Samaritans phone sex drama: Harry Mould's new play about the little-known 'Brenda Line'

The Brenda Line | Pitlochry Festival Theatre

Picture the scene. Out of a sense of Christian duty, you have volunteered for the Samaritans. It is your first shift and you expect to spend it by the phone giving solace to any caller who needs it. Perhaps it will be a teenager agonising over an unwanted pregnancy or a man considering suicide. You know it will be emotionally taxing but you hope you can do your bit to help.

What you do not bargain for is another category of caller. These are not people in distress but men who have chosen to use the service as a sex line. Rather than someone to share their problems with, they want a woman to listen to their fantasies. And they know they will find one by calling the charity.

In the pre-internet days, this was more than an occasional phenomenon. It happened all the time. Initially such calls were handled by the charity’s Brent centre. After they were devolved across the country, the Brent line became the Brenda line.

You will be hard pressed to find anything about the Brenda line on the Samaritans website, but from 1972 until 1987, it was official policy to listen to every caller. Only those seeking to abuse the volunteers for sadistic pleasure would be cut off. A man asking to speak to Brenda knew he would find a sympathetic ear.

First-time playwright Harry Mould heard about this largely forgotten aspect of 1970s culture from their mother who volunteered for the Samaritans when she was 20. On her first shift in Rhyl, North Wales, she was placed with an elderly woman who was the designated Brenda. When a male caller asked what she was wearing, the woman replied: “Well, it has been unseasonably warm lately.”

Mould shows me a weighty manual called Telephone Masturbators And The Brenda System For Befriending Them, written by the founder of the Samaritans, the Reverend Prebendary Edward “Chad” Varah. Beneath the title is a picture of Varah’s secretary, the only woman he could find who was willing to lend her face to the publication.

“Chad Varah didn’t want to turn them away but he also didn’t want the volunteers to be put in a position of answering these calls without consent,” says Mould whose debut play, The Brenda Line, opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre this month. “He wrote this huge manual where he categorised the callers into 16 subcategories and cross-referenced them with details about how Brendas could best support them.”

You can see the dilemma. Having committed to being non-judgemental, the Samaritans could hardly pick and choose which calls they answered. Could they even be sure the men’s behaviour, with its heavy breathing, obscene language and belittling of women, was not also a cry for help? Today, the policy is to terminate such calls, against the wishes of Varah, who died in 2007.

“Chad Varah believed the act of looking up the Samaritans line and calling meant these people were looking for a form of closeness,” says Mould who sits on the fence about whether Varah was right or not. “Optimistically, I see the benefits of it and pessimistically, I see how it’s really dangerous. It entirely depends on the caller. You do have to wonder whether for a lot of these people there was a deeper need, a need to be heard. My most optimistic take on it was it was about loneliness.”

The motives of the male callers are hard to fathom and, in the play, Mould does not try. Rather, The Brenda Line, which they describe as a self-aware comedy, focuses on two women. One is young and intolerant of the policy; the other is older and more willing to go along with it. “All I firmly believe is the women who were doing it were good,” says Mould. “Whether it encouraged or discouraged bad behaviour, the women were answering the phones from a place of deep, humane empathy.”

“A lot of the women were recruited from church congregations”, Mould continues. “They were God-fearing women in the 60s and 70s who were doing this unbelievably complicated task in a period of time when sex was so taboo. They were receiving these calls with lots of different urges, desires and fantasies played out to them and they had this role of not contributing but allowing the conversation to happen.”

The Brenda Line is their first play, but Mould is no newcomer: they have a decade of experience working in Scottish theatre, variously as a press officer, an equality, diversity and inclusion officer and a well-being facilitator. Mould has always channelled their creative energies into painting, but turned their attention to writing after a bout of ill health made it uncomfortable to stand for long periods. The result, as well as the play, was a script for a TV pilot, The Houdini Detectives, which has been optioned, and a novel that has just attracted the attention of an agent.

Stepping from behind the scenes into the limelight is an unfamiliar experience. “I feel very vulnerable,” they say with a laugh. “On the one hand, I feel really well held because I’m working with people who I know, so I don’t feel alone with it. But on the other hand, I know them, so there’s a level of exposure that feels nerve-wracking. I’ve been lucky to have worked in theatre, watching and reading plays, so I know the wealth of talent that exists. To throw my hat in the ring is a little bit horrifying!”

The Brenda Line, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 15 August–18 September; Traverse, Edinburgh, 13–16 November.