The Hidden Truth 1.9 Sweets to the Sweet (10th September 1964). Written by Hugh Leonard; dir. Peter Moffatt. Featuring Alexander Knox, James Maxwell & Ruth Meyers. Guest starring Bernard Archard, Joyce Heron, James Hunter, Kate Coleridge, William Buck & Ian Ogilvy.
“The people concerned are friends of mine, and I’m inclined to distrust my own conclusions.”
This episode was rediscovered and shown by Talking Pictures in autumn 2021, although only partially. With about 10-15 minutes missing, this is the most incomplete of the four surviving episodes (although, ironically, it feels a lot more complete than “A Question of Involvement.”)
The topical subject of this episode (”purple heart” pills) generated more press interest than any other, even to the point of describing the still-missing ending. (As to what else is lost - from the first half of the episode, a conversation between Lazard and Gerry in the car cuts out mid sentence, and there presumably must have been a scene that explained why Lazard was so amused at Dr Fox’s choice of reading matter later.)
Drinamyl (Dexamyl in the US) was an amphetamine/barbiturate addictive drug (blue triangle pills, nicknamed “purple hearts”), often prescribed to women with anxiety, that became a big part of the early 1960s Mod scene. (The Guardian had reported the previous year that it was being “eaten like sweets” in cafes in Islington.) It was everywhere in the media that year (when it was made illegal in the UK), including a series of Panorama Mod interviews. (The drug had a long history of abuse and was discontinued in 1982 in favour of safer alternatives.)
The critics (as ever) weren’t necessarily impressed. Ben Hewitt in the Daily Herald was fairly scathing about its “tourist trap... slumming” and predictability, its moral of “don’t trust your children, lecture them, search their rooms” and its failure to portray the “strange, sweaty Soho of reality.” The one scene Hewitt praised is currently missing from the recovered episode: “Its down-beat ending, with the pep-pill supply drying up and a baby-faced Canadian offering heroin all round, was the only surprise in a plodding script.”
The Mirror felt it was a subject better left to the “straight approach” of documentaries - but that this was the best episode of the series so far.
Playwright Hugh Leonard told the The Stage he had deliberately chosen to centre the episode around Lazard: “I am afraid that Alexander Knox has a busy time in my story,” says Hugh Leonard. “Although I don’t know him personally, I have always been a great admirer of his acting ability, so when I was asked for a script for this series, I made up my mind to use him practically throughout.”
The opening sequence was “filmed in the underground car park at Marble Arch, where, it is rumoured, Alfred Hitchcock is planning to make a thriller in the echoing corridors and vast concrete parking area.”
Zeph Gladstone, playing a St Jude’s nurse, had previously appeared in the same role in 1.4 “The Achilles Heel.”
