I couldn't find room for it in my Lion & Unicorn article about the film No Room at the Inn, but I did blog here about my discovery that the Joan Temple play on which it was based gave John Osborne his first break in the theatre:
After No Room at the Inn had cleaned up in the West End, it went on a national tour, though without its star, the awe-inspiring Freda Jackson.
As there were so many children in the cast, the company needed a tutor for them to make up for the schooling they were missing.
That role was taken by a young man keen on a career in the theatre - he even fancied writing plays. And he used it as a route to becoming an assistant stage manager and then a member of the cast.
His name? John Osborne. He was the archetypal Angry Young Man of the Fifties and the author of the epoch-making play Look Back in Anger.
I was scrolling through the vintage editions of Desert Island Discs on the BBC website and found that Osborne was the castaway in one of them. Only six minutes remain of his 1959 appearance (he was on the programme again in 1982), but during them he confirms this story about No Room at the Inn.
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