The Madhouse on Castle Street was a
British televisionBritish television broadcasting started in 1936, and now has a collection of free and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are up to 600 channels for consumers as well as on-demand content. There are six main channel owners who are responsible for most...
play, broadcast by
BBC Television
on the evening of January 13 1963, as part of the
Sunday-Night Play anthology strand. The production is notable for featuring the young
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
folk music singer
Bob DylanBob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet and painter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was, at first, an informal chronicler and then an apparently reluctant figurehead of social unrest...
, who went on to become a major musical star.
Dylan had been seen performing in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
by director
Philip SavillePhilip Saville, , is a British actor who turned to television direction and screenwriting in the late 1950s....
in 1962, and in December that year he contracted Dylan to come to
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
for three weeks to star in
The Madhouse on Castle Street, which he was directing for the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
, in spite of Dylan's complete lack of any acting training or experience.
The Madhouse on Castle Street was a
British televisionBritish television broadcasting started in 1936, and now has a collection of free and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are up to 600 channels for consumers as well as on-demand content. There are six main channel owners who are responsible for most...
play, broadcast by
BBC Television
on the evening of January 13 1963, as part of the
Sunday-Night Play anthology strand. The production is notable for featuring the young
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
folk music singer
Bob DylanBob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet and painter who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was, at first, an informal chronicler and then an apparently reluctant figurehead of social unrest...
, who went on to become a major musical star.
Dylan had been seen performing in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
by director
Philip SavillePhilip Saville, , is a British actor who turned to television direction and screenwriting in the late 1950s....
in 1962, and in December that year he contracted Dylan to come to
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
for three weeks to star in
The Madhouse on Castle Street, which he was directing for the
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
, in spite of Dylan's complete lack of any acting training or experience. This was the performer's first trip outside of
North AmericaNorth America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific...
.
The sixty-minute play was written by Evan Jones, and tells the story of a man who locks himself in his room at the
boarding houseA boarding house, is a house in which lodgers rent one or more rooms for one or more nights, and sometimes for extended periods of weeks, months and years. The common parts of the house are maintained, and some services, such as laundry and cleaning, may be supplied. They normally provide "bed...
where he lives and refuses to come out until the world has changed. His friends and fellow residents attempt to discover why. Dylan was originally supposed to have played the leading role in the play, but during rehearsals it became apparent that he lacked the ability to learn lines, stating that he would rather "express himself in song", was lax in his time keeping and would often wander off to smoke
cannabisCannabisalso known as marijuana or marihuana, and ganja , among many other namesrefers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug...
. It was quickly decided that he lacked the acting ability to be able to perform the part. Saville was still keen to include Dylan, so re-structured the play to create two characters out of the original one Dylan had been hired to perform. Actor
David WarnerDavid Warner is an English actor, who is known for playing sinister or villainous characters.-Early life:Warner was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, the son of Doreen and Herbert Simon Warner, who was a nursing home proprietor...
was hired to play the main acting role of Lennie, while Dylan performed songs commenting on the action in the manner of a
Greek chorusThe Greek chorus is a group of twelve or fifteen minor actors in tragic and twenty-four in comic plays of classical Athens. They could be portraying any characters - for instance, in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the chorus comprises the elderly men of Argos, whereas in Euripides' The Bacchae, they are a...
as the new character Bobby, essentially playing himself. At the conclusion of the play, Dylan performed
Blowin' in the Wind"Blowin' in the Wind" is a song written by Bob Dylan and released on his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war, and freedom...
, one of the first major public performances of the song.
As was the usual method of
BBC television dramaBBC television dramas have been produced and broadcast since even before the public service company had an officially established television broadcasting network in the United Kingdom...
production at the time, the play was produced in a multi-camera electronic studio on
video camerasA professional video camera is a high-end device for recording electronic moving images...
, although it was recorded as a 35mm film
telerecording rather than on
videotapeVideotape is a means of recording images and sound on to magnetic tape as opposed to movie film. Videotapes are also used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram...
. This 35mm master was released for junking in 1968, and no copy of the play is known to exist. While from a retrospective viewpoint it may seem surprising that such an early performance of Dylan's was destroyed, this was common practice in
British televisionBritish television broadcasting started in 1936, and now has a collection of free and subscription services over a variety of distribution media, through which there are up to 600 channels for consumers as well as on-demand content. There are six main channel owners who are responsible for most...
of the era. Contracts with the actors' union,
EquityEquity is the trade union for actors, stage managers and models in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1930 by a group of West End performers....
, and other trade bodies meant that only a certain number of repeat broadcasts of a production were allowed, and then only within a five-year period. Once the ability to re-use a programme had expired, if it were of no further value it would be usually be destroyed, as was the case with
The Madhouse on Castle Street.
No other copies are believed to have been made from the original master, as these would usually only be produced for overseas sales purposes by BBC Enterprises, who are not believed to have requested any copies of
The Madhouse on Castle Street, presumably deeming it to be of little overseas sales value, even after Dylan's rise to fame. This is by no means a unique situation, as thousands of hours of television programming were disposed of by the BBC in this manner until the junking policy was halted in 1978. By that stage the ability to further exploit programmes in the new medium of home
videocassette recorderThe videocassette recorder , is a type of video tape recorder that uses removable videotape cassettes containing magnetic tape to record audio and video from a television broadcast so it can be played back later...
s was becoming apparent, and the idea that programmes should in any case be preserved for posterity and historical and cultural reasons was also coming to be realised.
Still photographs and scripts for the production survive, as do some amateur off-air
reel-to-reel audio tape recordingReel-to-reel, open reel tape recording is the form of magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording medium is held on a reel, rather than being securely contained within a cassette....
s of some of Dylan's songs made at home by viewers of the programme. A full off-air audio copy is not believed to exist, however, and it seems highly unlikely that a telerecording copy will ever be recovered.
External links
- The Madhouse on Castle Street on the BBC Four
BBC Four is a BBC television channel available to digital television viewers in the UK. The part successor to BBC Knowledge. BBC Four launched on 2 March 2002....
website at bbc.co.ukBBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize...
.
- Off the Telly's take on a BBC documentary on the programme.
- The Madhouse on Castle Street at the Internet Movie Database
The Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, video games, and most recently, fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media...
.