The members of the Hunters Club, deliberating over how to cover up a murder on the premises. (Photo credit: IMDB.)
Nigel Kneale is best known for his contribution to science fiction. A prolific writer of television plays, his 1950s Quatermass serials are often imitated (from Doctor Who to The X-Files), while his one-off sci-fi satires like The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) are seen as eerily prescient.
But Kneale also wrote an extraordinary late-career television play, Ladies’ Night. This was an episode of the anthology series Unnatural Causes (1986), in which each instalment was a one-off play about a death in remarkable circumstances.
Overview
Ladies’ Night is a tale of misogyny, set in the Hunters Club, a fusty, traditional London club. From its faded Fawlty Towers-esque wallpaper, to its moth-eaten stuffed aardvark Eustace in the front lobby (a club mascot, whom the members rub for luck), it has clearly seen better days.
None of the characters, male or female, is particularly sympathetic - though Kneale’s ire is clearly aimed at the male club members. But he writes from a position of familiarity - plenty of the dialogue has the ring of truth about it, such as when the suggestion is made that the cash-strapped club might sell off more of its building to make ends meet, only to prompt the reaction, “Not that again!”
What makes Ladies’ Night so successful is Kneale’s writing, fully of witty observations; and the stellar cast of veteran character actors, including Alfred Burke, Ronald Pickup, Fiona Walker and Nigel Stock, who play a gallery of grotesques.
And like all the best plays, it has a remarkable economy of setting, concentrated around just a handful of sets: the Club’s main lobby (with its staircase and porter’s lodge), the coffee room (dining room), the bar, the lavatories, and one bedroom.
Colonel Waley speaks to the porter. (Photo credit: TV Ark.)
Synopsis
The action opens on the Hunters Club at the start of Ladies’ Night - the one night of each month when ladies are begrudgingly admitted, under protest, to have dinner at one end of the coffee room, while being banned from other parts of the Club. Several members make it clear that they are uncomfortable with women guests at all, including the Club’s Chairman and Hon. Secretary, Colonel Waley (Burke), who hovers by the entrance making visiting couples uncomfortable with his remarks, reducing several women to tears.
Before dinner, an emergency meeting of the committee is convened in the snug of the Club’s bar, to discuss the finances. They are dire, but there is little to no appetite to do anything which might reverse the Club’s fortunes. The most the committee can agree on is to write a financial appeal to members, and to the families of deceased ex-members.
Dinner is excruciating for all concerned. The food is dire. Visiting couples are banished to small tables of two on the edge of the coffee room. The room is dominated by a long club table at the centre, where the regulars trade bawdy and outrageous anecdotes, loudly making bitchy asides about the presence of women in the Club.
Colonel Waley tells a story about going hunting with Hermann Göring, and how he saved Göring’s life. For Evelyn Tripp (Walker), wife of the hen-picked James Tripp (Pickup), this is too much. She exclaims:
“Colonel, I thought you were senile, you’re plain mad. You’ve been mad all your life!”
She is booed out of the coffee room to a cacophany of “Out! Out!” from the barracking members, banging tables, as she and her husband retire to their bedroom in the Club. He expects his resignation to be called for, and asks his wife why she came along if she found the place so objectionable. She explains:
Evelyn Tripp: I wanted to see for myself just what your hidey-hole consists of. I wanted to know what this wonderful place is that you've been running away to all these years. Better than your own home!
James Tripp: Yes, it was!
Evelyn Tripp: You never talked about it. My club, the big secret. You never invited me; not even when they started Ladies’ Night! Even today, I had to twist your arm. And do you know what I found?
James Tripp: Oh yes, I know what you’re going to say…
Evelyn Tripp: A museum! With little boys playing in it. Not even a school. Because a school is where you might learn something, and none of you wants to learn anything at all; just suck up to an old madman.
James Tripp: Don’t!
Evelyn Tripp: You should be in short trousers; even those old soaks in the bar.
James Tripp: Those are my friends!
Evelyn Tripp: Hunters? Ha! You’re not even men. You’re not a man, James. Just something I’m stuck with, now and then, when you’re not at your club. There now, I’ve said it.
At this point, a note is passed under the bedroom door, informing Tripp of his expulsion from the Club. Evelyn Tripp’s response is to laugh at her husband, mockingly. James Tripp’s response is to grab a nearby candlestick, and brutally bludgeon his wife to death, splattering her blood everywhere.
Shocked at what he has done, Tripp is reduced to a gibbering wreck, and tries to confess his crime to the members downstairs, and beckons them up to view the scene of the crime. But far from being appalled, the Colonel relishes the new situation, even dousing one member in Mrs. Tripp’s blood, in a macabre blooding ritual the others do not find funny.
Inspired by the Colonel, the members and staff begin to rally around, and offer their help with a cover-up. The club porter steps in, and suggests how they might hide the body, and a clearly-sozzled Monks (Stock) volunteers to drive his car, in his present state. When asked if he’s in any fit state to be driving, he protests that his is the biggest car, and he will not allow anyone else to drive it.
Things take an unexpected turn, however, when the group returns from downstairs, to find Mrs. Tripp’s body missing, with a bloodied trail from where it had been. They realise that Mrs. Tripp may not have been so dead after all. They begin to hunt her down like prey. The Colonel fetches his elephant gun.
Eventually, they find the (men’s) bathroom locked. They plead with Evelyn to open the door, and begin bickering among themselves about her culpability.
Leach: She did no harm.
Colonel Waley: She did her best! She came to the Hunters Club to insult us! She came to make fun of our manhood! She came to belittle everything, our traditions, our customs, she couldn’t understand them! She didn’t understand anything we stood for!
After yells of “Bloody woman!”, the Colonel shoots his way into the lavatories with his elephant gun - to no avail. A bloody trail shows that she had already escaped through the window.
Not long after, there is a knock at the Club’s front door. A group of police officers - all of them female - identify themselves as being from the ‘Special Rape Detail’, and explain to the flabbergasted members and staff that they have come to make enquiries after finding the bloodied Mrs. Tripp in the street outside, barely able to say more than her name. The sergeant announces:
“Don’t say anything yet. There’ll be time for all your statements. And there’ll be charges. Quite a lot, I’d guess.”
The men-only club is then swept by a group of women police officers, while the Colonel fumes, “Women!”
The police arrive. (Photo credit: IMDB.)
Themes
The play’s strongly feminist slant is a departure from Kneale’s earlier writings, but it shows all the slow-release tension and fleshed-out characters that are a hallmark of his work. It is an obvious commentary on the fate of traditional clubs by the 1980s, and on shifting attitudes within them.
Members for and against the admission of women - which is discussed as the logical next step - are shown to have a range of views and motivations. Among the opponents, we see everything from raging misogyny (quite literally women-hating, in the case of Tripp’s lashing out of violence at his own wife), through to a defensiveness about masculinity, to simply being unaccustomed to and uncomfortable around women. Among the supporters, we see everything from reluctant support for financial reasons without a great deal of enthusiasm, to young 1980s yuppies taking the attitude that it is about time.
None of the men portrayed seems to have much of an understanding of women. Some are married, some are not, but they seem more comfortable describing brief affairs and “knocking shops” than any meaningful emotional relationships. The Colonel boasts, “Oh, I’ve had women, plenty of women, but I’ve never married, not once. Use ’em and chuck ’em, that’s what to do.” The portrayal is of damaged and lonely people - even those who are married - seeking companionship.
We get an insight into the rhythm of club life, and its rules (both written and unwritten); for instance the protest, “the hall porter isn’t supposed to carry parcels”, and the way that there are set ways in and out of certain rooms, and that there are rooms which are members-only - without anyone being told the rules when visiting. It makes the whole experience of visiting the Club as a newcomer quite intimidating.
This is exacerbated by the gloomy and unwelcoming portrayal of the Club. Evelyn Tripp is not shy in opining of the main hall, “It’s a depressing room”, and she is horrified on realising how many (badly-)taxidermised animals fill the staircase:
Evelyn Tripp: Good God, I didn’t see all this this afternoon. It’s too dark.
James Tripp: Rather impressive, isn’t it?
Evelyn Tripp: It’s obscene!
James Tripp: The collection dates back, er, quite a while.
Evelyn Tripp: Yes, I can see that. They’re filthy.
The food in the Club is routinely terrible, and even the members who are fond of the place struggle to defend it to their dates. Evelyn is no more impressed:
Evelyn Tripp: What’s this?
James Tripp: Boeuf bourgignon
Evelyn Tripp: It’s mince!
James Tripp: It’s always like this.
Evelyn Tripp: If you were offered this at home, you’d refuse to eat it.
James Tripp: Evelyn, keep your voice down.
Evelyn Tripp: It’s what it’s all about. Back to school. All this, slops and gravy and burnt offerings, it’s school food.
The members of the Hunters Club. (Photo credit: MUBI.)
Even more depressing are the insights into the Club finances - which are clearly absolutely dire. The Club’s accountant gently tries to break the news to his colleagues that they are broke. They can scarcely believe him. Monks has blind faith in the late Calloway’s bequest, “it’s a bloody fortune…every Rupee he grubbed out of India, all left to the Club”, only to be stunned to hear, “It’s all gone”, having been exhausted over the years. The accountant suggests merger with another club, Bantam’s, only to be vetoed: “That’s a mixed club! Women as full members!” The one time we see the Colonel turn on any charm is when trying to rope members into helping out with the Club’s finances.
Overall, it is a depressing portrayal of Clubland more or less at its nadir, made all the more damning by so many of its observations being so familiar, and so close to the bone. While the circumstances of the play are clearly exaggerated for darkly comic effect, the characters all echo archetypes that can be found in many clubs, past, present and (presumably) future. But its knowing flashes of insight and lugubrious black humour make it all the more worth a watch.
The book adaptation of the TV series, containing Ladies’ Night as a short story.
Adaptations
Shortly after the series was broadcast, there was a book adaptation, edited by the series’ script editor Beryl Bainbridge, which converted each episode into a short story. Ladies’ Night was adapted by its original author, Nigel Kneale. The short story version significantly fleshes out the backgrounds of several of the characters.
The episode was never released on VHS. Though difficult to find for many years and seldom re-broadcast on terrestrial television, Ladies’ Night had a DVD release in 2017, from Network DVD, as part of ‘The Crunch and Other Stories’, a collection of lesser-seen Nigel Kneale television plays. Unfortunately, Network DVD went into liquidation in 2023, but copies of the DVD can still be found on the second-hand market. A short three-minute preview trailer can be viewed on TVArk, here.
You can view the full and varied backlog of Clubland Substack articles, by clicking on the index below.
Index
Articles are centred around several distinct strands, so the below contains links to the main pieces, sorted by theme.
Many thanks for this confidential and particularly delightful episode. All the more so for me, as a member of the Club de la Chasse et de la Nature, in Paris –the French counterpart of the Hunting Club in the film, with this one difference—shocking, isn’t it?—that we are inclusive of women. Yours sincerely. FA
P.S. The film is available here:https://youtu.be/rttjzOD9sec
Reminds me of the S*v*l* atm.