Sarah – Nostalgia Central

1 9 6 8 (UK)
1 x 60 minute episode

Airing on ITV on Tuesday 6 February 1968, this stand-alone play was presented in a semi-documentary style. Granada Television intended the title character to be a composite of thousands of girls of her age.

Indeed, Sarah is, in part, producer, director and scriptwriter Patricia Lagone’s own daughter – intelligent, often eccentric, a girl who comes from a long line of feminist women with a strong independent streak.

Sarah (Wendy Allnutt), a pretty 17-year-old northern girl who loves to wear Edwardian clothes, has just left boarding school and is wondering what happens next. She isn’t sure. Society and life in the 1960s are pretty confusing.

The story follows her first visit to Swinging London, as she wanders amusingly through a series of situations and dream sequences, questioning herself and others about her role in life as she becomes involved with people and situations that her sheltered life at boarding school did not prepare her for.

The trail leads – not always typically – from a smart furrier’s where champagne is free, to the Cafe Royal for lunch with her poet uncle (A.J. Brown), to a love-in party, her grandma’s refined place in the country, and a clinic for drug addicts.

Sarah’s grandmother (Barbara Couper) had been a suffragette, fighting for women’s emancipation and is almost the only person Sarah can understand and talk to.

Sarah
Wendy Allnutt
Gran
Barbara Couper
Uncle Oliver
A.J. Brown
Naval Padre
Edward Jewesbury
Cafe Royal worker
Ralph Bates
Blonde Man
Paul Harper
Jenny
Barbara Mackie
Dr Sanji
Madhav Sharma
Joan
Sara Kestelman
Furrier
Noel Davis
American reporter
Rick Jones