Thunder on Sycamore Street: the rediscovered 1950s TV play about prejudice in suburbia

As well as celebrating one of the truly trailblazing stars of British cinema, the Earl Cameron season, currently playing at BFI Southbank, brings a rare opportunity to catch a powerful rediscovery from the television archives: Thunder on Sycamore Street. 

The 1957 play, produced by Granada for the anthology strand Television Playhouse, was based on an original script by American Reginald Rose – who was more famously the author of 12 Angry Men, a play first made for US TV in 1954, three years before Sidney Lumet made his classic film version starring Henry Fonda. 

With its themes of an individual holding firm against prejudice and outside pressure, Thunder on Sycamore Street makes a fascinating companion piece to Rose’s more famous work. When it was first broadcast on ITV in 1957, it was advertised with a simple but intriguing billing: “Thunder on Sycamore Street is an unusual dramatic play. It shows how the forceful powers of pride and prejudice can drive ordinary suburban people into cruel violence – striking at someone who seems to be unforgivably different.”

The play had originally been produced for CBS’s prestige anthology series Studio One in 1954. Rose pitched a story to the network about a middle-class suburban neighbourhood in which the majority of residents form a mob to force one family from their home. In Rose’s original story the mob comprised a group of white neighbours who threaten to forcefully remove a black family from their home. However, the premise was rejected by US network executives, fearful for their relationship with programme sponsors and anxious that a play confronting racism and integration wouldn’t play to TV audiences in the American south.

The result was that Rose reworked the premise of the play, with the victim of the discrimination becoming a white ex-convict instead of a black man – even if that fact isn’t revealed until late in the drama. The suspenseful structure of Rose’s play allows the audience to guess why the residents of Sycamore Street want their neighbour to leave, and to project whatever assumptions they might have about the prejudices of the day on to the drama. The family in question – the Blakes – are not seen until the third act of the play.

This reworked version of Rose’s play, with the racial discrimination element safely removed, played on US television in 1954, and was then adapted for international broadcasters from countries including Czechoslovakia, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Hungary, Australia and the Netherlands. (In Britain, the BBC would also produce a version of this reworked play in 1963). To the best of my knowledge, all of these adaptations retained the alteration that Rose had made for US TV, and had the character of Joseph Blake be a white ex-convict trying to make a life for himself and his family on Sycamore Street, and not a black man facing racial prejudice.

All of which makes Granada’s 1957 British production of Sycamore Street a still more significant production for its times, and an even more important rediscovery from the ITV Archive. For in Granada’s version the Blakes are a black family, with Earl Cameron starring as the father, Joseph Blake. Additional dialogue on the play is credited to the Canadian writer Stanley Mann, and it seems probable that Mann was given permission by Rose to alter his teleplay and revive the writer’s original premise. While the paranoia and intolerance displayed in Rose’s original teleplay chimes with much American drama that was produced in the era of McCarthyism, the Granada version addresses civil rights and racism head-on – a rarity on British television in 1957 and an outright impossibility on US network TV in 1954.

Cameron’s performance as Joseph Blake captures the actor at his most powerful and charismatically magnetic. He vividly portrays Blake’s great anger at the unjust situation he and his family face, in a performance that must have been greatly impactful on contemporary audiences – indeed, it remains so today. 

He’s ably supported by the Jamaican actress and writer Sylvia Wynter (credited here as Sylvia Winters), playing his wife Anna. Wynter is a remarkable figure herself. Shortly after Thunder on Sycamore Street, she worked again with Mann and Cameron on various BBC radio plays, before co-writing The Big Pride (1961), one of the earliest plays by black writers to be produced on British television. Wynter became a justly celebrated writer and academic, so it’s fascinating to see her in a rare early acting role. 

Unseen since its original broadcast in October 1957, the play is vital viewing for anyone interested in the history of British and American television. Granada’s production of Thunder on Sycamore Street is also a striking tribute to the talents of Earl Cameron and a pioneering piece of 1950s television drama – an American play that could only be made in Britain.