The Weekenders

The Weekenders

1961 - United Kingdom

How many marriages are dying of boredom? How many couples are dragging out a dreary, meaningless existence because they have long ceased to care for each other - and haven't the initiative to do anything positive about saving their marriages? And in any case, what can be done about it?
These are the questions posed colourfully, succinctly, and often amusingly by Rhys Adrian's play The Weekenders, which stars Jennifer Wilson, Bryan Pringle and James Bolam (who was making his first ITV appearance since leaving drama school two years previous). The play is set in a seaside caravan camp, which is visited with monotonous regularity by the same married couples every weekend of the summer. Barbara Lott and Victor Platt as Anne and Jack Harrison, and Jennifer Wilson and Bryan Pringle as April and Frank, are two couples who have been meeting there regularly for years. 

Their routine never varies. 

Kitchen chores for the women, while the men fetch the water and take a nap. A game of cards for the men and Bingo at the clubhouse for their wives. "For entertainment they cling to the old familiar things," said author Adrian. The emotional lives of both couples have also fallen into the same dull routine. They contrast sadly with the young lovers played by Keith Maidwell and Primula Pyne, who are obviously absorbed with each other. As Barbara Lott put it: "All four are horribly true to life. Everyone will recognise couples they know. Probably they didn't expect to fall into the habit of never smiling, or never saying a kind word to each other, and always being slightly aggrieved-but somehow it has happened." 

Said Jennifer Wilson: "After seven years of marriage, sheer boredom pushes April into having a drink with Johnny (James Bolam), one of the camp employees who has deliberately set out to pick her up. And one knows so well that April and Frank are typical of thousands who have forgotten why they ever married."   

Published on April 4th, 2020. Adapted from original TV Times article..

Read Next...

The Dick Van Dyke Show

This much loved, top rated US comedy series from the 1960's very nearly didn't make it on the air because then CBS chief, Jim Aubrey, disliked it so intensely that he had to be persuaded by the shows sponsors, Proctor and Gamble, to put it on.

Also released in 1961

The Likely Lads

A Sharply scripted comedy of character and wryly observed social change both series held a perceptively laughter gilded mirror to the changing face of the work-deprived industrial North East and of British society during the middle nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

Also starring James Bolam

The Close Prisoner

"We are all conceived in close prison: in our mother's wombs, we are close prisoners all...and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death..." John Donne.

Also tagged Single Play

Rosie sitcom

Long before he became a household name for his masterful touch with British comedy, Roy Clarke was pounding the beat—an experience he later transformed into a sitcom that charted the misadventures of a fresh-faced constable with more heart than street smarts

Also starring Bryan Pringle

Only When I Laugh

Set in an NHS hospital where the same three seemingly permanent patients, all congenital hypochondriacs, are forever playing a game of one-upmanship with each other, much to the irritation of the house surgeon.

Also starring James Bolam

The Browning Version

Schoolmaster Andrew Crocker-Harris is retiring because of ill-health, and Taplow, one of his pupils, brings him a present on the eve of his retirement in this Terence Rattigan play from 1966.

Also tagged Single Play

Freedom in September

A Soviet musician is missing from his hotel. He wanders through 1962 London trying to contact people he has met and known in Russia. Who are these people? What lies behind his desperate search?

Also tagged Single Play

The Four Seasons of Rosie Carr

A captivating quartet of plays, each unfolding a different chapter in the life of one remarkable woman. Spanning from the Edwardian era to the transformative 1960s, the series offers a rich portrait of resilience across decades of change

Also starring James Bolam