Rainy Day Women – An Unknown World Set Amongst a Ghost Story Without Ghosts

“That summer the countryside had suddenly become an unknown world. A ghost story without the ghosts but they were expected any minute.”

Rainy Day Women (1984), written by David Pirie, was one of the later episodes of the BBC’s Play for Today television anthology drama strand and blimey, it’s stunning, thought provoking, unsettling, shocking and at points politically radical stuff. Viewed today it’s almost difficult to comprehend that challenging work like this was once part of the everyday mainstream television landscape.

Set during the Blitz in the Second World War, its main location is an isolated and classically British bucolic (in appearance at least) village where an army officer who is suffering from shellshock/PTSD is sent to investigate rumours of a German spy.

While having its own character the drama recalls the likes of Witchfinder General (1968), Straw Dogs (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) in the way it deals with the fear and persecution of women, the distrust of outsiders who have come to a small rural community, an outsider in a position of authority who is removed from the source of his power and subequently finds it neutered and the escalation of tensions into violent mob rule.

The few men who remain in the village have become drunk with the power that their position as Home Guards and the guns that go with it provide, and rather than seeming like patriots who wish to defend their country against invasion and the enemy within, they have become bullying jobsworths… and then much worse. Also their fears, worries and hatred of potential German spies does not seem so much an expression of patriotism but rather to be a form of moral panic and folk devils. This is particularly so as its expression finds focus and release in their persecution of a local independently minded, politically progressive and cultured woman who threatens their traditional male authority and associated expected social norms; that her husband had been interned due to being German seems more like a convenient excuse which enables the Home Guard’s persecution of her rather than the actual cause of their suspicions.

The incomer Land Girls who have come to work on the local farms due to the men going off to war have been billetted with this woman in her isolated home and there are rumours of sexual “deviancy” and a seemingly ever present undercurrent of fear amongst the men with regards to female emancipation and an accompanying worry that the woman will “turn” or corrupt the Land Girls and this will lead to an ending of their acquiescence to the men and disrupt the social hierarchy.

In the eyes of the local men, these are all qualities that mark the woman out as somebody to be mistrusted and she is known as a “witch” and thought to most probably be a spy, and when their suspicions, paranoia and perceived threats to their positions of masculine authority grow this leads to a deadly denouement. This is subsequently covered up and the story ends with a sense that those responsible for the nation’s internal propaganda during the war were willing to do whatever it took to prevent threats to morale.

The drama can be loosely placed alongside work which has been labelled as folk horror, in particular due to the way that it depicts rural areas as isolated places where the norms and conventions that govern and restrict society, individuals and behaviour are able to fall away. Accompanying this there is the push and pull contrast that is often found in folk horror between the rural location’s sun drenched bucolic beauty and the immediate and ever growing sense of threat and moral disintegration. Intertwining with this is the way that the quality of the unofficially distributed online streamable version – which as I discuss below is currently the only more easily available version which can be viewed –  is considerably degraded, and this lends a darkened, grimey air and atmosphere to the village and goings on there.

At the time of writing Rainy Day Women is only available for private viewing as part of the BFI National Archive at one of five Mediatheque centres in the UK,* more widely via unofficially distributed DVDs and also unofficially through having been posted online at public video streaming platforms such as YouTube. Perhaps that will have changed by the time this is published, as the BFI is releasing restored versions of some of the Play for Today dramas on Blu-ray and some have been released to be bought officially and/or rented via online streaming. In the meantime the way Rainy Day Women has been made available to stream online and via DVD forms part of an unsanctioned folk distribution of older television programmes:

“Although these are not officially sanctioned releases, curiously considering them often being posted on high profile online public platforms the copyright holders seem to not know of or overlook them, or at least they do not appear to rigorously seek them being removed. Perhaps they do not have the resources to do this, or do not focus on the unauthorised distribution of these sometimes semi-forgotten programmes but rather direct their attention and resources towards higher profile and more in demand content. Whatever the reason, this overlooking could be considered to make their distribution not so much a form of forbidden samizdat-like publication but rather a form of archival folk preserving and distribution of culture that, while unsanctioned, acts as a substitute for official releases.” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands.)

It seems a shame that so much of British mainstream archival television is only being made available in a piecemeal manner and/or its audiences restricted due to the manner of distribution and/or the related costs to potential viewers. In the case of Play for Today to watch the officially available episodes can require the purchase of Blu-ray boxsets which are not all that cheap as they can cost £40 or more each and/or there is a mishmash of some episodes being available to purchase for online streaming in the UK at Amazon while in October 2020 they were made available to stream in the US via the subscription service BritBox but are not available to view at their original home via the BBC’s  iPlayer streaming service, which the majority of British homes have access to through paying for a TV license. This becomes even more convoluted as none of them are available at the BFI Player streaming service, despite them releasing the Blu-ray boxsets, while the boxsets largely have different episodes to those available to stream at Amazon, which again differ in part from those available at BritBox in the US (Are you keeping up? There will be a test later…)

This contrasts with the manner in which when the Plays for Today were first broadcast between 1970 and 1984 on mainstream television (which is all there really was at the time due to there only being a few British television channels) it was to a large and potentially diverse audience.

The ease of distribution that online streaming could potentially allow with regards to British archival television seems to still be curiously somewhat under utilised. The just mentioned subscription model streaming service BritBox, the catalogue for which largely consists of pre-existing and older British television, could potentially have provided a relatively affordably priced home for such things but seems to largely have not focused on such things but more, athough not exclusively, tends to concentrate on higher profile well known “hits” etc. While the also just mentioned BBC iPlayer also tends to concentrate on the more populist “hits” and/or more recently broadcast programmes and to largely overlook the BBC’s older archival material such as Play for Today.

All of which leads me to a post from 20th October 2020 called “Folk horror and Play for Today, the ‘National Theatre of the airwaves'” by William Fowler at the BFI’s site, which is where I discovered about Rainy Day Women, and in which he wrote:

“Analogue broadcast television is truly still the undiscovered country, countless artefacts lying in wait to be overturned by the plough… There are countless oddities and genre hybrids, folk horror and otherwise, to discover across the huge, unlikely vistas of British TV land, including but also going far beyond Play for Today. Large and unwieldy, the dales and dark woodland of this landmass are at least partially fenced in with the ceasing of the analogue signal in 2012. Or earlier still with the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which opened up the bandwidth, coaxing what would become Sky television into existence and increasing the levels of now overt competition between the channels… From that point on, it was less likely that strange things, even politically pertinent and radical things, might occupy a primetime mainstream platform… [The best of Play for Today] still say something about the lie of the land. They are all plays for today: slippery, open to different contexts, and ready for resurrection.”

As suggested in the above quote, Rainy Day Women was produced towards the end of a period when there was space in British mainstream television for “strange… and radical things”, which had previously allowed for the production and broadcasting of the likes of challenging work that included The Owl Service (1968), Penda’s Fen (1974), The Changes (1975) and Stargazy on Zummerdown (1978):

“[such work] could be seen to indicate how during the… [1970s] the experimentation and liberalism within society and culture that occurred during the late 1960s and into the 1970s had come to also be present to a degree in institutions such as the BBC…” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Cathode Ray and Celluloid Hinterlands, as above.)

Andy Beckett and Roger Luckhurst suggested in The Disruption (2017),  a booklet that featured a conversation between them on the just mentioned television series The Changes, that this had the result of “permitting experiments and allowing the pushing of boundaries here and there…”

The peak for this “boundary pushing” may well have been during the 1970s but to a degree examples of it, including Rainy Day Women, can also be found in the 1980s, albeit in an increasingly embattled manner:

“[The 1980s could perhaps] be seen as having been part of a golden age in British television drama, which was given space to take risks and provide its audiences with [television drama] that was challenging, dealt with sometimes contentious issues but which also entertained… notable series to do so from this period might include the likes of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986), Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer (1986) and Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness(1985)… [and A Very Peculiar Practice (1986-1988]. In some ways, such work can now be seen as flashes of rearguard resistance to a sea-change in society and broadcasting culture brought about by the increasing dominance of free market economics and an ascendant right-leaning political philosophy…” (Quoted from A Year In The Country: Straying From The Pathways, 2018.)

This “sea-change” lead academic and author Mark Fisher to write that: