When Channel 5 brought back the legendary anthology drama strand Play for Today in 2025, the anticipation was tempered by a fear that it couldn’t live up to the original run’s standards. “Standards”, though, meant different things for different people. Some were concerned a modern Play for Today couldn’t match the old series’s quality of acting, writing and directing. Some were worried it would lack the strand’s famous political commitment. For me, the main fear was a different one. I just don’t think it’s a proper British anthology series unless there’s something absolutely bafflingly weird chucked in there. For all it’s often reduced to a home for gritty kitchen-sink drama, the original Play for Today also found room for Dennis Potter’s Satanic horror Brimstone and Treacle, folk horror classics Robin Redbreast and Penda’s Fen, and the boldly postmodern Gangsters. The latter was written by Philip Martin, who would go on to create the character of Sil, and there’s another Doctor Who link in the strangest of all Play for Todays – Doran’s Box.
Doran’s Box was directed by Matthew Robinson, who would go on to helm two of the biggest stories of Doctor Who’s mid-’80s: Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of the Cybermen. Robinson was part of a drive by producer John Nathan-Turner to bring in directors who could modernise the look of the show, and it turned out that – like “standards” – “modern” has many meanings. For Peter Grimwade, it meant keeping pace with dynamic, fast-edited Hollywood action movies and music videos. For Paul Joyce – who had written and directed the similarly strange Play for Today Keep Smiling – and Fiona Cumming it meant experimenting with cutting-edge video effects. Looking at Doran’s Box, you might expect Robinson to be of the latter school. There’s a lot of alienating digital imagery in the film, which begins with a team of researchers watching test subjects go through sensory deprivation through a bank of blue-tinted, flickering BBC Micro monitors.
But as anyone who’s seen his Doctor Who stories will know, that’s not Matthew Robinson’s strongest suit as a director. His real gift lies in his cinematic location shoots, to the extent where – despite featuring the show’s two marquee-name monsters – both Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of the Cybermen really come to life in the gangster-film sections involving Maurice Colbourne’s gun-for-hire Lytton. Similarly, Doran’s Box really starts to seduce the audience when Peter Eyre’s title character is driving home from another day logging data from his hapless test subjects. He’s stuck at a red light waiting for a fighter jet to land at a nearby airbase, and as he waits he notices strange people around him watching the plane. They might just be plane-spotters, or they might be doing something else… It’s a beautifully composed, unhurried, tense scene, and it sets up a genuinely compelling and original mystery.
The problem is, no-one who’s seen Doran’s Box can figure out what that mystery is.
The problem is, no-one who’s seen Doran’s Box can figure out what that mystery is. David Rose, the play’s producer, complained “I don’t understand it, it’s about a man who shoots at aeroplanes”. And this was David Rose, the man who ushered plays as esoteric as Keep Smiling and Penda’s Fen through production! It’s possible that, like Keep Smiling, Doran’s Box is simply a film about a man’s nervous breakdown, told in such a way as to trap the audience inside his delusions. There’s an appealing neatness to that: the man who puts others through psychological torture in the name of science ends up snapping himself. But there seems to be more going on. Why do the test subjects appear to go into trances, drawing symbols similar to the ones found on Zener cards? Why does the action pause to observe Doran and his wife watching a TV documentary about archaeology? Why does the overlapping audio fall away when Doran is listening to a news report about famine? Is this Greek chorus of media simply another way to portray Doran’s psychological overload, or does it have a deeper meaning?
It’s an unexpected left turn from writer Eric Coltart, particularly since it was his last screen credit. Coltart’s first produced TV play was Wear a Very Big Hat, which was also one of the first credits for Ken Loach. After that, he moved onto Z-Cars, a show famous for importing the hard-hitting realism of modern plays into genre television. Z-Cars‘ creator Troy Kennedy Martin would later create Edge of Darkness, a show which, like Rose’s bewildered summary of Doran’s Box, was often reduced to its shocking ending in internal BBC conversations. “I am writing a show about a policeman who turns into a tree”, Martin said when he was asked what he was working on; that bizarre finale was cut from the finished serial, but Doran’s Box, a lower-budget single-episode production, was allowed to go into production despite Rose’s misgivings.
Coltart and Troy Kennedy Martin’s turns away from the social realism they made their names with suggest a wider crisis in the genre, that the kind of dramatic models invented to deal with single issues like homelessness and teenage pregnancy couldn’t be expected to deal with the multiple comorbidities Britain suffered in the late ’70s and ’80s. Around the same time, Alan Clarke, the director of Penda’s Fen, was wrestling with the same concern. His model of using drama to analyse a particular structure or institution was being challenged by the sheer opaqueness of modern international capitalism, so his last two Play for Today entries attempted new ways to address modern politics.
The first of those last two, Beloved Enemy, is a pure piece of systemic analysis about the co-dependency of the two sides in the Cold War; it is so focused on the politics that Clarke’s regular writer David Leland produced a dummy script which included conventional dramatic elements like a romantic subplot in order to get it through the BBC. Then, in the same 1980-81 season, Clarke and Leland made Psy-Warriors, which despite its science-fiction title was based on declassified reports of psychological torture carried out by the British army on Irish prisoners of war. Clarke had such a difficult time getting this made that he swore off working for Play for Today, and spent the rest of his tragically short life working on movies and other anthology drama strands.
Is Doran’s Box Coltart’s own, more cautious, attempt at tackling similar issues? It’s never completely clear who is commissioning the sensory deprivation experiments Doran and his colleagues are undertaking. It could be the government, or the military – readers of Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats will know there was a substantial fear among the Anglo-American defence establishment that the Soviet Union were on the verge of mastering psychic spying techniques, which would explain the Zener cards. If so, Doran’s shooting spree against the jets that held him up at traffic might be a justified revenge against the military-industrial complex.
Or Coltart could just be an offbeat kind of guy. He died in 2023, whereupon his ashes were baked into a brick and laid in the “People’s Pyramid” created by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (formerly the KLF). But those news bulletins continually suggest deeper, more pertinent themes. After the news report on famine, which calls it a greater threat than nuclear war, the very next thing Doran hears on the radio is a bulletin about freak weather conditions on the southern coast. Doran’s Box was broadcast in January 1976, making this eerily predictive of the infamously hot, drought-stricken summer of that year. So we’ve got nuclear war, famine, climate change – what could tie it together?
The answer might come in one of the play’s few big speeches, in which Doran’s colleague Gavitt (David Hargreaves) complains that “technology has become our awareness, what it can measure…” Looking at their work, he worries that technological predictions are applied to the outside world so carelessly that it becomes a feedback loop: the machines tell us to expect something, so we behave accordingly, rather than allow for the messiness and complexities of real life. This naturally makes the next round of computer predictions even more conformist, and on and on it goes.
It’s a shame that, despite tackling the two Doctor Who villains most in line with this breed of technopessimism, the scripts Eric Saward gave Robinson were too overstuffed to allow him to tackle this theme again. But then, Robinson’s Doctor Who work doesn’t really utilise the same corner of his skillset as Doran’s Box. Robinson arrived on the show just after Peter Grimwade made his career switch from writer and director to full-time writer; there was a vacancy for Doctor Who‘s blockbuster-action director, and Robinson was extremely good at filling that chair. Had he held on until the Sylvester McCoy era, Doran’s Box suggests he might have been equally good at working with the more layered, cryptic scripts that writers like Ian Briggs and Marc Platt wrote for the Seventh Doctor. But then, perhaps it’s foolish to expect anything like Doran’s Box to happen again. The space for experimentation on television, a space both Doctor Who and Play for Today thrived in, grows smaller every year, and even during its heyday there weren’t many things as strange as this being put out. You might hate it, but it is a unique artefact made by real TV craftsmen.
Doran’s Box can be seen on YouTube.
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