In 1970 Ray Davies took a break from the Kinks to work on the first entry for a new anthology drama show for the BBC called Play for Today. The show was to take over from a program called The Wednesday Play that had run since 1964. The premiere of a new drama show generated some interest, as seen in the Radio Times cover above.
The play was called “The Long Distance Piano Player,” and it’s a kind of mashup between They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the Sydney Pollack movie of a year earlier about a marathon dancing contest during the Depression, and any number of treacly kitchen-sink dramas of the early to mid-1960s. The idea of the play is that Pete (Davies) plays a guy who will execute, in the words of his unscrupulous manager Jack, “one of the greatest feats of human endurance ever attempted…. the marathon, non-stop piano playing championships of the world—four days and four nights of continuous, I repeat continuous non-stop piano playing!”
It quickly becomes apparent that Pete is being manipulated by Jack and that the whole thing (similar to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) is meant to be a metaphor for the rapacious and predatory entertainment world or something. Meanwhile, Pete’s wife Ruth (Lois Daine) importunes him to stop this stupid marathon and get as far away from Jack as possible—it all doesn’t end well, but that much is clear pretty early on in the story. (For those wanting to learn more about the show, this article can’t be beat.)
“The Long Distance Piano Player” was written by Alan Sharp, who wrote many movies in his long career, the best of which is probably Night Moves, a distinctive thriller directed by Arthur Penn and starring Gene Hackman and Melanie Griffith, who was still a teenager at the time. Sharp also wrote Sam Peckinpah’s final movie The Osterman Weekend as well as the 1995 Scottish epic Rob Roy starring Liam Neeson.
Pete’s manager, Jack, is played by Norman Rossington, who also played the Beatles’ manager in A Hard Day’s Night. Typecasting!
“The Long Distance Piano Player” aired on October 15, 1970. (Amusingly, according to the essential Kinks resource All Day and All of the Night, written by Doug Hinman, Davies is said to have booked studio time that evening for his bandmates so that they would be unable to watch it.) The movie isn’t good (and isn’t helped by the literally incessant piano tinkling that never goes away), but Davies is a natural actor and the problems with it have nothing to do with him.
Over the closing credits the as-yet-unreleased song “Got to Be Free” is played; it would appear on Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, which was released a few weeks after the television special.
The movie is unfortunately broken up into ten parts on YouTube. If you want to hear “Got to Be Free,” it starts at the end of part 9.