ABSTRACT
On the evening of 16 November 1966, an emotional, black-and-white television drama captivated viewing audiences across Britain and shattered the postwar complacency which held that problems of bad housing and homelessness, if not already things of the past, soon would be. The Wednesday Play that evening, on prime time B B C 1 , was Cathy Come Home. Directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, who had made their names collaborating on a previous social-realist dramatic success, Up the Junction, the play had an impact that would be unimaginable in later, more media-saturated years. A t the time, with television still a novelty and just three terrestrial channels (one of them the fledgling BBC2 , then barely two years old) to choose from, it seemed as i f virtually the whole nation had turned on to watch Carol White 's heart-rending performance as Cathy: and that virtually everyone in the country was talking about the issues raised by the drama the next day.
