The Break

^{Review: Laurence Marcus}

Successful Harley Street psychiatrist Julian (Gerald Sim) and his ex-model wife Jane (Mary Ure) invite former best man Gerald (Jack Hedley), now a top civil servant, along to help celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. What begins as an innocent get-together turns into a night of terror for Gerald. He finds himself playing a deadly game of cat and mouse. His trauma begins when Julian accuses him of having a continuing affair with Jane. All the arrangements have been made for Gerald's murder and the disposal of his body. Mr Giles (Robert Shaw) and Mr Crawford (Tony Selby), two of Julian’s ex-patients, have been hired to do the killing.

The tension is built up through the night as the two madmen debate with Gerald how he'd like to be murdered! Would he prefer to be shot, knifed or drowned in the bath? With Gerald grovelling around on the floor, it is revealed, in the final moments, that the two 'patients' are in fact policemen who are trying to extract from Gerald a confession that he is really a spy.

In 1974, David Frost's Paradine Productions did a deal with Yorkshire Television to produce dramas involving star names that could be sold to the ABC Network in America. The Break was the first of these, but it immediately ran into trouble with the American censors. During the play, Jack Hedley was required to remove his trousers revealing, briefly, a pair of Y-Front underpants. The sight upset the US censors who said that that boxer shorts would have been acceptable, but Y-Fronts were a no-no. So, whilst the British broadcast went ahead, fully networked across all the ITV regions, the US broadcast was put on hold (it had been due to debut on the US network first in the previous November) until the censors and the producers could sort out the Y's and wherefores.

Forty-three-year-old Hedley, by then known to millions of viewers as Lt. Col John Preston, hero of the Colditz series on the BBC, spoke to the Daily Telegraph in February 1974 about the two distinctively different parts he played in these two productions - the cool and suave prisoner-of-war and the simpering cringing coward in The Break: "Play a lunatic or a drunk and you can't go wrong. But standing still in a uniform with nothing much to do I find more difficult." Hedley found Preston to be something of a cardboard cut-out sort of figure. Too good and too honourable. He found The Break to be a pleasant change.

As a youngster, Hedley had spent nine years serving in the Royal Navy, having signed up straight from school. He then went into the family advertising business before deciding to become an actor. By the time he made Colditz he had already starred as a secret service agent with impeccable manners in The World of Tim Frazer, a role that, 14 years later he was still being recognised for. As for the underwear controversy, he told the Telegraph's reporter, Enid Gibson, "My mother watched the play. And if there had been anything wrong with it, she would have been the first to say."

Reviewing the play on 1 February 1974, James Thomas, critic for the Daily Express was, despite the star names in the cast, not at all impressed: 'When TV musters a cast led by Robert Shaw, Mary Ure and Jack Hedley, it seems reasonable to expect something out of the ordinary. Well, out of the ordinary it was, but not very distinguished. None of it was at all convincing and implausible thrillers like this can only stand up on much more dramatic invention.'

The play was a rare return to television for Shaw who had previously starred as ex-pirate Dan Tempest in the swashbuckler The Buccaneers in 1956, and it gave him a chance to work alongside Ure, to whom he was married at the time. Just the year before, Shaw had won international fame as the crooked Doyle Lonnegan in the multi-dollar box office success The Sting in which he starred alongside Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and this is without doubt why he was chosen as the star to launch these series of plays internationally. However, only one other Paradine/Yorkshire Television production appears to have been made - Who Killed Lamb, which starred Stanley Baker, and which was also made in 1974.