Backlisted - A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Dave Haslam and Melanie Williams join us to discuss A Taste of Honey (1958), Shelagh Delaney's first play, written and produced when the author was not yet 20 years old. To describe this as an expert panel would be an understatement: Dave Haslam is a former resident DJ at the legendary Haçienda club in Manchester and the author of Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City; Melanie Williams is a professor of film studies at UEA whose most recent book was the BFI monograph on the big screen adaptation of A Taste of Honey (1961). How did a Salford teenager change the face of British theatre? Nearly 70 years on, why do the play's themes and characters continue to resonate in the 21st century? And what did Shelagh Delaney do for an encore (and why do so few people know about it)? This show will open your eyes.  On 27th Oct 2025 Backlisted is recording a show at 92NY in New York, on William Maxwell at the New Yorker. Tickets are available now from https://www.92ny.org. To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When planning for life's most important moments, sometimes the hardest part is simply knowing where to start. That's why we're here to help. When you pre-plan and prepay a celebration of life with us, every detail will be handled with simplicity and professionalism, giving you the peace of mind that you've done all you can today to remove any burden from your loved ones tomorrow. We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at DignityMemorial.ca. The Dignity Memorial branding is used to identify a network of licensed funeral cremation and cemetery providers owned and operated by affiliates

of Service Corporation International. Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new baker, you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need. TD, ready for you. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books.

The book featured on today's show is A Taste of Honey by Sheila Delaney, first produced as a play in May 1958 when the author was still a teenager and subsequently published in script form by Methuen in January 1959. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventory, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr Una McCormack, science fiction author and associate fellow of Holminton College, Cambridge. And I'm Nikki Burch, the producer and editor of Backlisted. And I'm excited to say I've got some big news

for our American audience. To celebrate 10 years of us podcasting about old books, Backlisted is going to New York. That is right. We are going to be in New York City in America in the last week of October. We're crossing the Atlantic to do at least two live shows and we couldn't be more delighted about

where they will take place and what we'll be talking about. Yeah, so on October the 27th, write this down please, October the 27th at 7.30pm, we'll be appearing at the fabled 92nd Street Y or 92 MY as it's now known in Manhattan. That is a venue that has hosted some of the greatest writers of the last hundred years. greatest writers of the last hundred years. Auden, Baldwin, and now backlisted. Yay! Yeah, but of course. Yeah, so it feels like fitting that the subject

of our show will be the legendary New Yorker editor and novelist William Maxwell. We'll be celebrating Maxwell's work and the writers he championed. People like, can you tell us who they are, Andy? Well, John Cheever and JD Salinger, who we've never made backlisted shows about, and Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvia Townsend Warner,

who we can't stop making shows about apparently. And which guests are we going to bring? Oh, and our guests are, I'm very happy to say that Deborah Treesman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker will be joining us. It is in fact The New Yorker's 100th anniversary this year. So it's all the anniversaries. And also our great friend, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan,

who has been on backlisted a few times, will be joining us live on stage at 92NY. Yeah and it's our first ever live event outside of the UK so we're super excited and if you're in New York or you can get to New York on Wednesday the 27th of October we'd love to see you. You can actually buy tickets now on sale at 92NY.org and we'll put that link in the show notes. And for our East Coast listeners, those of you in New York or near to New York City, there's more to come because there's another anniversary two days later. I can't actually reveal who this show is about or where it will be, but I will give you a clue which is on October the 29th is the ninth anniversary of Bob Dylan

being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So on our tenth anniversary, so on the 100th anniversary of the New Yorker, the 10th anniversary of Batlist, and the ninth anniversary of Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize, there's a mystery show happening on October the 29th in another bit of New York. I can't reveal which yet, but we will announce it as soon as we have ticket details for that too.

And he's here tonight for one night only, Sir Bob of Dylan. That would be terrifying Una, thank you. Just put that image in your head. I've got an image of you sort of arm in arm dancing down the streets of Manhattan. It's going to be... With guitars slung over both their backs. Exactly that, yeah.

I'll be the Susie Rotolo in that equation. That's fine. Now, joining us on today's show to discuss a taste of honey and the life and career of Sheila Delaney are two guests. One of them is new to Batlisted and one is returning. We have Dave Haslam and Melanie Williams. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Dave Haslam is a former resident DJ at the legendary Hacienda Club in Manchester and the author of five full-length works of non-fiction. Ender Club in Manchester and the author of five full-length works of non-fiction. His debut book Manchester England the story of the pop cult city was an acclaimed cultural history tracing the

story of Manchester from its radical 19th century politics through to its 20th century popular culture. His memoir Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor, published in 2018, was proclaimed Book of the Year by broadcaster and DJ Giles Peterson, amongst others. He's a regular contributor to The Observer, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and more, and his innovative recent series of short format books has dealt with variously Sylvia Plath, Pablo Picasso, Keith Haring and Courtney Love. And he's been described by Olivia Lang as an exceptional writer. We'll all take that, I think. That's very good, David. That sounds great, doesn't it?

Yeah, really nice. It really does. Wow. Dave, you're also an expert interlocutor and interviewer. I saw you the other night here in Liverpool, talking to Kevin Rowland from Dex's Midnight Runners, who has a new memoir out called Bless Me Father. It was very intense.

I mean, it was a really good interview. Well, was Kevin relaxed? Well, I think he was more relaxed than me. I mean, I'd interviewed him twice before, but I'd read his book and the book is astonishingly raw and confessional. So I kind of, yeah, I mean, he's kind of an intimidating character still, even though he's calmed down a lot from when he used to walk around Birmingham in a donkey jacket, kind of pushing people out of his way and being very, very rude to other pop groups. But yeah, there's maybe even a connection between him and Cheetah Delaney. Maybe you were going to

go on and make it in the sense that he's so well known for Dex's Midnight Runners, come on Eileen, especially in America, where it was a big hit. And it's still so well known for Dex's Midnight Runners, Common Eileen, especially in America, where it was a big hit and it's still so well known, that he kind of carries that, I think, has in the past carried that in a quite difficult way. But those of us who know his work know that he's very innovative and he's worked in lots of different ways,

different kinds of music, and he's still an artist. And it's a kind of like a Sheila Delaney, known for a taste of honey done, know when she was very young but then not so well known for her subsequent work and for those of us who know her subsequent work that's unfortunate because there's so much to enjoy. Yeah Dave and I were once married which is how he knows that I've, my question was Dave next, he reminds me a little bit of Sheila Delaney. So yes, absolutely. Well, I was, what I was going to say was, you're quite, I agree with you completely. She has to carry around a taste of honey. He has

to carry around, particularly in the States, common island. But he pushed back a bit, didn't he? Like he does. He likes to be accurate. When you suggested this, which is perfectly reasonable, he was at pains to say, what did he say? He said Geno had been at number one and people should know more about Geno. But yeah, I mean when I interviewed previously, he said that it kind of follows him everywhere. And he was in a Chinese restaurant and there was a kind of Chinese version of Come on Eileen. And it really put him off his wanton. Okay, very good. Shall we welcome our other guest? Melanie Williams is the author and editor of numerous

books on British cinema, including studies of David Lean, Shane Meadows, Ealing Studios, Female Stardom, Women's Films and 1960s film production in Britain. And as luck would have it, her most recent book was a BFI film classic monograph on A Taste of Honey. It is lucky, isn't it? Yeah, we dropped on there, I think. She's currently Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and last joined us on backlisted episode 206 for a discussion of Michael Powell's A

Life in Movies. You invited me to do that one. I couldn't do it. I was really disappointed to miss that one actually. Well, you know, that was a very good show about a very good book. Welcome back, Melanie. Dave was just saying there how hard it is

to get to see some of Sheila Delaney's work. But I was wondering, I mean, you work in an area and I mean, I guess we all do, we all have a real interest in archive, film and TV and literature. A lot of these things were very difficult to get to see, weren't they, 20 years ago? I mean, in terms of Sheila Delaney's work, you could probably see a taste of honey and nothing else. Has that changed in the last 20 years?

Do you feel as a researcher it's easier now for you to find rare films and TV? Definitely, there's been a big shift. I mean, particularly as somebody that focuses on British cinema, I have to give props to Talking Pictures TV, which has made newly available all kinds of very obscure British odds and ends from film and television. I think also the digital availability of some of these things has really helped, but there's still a lack of availability of a lot of her work. I mean, we sometimes think that everything is kind of all available now, but in terms of Delaney's career, and she's certainly not alone in this, there's a kind of hardcore of stuff that is very difficult to access, particularly the television work that she

did, the radio work that she did later on, that stuff's much more difficult to access even now. You can now find most of her 60s output. You can read her plays and her volume of short stories and you can, even though it isn't in print, but it's relatively easy to track down. You can see the films that she contributed to. The White Bus, I remember, was incredibly difficult to get to see,

and is now available from the BFI. Charlie Bubbles, which is a great favourite of mine, and we'll be talking about that later in the show. I mean, I didn't see, I remember Charlie Bubbles being on channel four in the 1980s and then not being able to see it for 25 years until I traded VHS on the dark web to try and get to try. It's easier now, right? You can just go and buy a copy of Charlie Bubbles. But, but A little subsection of the dark web with people swapping, you know, episodes of drama, Rama and

Let's be honest, let's be honest, Una, that's very much the darkest web where that happens. The worst timeline. And Mel, do you, do you, I suppose I was going to say, do you yearn for the days when stuff was more difficult to see or do you just transfer it to the stuff you can't find? Yeah. I mean, there's always some object you just transfer it to the stuff you can't find? Yeah, I mean, there's always some object that you're still searching for that you can't quite get, so you don't quite lose that. But I do now, there are lots of films that I had to watch for my PhD, and I had to go into the basement of the BFI and order them up

and put them on steam backs and handle the film. And that was the only way I could see certain things. And now, you know, I've turned the telly on and there they are playing away probably on talking pictures. And yes, it does feel like a certain degree of, I don't know, sort of the hardship of the researcher having to like look for these things and then finally put them onto the machinery and see them flicker into life is slightly dissipated now. But I mean, it's fantastic. I'm seeing and being able to read and access all kinds of things that were just impossible to get to before. Is there a holy grail of Sheila Delaney's archive that you've not tracked down that

you would love to see or read? Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, I was very, it was really great to get the tip off that there had been a digitization of the television series that she wrote in the late 70s, The House That Jack Built, because I'd read about that, but I hadn't been able to see it or read the script or anything like that. So someone in the archive or inside in a circle kind of tipped me off and said, well, this is digitized now. And they kind of gave me a secret link and I managed to download the episodes with the time code still on them for when they've been taken from the arc. So a slight freeson of like the forbidden

about watching this stuff. Anyone listening to this who isn't absolutely thrilled at the romantic picture this creates, I don't know why you're listening. You're not our people. on hey Dave northern soul DJs right about 15 years ago I bumped into a DJ who often played things from rare British jazz records from the late 1960s and early 1970s and I said to them it's genuine enthusiasm oh it's brilliant people are posting these records on blogs now you could say you can get to hear them. And he was like, yeah, huh, huh, was not happy, was not happy.

Where do you stand on the exclusivity of the Crate Digger? The Northern Soul DJs, it's the original seven inch record on the original label or stay at home basically. So I kind of steer clear of that amount of purist thing because for me it's just about the records and doesn't really matter so much what the format is as long as you can share them with the people but often they don't even want to share them with the people.

Yeah right. You know I mean... Still keep them in plastic, eh, Andy? No, well, yeah. Look, Nicky, you buy one for your archive, one for the shelf and one to play out with. It's a very cheap hobby. Your shelf isn't even the archive. No. Oh, Nicky. But there is a nerdy side to me that actually loves the research as well. I've never been in inverted commas lucky enough to be an academic, but I kind of forgot part

of my brain. Yesterday I was reading about Sheila Delaney, about her early years going to the theatre because obviously the kind of conceived wisdom is that she arrived on the scene as a kind of savage, which is a word that was used about her about a taste of honey, as a kind of naive teenager from Salford who failed her 11 plus. But in fact, she'd been part of a Manchester and Salford radical arts and theatre scene ever since, you know, she could be. And she went to see Waiting for Godot in 1956 at the Manchester Opera House. Well, I read that she had and her daughter Charlotte says that that rather than the Terence Rattigan play that she saw the following year was what stimulated her writing and not necessarily her drama but her writing and she'd absolutely worshiped God Beckett and in fact Charlotte

says that later in her life Delaney went to Paris and met Beckett which would have been would be a fantastic radio play if anyone wants to write it. Good Lord. Anyway, so I was digging about to find out when exactly she'd gone to see Waiting for God. Because I wanted to get the timeline in my head right about Sheila Delaney's intellectual adventures pre A Taste of Honey.

Anyway, I managed to track down August 1956. I wanted a program. I was going to go on eBay and buy a program from the Opera House but there isn't one available. I discovered that Sir Ian McKellen, who was then Ian McKellen from Burnley, had gone to the same production at the Opera House to see Waiting for Godot. And obviously later in his life, he played in Waiting for Godot on Broadway amongst other places. So those two young teenagers from the so-called Grimm Up North,

where all the savages, illiterate savages live who aren't interested in radical art and culture, had made their way to the Opera House to see Beckett in literally the first year where Beckett was available in English theatre. And so also Delaney and Ian McKellen meeting on the street outside would also be a radio play, work, writing. I was going to say, Dave, this is very much like the pistols at the free trade hall. They say that only 200 people saw Waiting for Godot at the Manchester Opera House, but everyone

who did went out and became an actor or wrote a play. You call it Waiting for Beckett's, I think, play. Oh, that is very good. It's written in my head. Right, well listen. Well thanks both for coming. We could not hope for a more expert team to talk about both The Taste of Honey and Sheila Delaney.

Well, rather like the book we covered on the last episode of Backlisted, The Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson, A Taste of Honey tells the story of a bored teenager looking for a way out of a humdrum existence. But instead of a futuristic dystopia, Jo, the heroine of A Taste of Honey, is trapped in a shabby flat in 50 Salford with her disreputable, hard-drinking mother Helen. The pair's bickering – which is vicious one minute and hilarious the next – is the lifeblood of the play. After Jo falls pregnant by a visiting black sailor named Jimmy, Helen temporarily abandons her daughter and in the second act Jo is befriended by an art student called Jeff who moves into the flat and helps her prepare for the baby's arrival.

It becomes obvious to Jo that Jeff is gay, it is not marrying love between us, she tells him. But they are happy together, or happy enough, until Helen returns and decides to take charge. A Taste of Honey is one of the most famous and most important British plays of the 20th century. It deals with variously, class, gender, sexual orientation, race, the age of consent, illegitimacy, and most notably arguably, the North. Sheila Delaney wrote it in a fortnight when she was still only 18 after a trip to the theater to see either variations on a theme by Terence Rattigan

or Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Accounts differ, Dave, accounts differ. I think both. I think both. variations on a theme by Terence Rattigan or Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Accounts differ, Dave, accounts differ. I think both. I think both. Well, that's the point, isn't it, that she had that grounding in theatre and perhaps Rattigan was also a better story to put out there. It's, you know, cocking a snook at Rattigan is a better line than being influenced by Beckett anyway. The play was produced

by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a socialist fringe theatre in London on the 27th of May 1958. The production then transferred to the West End in February 1959, to Broadway in 1960, and to film in 1961, directed by Toni Richardson from a script by Delaney herself. And I'm just going to read a few lines by the author Melanie Williams from the BFI volume On a Taste of Honey. claims from the BFI volume on a taste of honey. Dr Williams says, claims Dr Williams, that's what they say isn't it? How dare you? Professor Williams to you Andy. Yeah, Professor Williams claims, if you wanted to get some sense of the zeitgeist in Britain

around 1961, you could do worse than Watch A Taste of Honey. The film is absolutely steeped in its watershed historical moment, a product of the innovative British new wave in cinema, derived from a play central to post-war theatre's proletarian revolution, imbued with a particular youthful northern non-conformist sensibility just one year ahead of the Beatles' first hit record Love Me Do. Appearing on the cusp of the swinging sixties but before any swinging had begun in earnest, A Taste of Honey dealt with some of the period's most urgent social concerns, from unmarried

motherhood to interracial relationships to homosexuality, which certainly didn't harm its commercial prospects. Teenage sex, a black baby on the way and a queer boyfriend, she's not so dumb, observed one theatre workshop associate when 18-year-old Sheila Delaney's roughly typed play script first arrived through their letterbox in 1958. So what is it about A Taste of Honey that continues to speak to audiences nearly 70 years after it premiered and where might characters like Jo, Helen and Jeff have ended up? And what did Sheila Delaney do next? Well before we discuss all those matters and more, let's hear from 19-year-old Sheila

Delaney herself on the first night of the West End run of A Taste of Honey being interviewed by a baffled and infuriated man from ITV. Mr Delaney, you must be feeling pretty excited about tonight. Have you got the butterflies? No, I've just got a very bad cold at the moment. That's all that's worrying me. How do you anticipate the critics will receive your play? Well, I'll be very interested to read what the critics say, but I really feel that the best form of criticism, the form that I find most rewarding anyway, is that when, you know, somebody off the street, like when the players at Stratford and all those sort of somebody off the street like when the

players at Stratford and all those sort of cafes the locals like came in you know the brick layers and the cleaners and everything when they said it was good and they enjoyed it I knew they meant it and it was much more rewarding for me that way. How much help did you have in writing your play? Well originally when I wrote the original thing I didn't have any help at all, you know, I just wrote it. But when I went into production, I think Joan Littlewood is the most sort of valuable person I've ever met, as far as work's concerned.

She is producing the play? Yeah. Your play is rather a sordid theme. Where did you gather your information? I just applied my imagination to my observation. That's the safe answer. Observation where? In your native language? Yeah. Well, it had to be there. I've never been anywhere else. I understand you're getting married soon.

No, I'm not getting married soon at all, no. It's been reported. It has been, yeah, but you know, that sort of thing isn't usually very reliable, is it? It's all there, isn't it? It's flawless from the start. Just, she's incredible. I love his pronunciation of the word pleh, P-L-E-H.

That's very good. Right. We should start by asking Dave, where and when did you first encounter Sheila Delaney or A Taste of Honey? I studied, look back in anger at school. So I was about 15 and then the teacher suggested that we look at other texts that were to do with the so-called kitchen sink drama

and we read A Taste of Honey and I thought it was so superior to Look Back in Anger with all due respect to the John Osborne fans who were tuned in in their millions and I found Look Back in Anger, I mean the Jimmy Porter's tie raids were just so tiresome and even though I wasn't particularly enlightened and progressive 15-year-old, I could tell that his attitude to women really was very, very poor. So I got to Taste of Honey and I felt it was so much more refreshing and dynamic. I loved the relationships between the characters.

The language was superb and the humour was just the kind of sarcastic humour that I really loved then and still kind of love. So it was through reading the play. Then I think I saw the film and then I did manage to see a couple of productions quite early in my life. I went to Bolton, Octagon to see one. I think the thing that really endeared me to was the White Bus, which I read as a short story. As Andy said, it's subsequently been a film, short film anyway, but,

and I thought that the White Bus kind of took sarcasm to such a high degree that I really adored that. I took my daughter to see A Taste of Honey at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. She was 12 and she giggled all the way through. I just thought that was great, you know, and quite compared to what the man from ITN was probably thinking about the play. You know, Angry Young Woman or whatever other box that she might have been put into. It was sordid, David. Sordid and savage.

I thought it was great that my 12 year old daughter thought it was one of the funniest plays that she'd ever seen. My 11 year old wandered in while I was watching the film last week, my 11 year old daughter, and sat through to the end, hadn't watched from the start, but was interested, was going, well, you know, what's this?

Who are these people? Give me a bit of context. So again, I think just the sound of it and the way those people are speaking to each other and the rhythms of it were pulling her in. And my kid won't watch a black and white movie, not without being nailed to the seat, but this one kind of, yeah, was looped in.

Melanee, given that you have devoted a chunk of your career to thinking and writing about Sheila Didelaney, can you remember when you first encountered her? I think the first encounter was not reading A Taste of Honey. I was doing English A-level, and the other group was doing A Taste of Honey. I was doing English A-level and the other group was doing A Taste of Honey as the example of 20th century drama. Our group was doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof instead.

I think there were only so many books to go around. I got a sense of what that was about from my friends who were in the other group doing the other books. So that was quite weird sort of learning about it but at one remove and perhaps slightly enviously thinking, oh that sounds interesting. Then I think I saw the film on television, not quite sure exactly when, but you know I went through a real phase of watching all those Kitchen Sink and New Wave films. So it was part of that and I very much enjoyed it. And I think as well, Sheila Delaney as someone that Morrissey name dropped. So that idea of her as a kind of interesting cultural figure that this other person was

kind of admiring and looking up to and making references to also was part of learning about Sheila Delaney. Yes, she's on the cover, isn't she, of Louder Than Bombs and Sheila Take A Bow is about her. Yeah. Dave, speaking of pop stars, Sheila Delaney comes over like a pop star, doesn't she? When you see those interviews with her on monitor and that she's very charismatic and funny and won't put up with any nonsense. Absolutely. I mean, it is that thing of emerging almost fully formed,

which is so impressive. And really a sense of believing in what she was doing, but also just a great attitude to bad questions. And in the same way, swerving all social conventions, feeling like she can assert who she is, I am somebody, you know, like a star would, you know, at the beginning of their life. It's very much all generated by her. The Morrissey connection is interesting,

but, you know, and when Sheena Delaney died, of course the Manchester Evening News pegged the whole story of her passing on the fact that she was Morrissey's muse. Which, you know, once had me stood outside the Manchester Evening News office for three days until I found the journalist who'd written that. She certainly has Melanie that same, and then Mark Lewis says of the Beatles that one of the reasons that they captured the national imagination and then the world's imagination is they had a kind of amused northern disrespect for the conventions of broadcasting, be they radio or TV broadcasting. And as Dave says, it wasn't an act.

It was just they were very good at being, at finding it all hilarious and slight. And you see that in that clip we listened to of Sheila there, don't you? She's kind of like, who are you, you silly man? And this is how you'll have talked back to the television or the radio, but because of the time it is, now it's actually getting broadcast. This is what you would have been doing at home

with somebody on the radio or a face on the telly, but now you're being interviewed and coming out with this pattern that you'd be doing back on the sofa, yeah? Oh, that's great. Yeah. I mean, I love all that, you know, it's like, no, I'm not getting married. They're so, I mean, all, all the press around the time is so eager to have her kind of parceled off as a married woman because there's a sense then she won't be this young, uh, actually now very wealthy

woman who said, you know, I intend to spend, spend, spend, anticipating Viv Nicholson and her Paul's win. She falls out with Joe Littlewood and Jerry Raffles because she wants to buy a shiny red sports car with the money she's got for the film rights for A Taste of Honey. She's not yet 21, so they're still kind of handling her financial affairs and she's like, no, I want to do this. I mean, I think one thing that strikes you is the amazing kind of confidence of her,

particularly as a young woman as well, to be so able to kind of speak and speak using her own voice. I think with that ITN clip, you really get a sense of the contrast between her soft, northern, sort of sarcastic voice and this very kind of clipped, patrician, male interviewer voice and she just kind of speaks her truth and it's flabbergasting. Una, you asked what did Sheila Delaney do next? It seems to me that Sheila Delaney spent a lot of her life

and career trying to avoid traps laid for her by establishment figures. And even within the establishment, we could include Joan Littlewood in the theatre workshop. You know, there is a real tension in Delaney's work, I think, between a kind of well-meaning middle-class Richard Hoggartish sense of what the working class communities should represent. And on the other, wanting to buy and get some money and have a car and do what you want.

That's what Delaney is constantly rubbing up against. Yeah, and takes her second play away from Littlewood, is that right? The line in love, that sort of goes from Littlewood doesn't it? Melanie, what do you know about that? Yeah she, I mean there is this falling out with Littlewood and whilst they're still very close and Delaney acknowledges her as this incredible facilitator and supporter. There's tensions there and Delaney takes her next play elsewhere. And I think there's also a sense that everybody is wanting her to fail. All the critics, you know, this is like difficult second album territory.

Everybody wants this to not be as good as A Taste of Honey so that they can claim she's a one-hit wonder, a meteoric teenager, but now we're over all that nonsense. The pressure on her to deliver another hit play, but also for them to find it wanting in some way. And she's still only in her early 20s by this point. I mean, it's, you know, again, the kind of pressure that she's under is what makes other people kind of bend, I think. I think the other pressure is that pressure of people expecting you to keep doing the same thing. You know, oh, A Taste of Honey was a hit.

And this is who you are. This is the box that we're all putting you into. Write more stuff like A Taste of Honey. And that was just not what she wanted to do. And a sense as well I have that whatever she had done next, there would have been Tall Poppy Syndrome, there would have been, oh, she's, it's not as good. Oh, she's repeating herself. Oh, it was all Joan Littlewood. Oh, it's not her. All of these things, I think, you often hear women's writing talked about in this way. It was a one-off, it wasn't really her.

Look what she wrote about, this kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, with that play, even in that ITN interview, it's like, how much help did you get? This disbelief that she could have actually generated this writing herself. Someone else must have written

it for you. It's probably the Earl of Oxford. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And with the film adaptations as well, you know, it's always like, oh well, Tony Richardson's really the one that's made this a success. There's also a very Northern, to quote a different Kitchen Sink text, whatever you say I am, that's what I'm not. As nicked by the Arctic Monkeys for their album title, but it actually comes from,

I think it comes from Saturday night and Sunday morning, doesn't it? It's Arthur Seaton, played by Albert Finney. Whatever you say I am, that's what I'm not. There is that kind of thing within Delaney and within Delaney's characters as well. I really see that. They speak for themselves, as you said, Melanie.

Why don't we hear a clip from A Taste of Honey? Dave, do you just wanna set this up for us? You chose this little excerpt from the film. Yeah, I mean, I think that the relationship between young Joe and mother Helen is so central and so wonderful and so ambivalent and passionate and everything. I wanted to represent some sort of classic,

a classic encounter between the two. And it comes just after Jimmy, the young black sailor, has walked with Joe for a while, and in fact asked her to marry her in quite a jocular fashion. They're talking to each other and Joe says, did your ancestors come from Africa?

He says, no, Cardiff. And also that little episode ends with Joe saying, dream of me. And he says, I dreamt about you last night. I fell out of bed twice. And then we cut to this clip of Helen in the bath as it happens, which you won't realize necessarily in the audio back at the lodgings where they are and Joe and Helen meet.

Is that you Joe? Yeah. Well you're late aren't you, where have you been? Met a friend. Oh well he's certainly not out to put pink in your cheeks. What makes you think it's he? I certainly hope it isn't a she that makes you walk around in this enraptured fashion. He's a sailor. Well, I hope you exercise proper control over his nautical ardour. Jo, I've got something to tell you. Joe, I'm going to get married again. Is it that Peter Smith?

He's the unlucky man, yes. You're centuries older than him. Do you mind? I'm only eight years. What use can a woman of your age be to anybody? I wish you wouldn't talk about me as if I'm an impotent old woman. You're not exactly a child bride. I was once. I have to be dead and buried by the time I reach your age. Just think you've been living for 40 years. I know I must be a biological phenomenon. You don't look 40. You look a

sort of well-preserved 60. Oh, you're a cheeky monkey, you are. I mean, how many times have I heard that said to me, oh, you're a cheeky monkey. That was Dora Bryan as Helen and the goddess Rita Tushingham as Joe. Dave, the relationship between Joe and Helen in the play, I was interested you chose that bit, although you could have chosen many parts of it, but certainly there, there's a role reversal. It's like Joe is the adult and Helen is the child.

Yeah, there's so much that's interesting about that relationship between them, because also there's a, I think at one point Helen says you're supposed to learn from my mistakes. And there's a sense, especially where that appears in the play, there's a sense that actually Jo isn't doing that to the extent that we might as viewers of the play wish her to. So they're kind of more alike than they think they are. As we heard, they bicker a lot. And they both need, as you sometimes think about managers of rock bands, sometimes they need a manager, you know, and in that same way, they both need looking after.

They both have a kind of a vague idea that they're gonna find happiness, but their expectations, especially Helen's, are quite low. And by the end of the play, I think Joe's are as well. When we come back, we're gonna have a conversation about the influence that that kind of dialogue had on all sorts of film and TV that followed it. But first we need to take a commercial break. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses only in theaters August 29th From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch,

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they are. Visit Specsavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. And we're back. Melanie, that kind of dialogue, we're so used to listening to that kind of stuff now that we heard before the ad break. The banter, the bickering between Joe and Helen. I hear so much of the popular culture of the 20th century that followed in its wake there. Could you say a little bit about that?

I mean, when the play is first reviewed, lots of people talk about this feeling like real life coming, like scuffling and shouting and bickering onto the stage. And I think that, I mean, it's drawing on music calledstalk, particularly at the theatre workshop version, this idea of addressing the audience and doing it a bit like a musical double act. But the difference, I think, the shift and probably what makes it most influential is that sense of the kind of reality of it. And Delaney talks about, you know, I write how people talk and I got fed up with seeing gormless working class characters in drama and I wanted to give across a sense of how vivid and alive people's conversations are, even if they're kind of disagreeing with each other. So I think that

comes across so vibrantly. And it's no coincidence that Tony Warren sees a production of A Taste of Honey and that feeds directly into his own Salford melodrama, Still going, Coronation Street. It's the wellspring, I think, of a lot of stuff. Things like Victoria Wood, that sense of how slightly exaggerated and heightened, but this female back and forth thrust and parry of a bit argumentative, but also loving. And it's love language being argument. That feels like a massive influence on lots of things that come after. I certainly, Una, see its influence on sitcom. The simple idea of trapping two people in a situation and then having them argue with one another underpins everything from the likely lads to Porridge to Steptoe and Sunt. Partly constrained by needing to do something in a small studio. But then I think behind this, you can see what we were saying earlier,

you can see Waiting for Godot, can't you? You can see Beckett and the two voices talking at cross purposes or not necessarily about the same thing and then cutting into each other. But no, I don't think Coronation Street would exist without this. Couldn't exist. But you can also see, Dave, Godot certainly, two characters trapped waiting for something, they don't know what. But also you can see the influence or a pastiche of Rattigan, the idea of instead of being in a drawing room exchanging witticisms, you're in a one bedroom flat exchanging a courser kind of banter. I can see that there is a, both those things are feeding into a taste of honey.

Absolutely, but the other thing which I think is important in terms of the Coronation Street, and also how we think of a taste of honey as shifting the theater off its axis, you know, and being revolutionary and catching a zeitgeist or even creating a zeitgeist is its female characters who are the strong characters who are witty and passionate and sometimes make mistakes. Coronation Street, the female characters, are historically always so important. And the way of speaking, although it was talked about as this is real life,

there's a kind of heightened enjoyment in the sound of the words, which I think is incredible. So I think it's that, because again in the other so-called kitchen sink we've had young men talking to other young men about you know we've got to get out of this place you know and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. And this is women and so it was you know you can, I think looking at it now, you can, because of the sitcom, and because we're used to it, because of Coronation Street, I think we don't quite appreciate how avant-garde it was. Melanie, thinking about this, while Dave was talking, just rifling through was talking, just rifling through the index file in my brain of Delaney's other work, she writes almost exclusively, doesn't she, about female protagonists? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of focus on women's experience and that makes her quite interestingly interestingly anomalous, but she's also very interested in relationships that are codependencies

in some way. You can see several of those in A Taste of Honey, the mother-daughter, but also the other relationships that Jo has with different men. She's a really interesting writer on marriage. I think you get that in Charlie Bubbles later on, and you get that in certainly in The House that Jack Built, which is kind of like a portrait of a marriage and from the wedding through to getting divorced. She's very interested in other kind of strains and tensions in a relationship, but she does give space to the kind of women's side of that. Because I think it's true in the kitchen sink stuff, usually if someone gets pregnant, it's all about, oh, the man is going to be trapped by that. Whereas a taste of honey looks at that same issue but from the other side of the coin. What

does that mean for the girl who's pregnant? There's a series of her audio, her radio plays, which I think are written during the sort of 90s and noughties and they're available. You can hear them on Audible and they reinforce exactly what you're saying Melanie, which is that it's a tight group of women who were friends from childhood, in a convalescent home actually, Sweetly Sings the Donkey, I think it's based on a short story,

but then it follows that friendship and how some of them are a bit more friends than others, there's one that they tolerate, and there's a lovely duology, a very painful duology about a couple that have split up and it's an aunt and her nephew and the relationship between them. But again, it's like you say, it's the tightness of those relationships, the women-focused relationship or the female-focused and the way they can't entirely get away from each other. I think radio really suited her. It sort of strips

it away, just brings it to the voice and the necessity for kind of interaction between those voices and those people and the batting two and fourth as well. Well, I would like to, as is my personal brand on Backlisted, I would like to draw matters back to Bob Dylan. But Dylan said very famously

when he came off, after he came off his motorbike in 66, that he lost the ability to produce work of the richness and instinctively the speed that he had done so in the first 10 years of his career, seven, eight, 10 years of his career. And he said, famously, I had to learn consciously to do what I had done unconsciously. And I see Delaney's career as a very similar process,

Delaney's career as a very similar process, having now had the opportunity to hear those late plays, they are extremely well crafted. I mean, they're good. I'm not damning them with faint praise, but whatever that fluorescence of energy was when she was 18, 19. She writes about similar things like all great writers do for her whole career, but she changes how she does it. And she does it in a, this is why it seems to me, Melanie, a real tragedy, not tragedy, perhaps overstating it, but in a sense of great, a real shame that we can't see Delaney's career in the round. That she is, as Dave says, a one hit wonder and all her other singles and LPs are out of print and haven't even come out on CD. Don't even circulate as bootlegs. It's such a shame. Yeah. That first success and all of the kind of ballyhoo and the kind of press paraphernalia

that comes with that, it casts such a long shadow and everything she does subsequently is seen in relation to something that she did as a teenager. I think anybody would find that very difficult to deal with. I remember Jeanette Winterson writing about her and comparing her to Harold Pinter and saying one of the tragedies is that she wasn't given the chance to develop her talent in the way that someone like Pinta had Peter Hall to support him. Therefore, his dramatic career reaches this kind of different level because he's got a mentor and the whole thing of being mentored as a male writer is less problematic and fraught than her position. But at the same time, we mustn't then think, oh, she has one

big hit and then nothing afterwards. The quality of the work that comes after is brilliant, but it's in lots of different places, in lots of different formats. So it's much harder to kind of trace that through line of her career because of that. I suppose the mentorship was there offered by Littlewood, but it wouldn't have been true to Delaney to accept it, I guess, is the, it wouldn't have been creatively, perhaps productive for her to sort of go, I'll work with you, I'll continue working with you.

Dave, can I ask you to respond to this? This is a clipping from a column in The Times in 1965. So we're seven years on from the theatrical success of Taste of Honey and four years on from the success of the film. This is the theater critic of the Times, writing a column. I'll just read this and Dave,

tell me what you think of this. I think the playwright most to be pitied is Sheila Delaney. Being sorry for young women who have sold the film rights of their first play for thousands of pounds is not precisely a habit of mine, but Ms. Delaney is a special case. Her success was more spectacular than others. Her youth, her working class origin, and the story that she had written, a taste of honey, as a kind of thumb-to-the-nose gesture in Rattigan's direction, all made her hot news,

and the most extravagant praise came her way. How could she write with that cloud on her head? Automatically too much was expected of her second play and it was a disappointment and the third is yet to come. It is a daunting situation for a not very fully trained dramatist. And if Miss Delaney never writes that third play and her talent is lost to the theatre, who will be to blame but the people who acclaimed her so immoderately to begin with? Wow, well blaming the critics who actually absolutely got a taste of funny from the very first, it's a bit of a weird way of trying

to bury Sheila Delaney. I mean, that was the year 1965 when she was working on the white bus. You know, so she was working away and just because that fella, I assume it was a fella, you didn't make that clear, but that fella. It was a fella. Yeah. Well, there's also, if I take it on a little bit, it is interesting how that cultural explosion that Melanie was talking about earlier, where there was the kitchen sink drama and there was Saturday night, Sunday morning, and there was Look Back in Anger, and there was Taste of Honey, and there were the films and there were the plays.

I'm also minded that they were given a certain amount of space by the establishment and the critics, who then wanted to move on. Okay, we've done working class realism. Let's go into somewhere new. That's not the thing anymore. In the same ways that music journalists

always looking for the next big thing. But also there could be a little bit of a deeper thing where the Beatles and the animals had come along and that notion that that teenagers and young people might have had of kind of unease and that kind of unease that the you've never had it so good consensus and that feeling that Sheila Delaney talked about in the Ken Russell documentary about feeling tethered and the idea that England is all about country houses and drawing room dramas, that actually a lot of that spirit which she absolutely got was transferred in a way into that British pop music arena, the Northern Beatles, the sarcastic humour, the animals have got to get out

of this place. And so it's also partly because I think she was identified, her taste of honey was identified as being part of a genre which we've all moved on from, both in terms of theatre and in terms of wider culture. There's also a big dollop there, isn't there, of know your place, whether you're from the North or the working class or whatever. You've had a good little run out. Now you're being rather vulgar by wanting to buy a car

and have some money, so pipe down now. Dave, forgive me, but I jumped up boy who never knew their place is a very good sense of the indignation that that guy clearly feels by the mid 1960s to still have to be thinking about Sheila's Laney. How can he shut her down? Melanie, sorry. Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking about her own discomfort, increasing discomfort with being the object of press interest, because by the mid-60s, she's had a baby, she's not married and she gets kind of doorstopped by the press and her picture put on the cover of the papers. And after that point, she is very reticent about being photographed, about having very much to do with any kind of press. So I think there are particular reasons why she withdraws and they are to do with, I suppose,

her being associated with the characters that she wrote in being an unmarried mother and the whole, you know, there's more freedom and more possibilities for men in that period than there is for someone like Delaney, I think. Melanie, could you, I want to hear another clip from the film. Could you just give people a little sense of who we're hearing and where they are?

Yeah, so Jo is pregnant and is feeling ambivalent to say the least about it, but she's developed a friendship with Jeff who's an art student, is, and they've kind of set up home together. And she's feeling quite depressed about her predicament, and she goes for a walk, and she's under big railway viaduct when Jeff catches up with her. Have you seen Joe? Shut the arches! Hey, I've been looking for you. I've cooked dinner, don't you want it? I don't fancy it. Well, I haven't poisoned you up till now. I don't want anything to eat.

I'm gonna have a baby. Yes, I thought so. You're in a bit of a mess, aren't you? Oh, I don't care. You can get rid of babies before they're born, you know. Yes, I know, but I think that's terrible. When's it due? About November.

Your mother should know. Why? Well, look at the things you'll have to buy for a baby. Clothes. And you need a cotton of pram, won't you? About November. Your mother should know. Why? Look at the things you'll have to buy for a baby. Clothes. And you'll need a cotton of pram, won't you? Oh, shut up! I'm not planning big plans for this baby.

You're dreaming big dreams. You know what happens when you do things like that? This baby will be born dead, a daft of... You're just feeling a bit depressed, that's all. You'll be your usual self once you get used to the idea. And what is my usual self? My usual self is a very unusual self. And don't you forget that Geoffrey Ingham. I'm an extraordinary person. There's only one of me like there's only one of you.

We're unique. Young. Unrivaled. Smashing. We're bloody marvellous. We're bloody marvellous. Why hasn't that been the title of some book about this scene? Or that is that is a I'm so pleased you chose that bit Melanie. Could you just say a little for us about the character of Geoff played there and in the original production by Murray Melvin, the late Murray Melvin? Both of the men that Joe is involved with are so lovely and

nurturing and sympathetic and Jeff is like this, you know, marvellous, supportive, loving friend that Joe is lucky enough to make. Murray Melvin's performance is fabulous in the film, which is obviously the preserved version that we have of it, although he was also in the stage production and in the Broadway production as well. He is such an interesting figure and it's just at that point where in the British stage and also British cinema, stories that engage with homosexuality are beginning to be permitted. They're not just being outright, not an area that you can engage with. Homosexuality is still illegal of, in the late 50s and early 1960s, but the Thor is setting in, isn't it? It's very interesting that the film of A Taste of Honey is the same year as Victim, the brilliant Dirk Bogard melodrama that has this amazing confession

that he feels sexual desire for another man. And it's an amazing shattering moment in British cinema and British culture. But when Dirk Bogard and Murray Melvin were working on a film a couple of years later, HMS Defiant, Bogard said to him that, you know, I think your character in A Taste of Honey did more to kind of raise awareness and kind of help understanding than everything that I did in Victim, which is interesting, I think,

from Bogard. And there's a difference in the way that the two films are approaching. How do we deal with a gay character? Do we focus on that alone or like with Jeff, is that just one component of a very nuanced and interesting character? I would say the difference is that Bogart's character and victim is tortured by his homosexuality and Jeff in A Taste of Honey is tortured by being Jeff. You know, it's, it's a, it's a, as you say, that's the rounded picture.

We're just going to move on while we have time. Sheila Delaney wrote the script for after the success of the film, The Taste of Honey. She adapted a short story, The White Bus, which we talked about. And she also wrote a script for Albert Finney's production company. I believe she was commissioned to do this in 1965. It didn't make it into cinemas until 1968.

For a film starring Albert Finney and which Albert Finney directed, the only time he directed a film, Charlie Bubbles. And I asked all our panel members to watch once again Charlie Bubbles, confident that they either wouldn't have seen it or like Melanie, they did the Blu-ray commentary. When I saw you, Dave did the Blu-ray commentary.

Or when I saw you, Dave, the other night, you said, why did you make me watch Charlie Bubbles again? So I'm gonna ask you first, David, what did you make of it, seeing it again? There were parts of it which I enjoyed. I still find the Liza Minnelli appearances quite excruciating, but Billy Whitelaw, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant. And just to mention Samuel Beckett again, you can see why she's one of his, was one of his favorite actresses. I like, what the bit I love is when Charlie Bubbles takes his son to Old Trafford football ground.

And it's very prescient because it's a father who occasionally visits the son, his son having had a separation from the son's mother, which, you know, is now kind of happens all the time. But I don't, Melanie will probably tell me there's a long tradition of this in British cinema. But it's the first time I remember it being a part of it. And he takes the son to Old Trafford and they sit in a luxury box,

kind of away from the life on the terraces. And the little boy is very bored and then kind of runs off. And that idea of living in a bubble that Charlie Bubbles does and being at one removed from real life due to his success as a writer is right through the film. But that encapsulates it in such a good way. And just to point out that when he runs away from Old Trafford and his father, and his father goes to find him, he somehow miraculously gets from Old Trafford to Ancoats, and he's running up and down the derelict canals of Ancoats, which I guess was more photogenic or impactful than the semi-detached houses around in Stretford that it's more likely to have run into. But Sheila Delaney was very instrumental

in finding locations in Charlie Bubbles. So I do have a few reservations. IMDB, which is the internet database, describes Charlie Bubbles as a married man has an affair with his secretary. Okay. Which I think is the worst summation of any film. I had a go. Just let me, my, a successful writer's life seems a bit empty, but people keep giving him sandwiches. It's a film about food. That is a film about food. Feed the man. I'm trying to think of bad summaries for taste of honey. A mother and daughter bond

over their relationships. Melanie, you've spoken about the relationship in Charlie Bubbles between food and class and success. It occurred to me that one of the in jokes there is that Albert Finney had become a worldwide film star as a result of a specific scene that involved eating in Tom Jones. Right? It seems to be a bit of a gag in a film with quite a lot of jokes in them. Before I come to you, Melanie, Una, do you share Dave's opinion that for some bizarre reason, the sight of Liza Minnelli at Newport Pagnell Services or running up a slag heap is not inherently fascinating?

You see, I hadn't seen this before. And it was obviously one of the, you know, cultural highlights of my year, Andy, I would say. It's the scene with Billy Whitelaw at the end, when we see the son again, that sort of absolutely unfunctioning family and the way that the kid is playing the mother off the father. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

Melanie, this idea that Albert Finney is playing Sheila Delaney rather than Charlie Bubbles, what do you think? Yeah, no, I think there's a lot in Charlie Bubbles that is, I mean, interesting as well that Albert Finney and Sheila Delaney are both Salford, they're kind of born and live within a few streets of each other. So they've got this kind of shared background and they've both become kind of celebrities off the back of being in things about working class life. And then there's a sense of where does your career go beyond that? And both of them kind of struggle with it but the things that are particularly about writing seem to be so pertinent and so much like what a

working-class writer going back to their hometown might the kind of conversations they they might have. I'll give you my theory about Charlie Bubbles. I think it's so about Sheila Delaney that the scene at the end which you've all just referred to with Billy Whitelaw is almost in quotation marks. It's almost like saying look if I wanted to do kitchen sink stuff I could do it better than anybody else and she creates this incredible 15 minutes of cinema and then what does she do? She walks away from it, gets in a balloon and floats away forever. So I think it's a comment on types of writing, films about writing, books about books, you know. I think it's a wonderful film,

very different to A Taste of Honey but some of the same themes in there anyway. That's where we must bring down the curtain on our discussion of A Taste of Honey. Thanks to Dave for choosing the play and to Melanie for filling out the dramatist personae. And many thanks to East London's Nikki Birch, our own Joan Littlewood, for producing a show which will be transferring to New York in October. NYC baby, details are on the show notes. Buy the tickets, buy the tickets. Come and see us, come and say hi.

And if you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the previous 244 episodes, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

Remember, if you subscribe at the lock listener level, you get two extra exclusive podcasts every month, installments of Andy's new writing project Inventory, which is fantastic, and the chance to join a community of dedicated listeners and readers like us. But before we go, Melanie, is there anything that you'd like to add about Delaney or A Taste of Honey that we didn't get a chance to get to? It's a real shame that her collection of short stories, Sweetly Sings the Donkey is not in print.

I got it out as a library book. It's full of fabulous writing. Um, it would be great if people could access that in the way that they're now able to access more of her film and TV work. Good news, Melanie. It's on the internet archive. So you can borrow it from there if nothing else. David, how about you?

Is that, yeah, he's so polite. How about you? Is there anything you'd like to add? I really wanted to do a shout out to youther Joyce, who makes a very short appearance in Charlie bubbles and is also on the front cover of a Smiths record and is I'm a big fan of youther Joyce's. Right well we'll be back in a fortnight with a show about youther Joyce do join us there. Not James Joyce, youther Joyce. Thanks ever so much, thanks Melanie, thanks Dave, this has been an absolute delight.

Thanks everyone for listening. Una, any last message for to humanity? Oh no, just to our chucks. See you everybody, see you next time. Bye bye. The End