathy Come Home and Edna the Inebriate Woman, Jeremy Sandford has the distinction of an output which is the one of the smallest yet possibly the most famous in the history of British television drama. Cathy Come Home is surely the most talked about television play ever, and an iconic text in the radical canon of the 1960s Wednesday Play, which has become overshadowed by the association with its director, Ken Loach, and producer, Tony Garnett.
After more or less disappearing from television, Sanford surfaced in 1980 with a play commissioned for the series Lady Killers, and then in 1990, as the homeless population in Britain began once again to be a topic of public debate, with a documentary for the BBC, Cathy, Where Are You Now? When Cathy was reshown in 1993 as part of a season commemorating the setting up of the housing charity Shelter, Sandford wrote to the
Independent taking issue with a claim that doubts had been raised over the accuracy of the homelessness and family separation statistics given at the end of the play. "I work as a journalist as well as an author," he wrote, "and it would be professional suicide to be inaccurate." Sandford has never wholly identified himself as television dramatist. A one time poet and artist, he had nursed an early ambition to be a professional musician and played the clarinet in an RAF band during his national service. One of his first plays, Dreaming Bandsmen, broadcast by BBC Radio in 1956 and later staged in Coventry, seemed to confirm his early reputation as a surrealist, but at the same time he was recording radio documentaries about working class life in the East End and it was as a journalist and activist that he began writing about homelessness in the early 1960s.
As he told an interviewer in 1990, he had always sought to play his role on the stage of life rather than simply reflecting it. Thus, not only did he submerge himself in the nether world of the down-and-out for his research on Edna, but went on to arm himself with his written work as part of an active crusade on behalf of the dispossessed. A special showing of Cathy was arranged for Parliament and Sandford himself toured the country screening and talking about both plays at public meetings.
Homelessness, itinerancy and housing policy have been particular obsessions of Sandford. His Anglo-Irish grandmother, Lady Mary
Carbery, was a member of the Gypsy Lore Society and he has campaigned on behalf of gypsies and edited their newspaper Romano Drum. A play about gypsies, Till the End of the Plums, was to complete a trilogy about the homeless but was never produced.
Born of wealthy parents (his father owned a private printing press) and educated at Eton and Oxford, he was brought up in a stately Herefordshire home. In the late 1980s, after a long association with the alternative communities of folk festivals and camps, he moved
into a large country house and opened it up as a study centre for New Age travellers. A further play, Smiling David, about the case of a Nigerian drowned in a Leeds river and the agencies implicated in the events, was
commissioned for radio and broadcast in 1972 but never made it to the television screen. Sandford's oft-remarked status as a documentarist and social advocate rather than a natural television dramatist is emphasised by the fact that the scripts for Cathy and Edna are published in a series of political and social treatises.
His polemical and factual writing, such as Down and Out in Britain which accompanied Edna, far exceeds the amount he has written for television. However, the importance of his two major works in defining the cultural role of television drama in Britain as an intrinsic part, rather than mere mirror, of socio-political actuality, cannot be ignored. Cathy Come Home remains a landmark in this sense and Sandford's exchange with Paul Ableman in the pages of Theatre Quarterly over the ethics of fictional form in Edna the Inebriate Woman set the agenda for a debate about the aesthetics and politics of drama-documentary that was to dominate television drama criticism through the 1970s and 1980s.
-Jeremy Ridgman
