A television play by David Campton and Stephen Joseph.
(See below)

The trouble with Johnny...
For Johnny there isn't much to life except just watching the trains go by - watching, listening, and not caring much about anything or anyone else. Unless he's roused, that it. Unless someone rouses him to a fight, and then - well, he's useful with his fists; a sight too useful and a sight too ready to come to blows. But Alice looks like changing all that. Alice is young, too, and pretty, and she brings him something he's never been used to. Until now he's always had to fight for respect and affection, and it's not easy to change a character overnight, even if Alice does see a way to helping him get a job on the railway...

Tonight's play, written specially for television by David Campton and Stephen Joseph, relies for its speed and mobility on simple basic settings, on close-ups, and the suggestion rather than explanation of place and time. It uses no film and yet it moves with Johnny through a crowded part of his life into court, into the army, into the home, by means of a technique that a few years ago would have been accounted experimental. Now it is the kind of treatment that television is beginning to develop as its own.

Tonight's production comes from the BBC Midland Region studio at Gosta Green.
(Rowan Ayers)