CAST

Dolly......................................................... Ann Mitchell
Bella.......................................................... Eva Mottley

PRODUCERS Verity Lambert, Linda Agran

PROGRAMMING HISTORY   6 52-minute episodes 16 March 1983-20 April 1983

Widows, a drama series with six 52-minute episodes written by Lynda La Plante was first broadcast on British television in the spring of 1983. The series had a simple, effective conceit, which was initially condensed into the opening credits, in which we saw a carefully planned robbery of a security van go badly wrong, with the apparent death of all participants. The widows of the title are the three women left alone by this catastrophe which has befallen Harry's gang. They decide, under the leadership of Harry's widow, Dolly (Ann Mitchell), to follow through the already laid plans for the next robbery--which they will conduct themselves after recruiting another recently widowed woman, Bella (Eva Mottley). This simple variation on a traditional crime story formula--the gang of robbers planning and carrying out a raid under the surveillance of the police-- offered a series of pleasures for both male and female viewers in what is traditionally a men's genre. The production company, Euston Films, a wholly owned subsidiary of Thames Television, set up in 1971 to make high quality films and film series for television, had a strong track record with the crime genre, being responsible for Special Branch, The Sweeney, Out, and Minder. Characteristics of the Euston series included London location shooting in a "fast" realist style, working class and often semi-criminal milieux and sharp scripts. Widows offered these familiar pleasures, but also engaged with changing ideas of appropriate feminine behaviour by audaciously presenting the widows of the title tutoring themselves in criminality so they could be agents not victims. In this sense the series, which had Verity Lambert as executive producer and Linda Agran as producer, was clearly a Euston product; it must also be understood in relation to earlier shows which had tried to insert women into the crime genre--such as Cagney and Lacey, The Gentle Touch and Juliet Bravo. The difference with Widows was that the women were on the wrong side of the law.

Following the success of the first series--which had six episodes and a continuous narrative--a second series was commissioned and the two were broadcast together in 1985. Again, the narrative was continuous over the two series, and at the end of Widows II the central character, Dolly Rawlins, was imprisoned. Some years later, in 1995, Lynda la Plante, the writer of the first series produced the final part to what had become a trilogy, She's Out in which Dolly returns. She's Out reprises Widows I to some extent in that its climax was a carefully planned train robbery--conducted, spectacularly, by women on horseback--but the general critical consensus was that neither of the sequels quite matched Widows I.

Retrospectively, Widows is now perhaps most interesting as Lynda La Plante's first successful foray into a territory she has made peculiarly her own, the hard world of women in the television crime genre. Her subsequent projects, which include the internationally successful Prime Suspect, in which Helen Mirren plays a Chief Inspector on a murder case, and The Governor, in which Janet McTeer plays an inexperienced governor given a prison to run, have tended to place their central female characters within a male hierarchy and visual repertoire. Here they must both confront the prejudice of their colleagues and successfully inhabit and wield power in the context of law enforcement and criminal justice. In contrast, Widows the first of La Plante's "women in a man's world" dramas was set explicitly within a criminal milieu with the women attempting to support themselves through robbery, rather than learning how to occupy masculine positions of power. This had a series of interesting consequences.

Firstly, the representation of female criminality in the crime series is strongly focused around the figures of the prostitute and the shop-lifter, not the ambitious and successful bank robbers we find here. So the series shook up expectations about what women in crime series can do. Secondly, because the women are having to learn to perform as men, femininity is "made strange" and becomes a way of behaviour that the women consciously turn on when they need to escape detection. Finally, it should be noted that the hero/ines of this series, three white, one black, were all working class in origin--although Dolly, well-off from the proceeds of Harry's crimes, listens to opera--and the series thus has a place in the history of honourable endeavour by both Euston Films and Lynda La Plante to depict working class life as diverse and contradictory--and more than comic.

-Charlotte Brunsdon