Light shed by Spotlight: The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Executioners, and more.


I've just updated this blog's not-perfect-but-more-complete-than-any-other list of Jacqueline Hill's performances (here it is. Go on, have a look!) to include a few more items.

One is the BBC Saturday Playhouse production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, starring Leo McKern. This is mentioned in at least one of Jackie's obituaries, but I didn't have a date for it or any other information until today. Now, though, I know that it was broadcast in the spring of 1960, and that Jackie played Maggie Cutler (the Bette Davis role, if you know the film). Online sources only mention McKern, so I can't say who else was in the cast; the detail about Jackie's role turned up in her entry in the 1965 Spotlight directory.

Also mentioned is ATV drama The Executioners, which I hadn't heard of at all. But this page has quite a lot of detail about it, as follows:

[04] ATV Drama ’61: THE EXECUTIONERS (60 min)

30Apr61 ITV Sun 9:05 pm

Written by Frederic Raphael

Produced by Geoffrey Nethercott

Designed by Eric Shedden

Starring:

William Sylvester ………. Mark Lander

Jack Gwillim …………… Walford

Derek Francis ………….. Altschuler

Alan Gifford …………… Ray Swift

Jacqueline Hill ………… Sylvia Lander

With:

Peter Swanwick …………. Mannheim

Carlos Douglas …………. Jose

Mark and Sylvia arrive at an isolated hotel on the Spanish coast. There are only two other guests and conditions are ideal for a quiet holiday. But another traveller arrives, bringing with him echoes of the past … and a memory which puts every character involved through a test of fire.

So Derek Francis, with whom Jackie was friendly offscreen and worked on programmes including The Six Proud Walkers and, later, Doctor Who, was in it as well. See here for a brief snippet of an interview with Penny Francis, his widow.

Then there's something called A Business of His Own, a BBC production. Again, it was a Spotlight entry - this time for January 1956 - that gave me what little I know. Jackie's character was called Helen, and the broadcast date must have been, I think, some time in 1955. A Business of His Own is listed after The Legend of Pepito here:

[Note from the compiler: picture not archived]

Another interesting thing I heard about recently was this, via Twitter: a tweet from someone in the audience at a Doctor Who convention called Power: Reimagined, at which the Doctor Who Restoration Team made an appearance. The tweet mentions "a recently-found film of a show starring Jacqueline Hill", and in the photo someone's actually holding a reel of film. I'm pretty keen to learn more about this, but the person who sent the tweet understandably hadn't noted down the details, as he had a talk to listen to.

I'm still working out who else to ask. If you know, I'd be glad to hear from you; and the same goes for anyone who may know something about the performances mentioned above.


Most of the picture from the article ended up being lost.

Equally lost is said mysterious tweet. This article was written in 2012, so must've been the tweet.

The only Jacqueline Hill stuff that has been found in recent memory is the Requiem for an Heavyweight AUDIO, and that was 2014 as well.

If anyone has any info on this, please contact me.