EASTER 2016 has now come and gone, but in the Troubles-blighted Northern Ireland of 1982 it was still very much in the increasingly uncertain future.
Belfast playwright Graham Reid – then still trading as 'J Graham Reid' – received great acclaim that year for his BBC Play for Today instalment Too Late To Talk To Billy, a family drama starring a young Kenneth Branagh as a working-class Belfast Protestant kicking against expectations.
However, another of Reid's Northern Ireland-set works from 1982, the lesser seen one-off drama Easter 2016 (which also featured Branagh in a minor role), is about to enjoy a revival courtesy of the Belfast Film Festival's TV Eye programme.
Produced for the BBC's Play for Tomorrow series of 'future'-themed productions, the Ben Bolt-directed Easter 2016 predicts a sobering vision of life in a north where integrated education has been implemented under the close protection of a 'secret police'-styled security regime.
Ostensibly there to guard against attacks by sectarian dissidents, these watchdogs seem equally concerned with monitoring the lives of those attending the New Communities College of Education's heavily fortified teacher training facility at Stormont.
With College founder Dr Cyril Brown (Denis Hawthorne) and hard-headed new security director Lennie North (Derrick O'Connor) butting heads over their very different approaches to ensuring the institution's 'politically neutral' status quo is maintained, events take a drastic turn for the worse as nationalist and republican-leaning students and staff (the latter led by a young Bill Nighy) become determined to rebel by holding a commemorative Easter Rising march in the spirit of the 1960s Northern Ireland civil rights movement.
Reid's tension-winding script and a talented cast also featuring nascent Irish acting talent such as Colm Meaney, Gerard McSorley (Father Ted, Braveheart, Lethal Weapon 2), Eileen Pollock (Bread) and Lise Ann McLaughlin (The Irish RM) help ensure Easter 2016 is an engrossing watch.
Moreover, while 2016 didn't turn out quite as Reid imagined it might, his work actually offers one of the least painfully dated looking visions of the future presented by the Play for Tomorrow strand – at least judging by the evidence available on YouTube.
"The other writers had all been to a couple of seminars on future technology and science fiction, which doesn't interest me at all" reveals the former teacher at Gransha High School in Bangor, who hails from the Donegall Road in Belfast and has been based in London for many years.
"I believe at the time we did it, Bill Nighy was overheard telling people he was going to be playing in the 'Irish version of Star Wars', so he obviously hadn't read the script at that point.
"It's always difficult and dangerous to try and predict the future as a writer. At that time the future in Northern Ireland was up in the air; nobody quite knew what was going to happen. The last thing people would have envisaged was some sort of agreed political settlement.
"I'd been interested by the 50th anniversary of Easter 1916 in 1966. There was always that problem – was it a commemoration or a celebration, you know?
"So, Easter 2016 stemmed from all that and what way people might react to the 100th anniversary."
The concept of integrated education in the north was still pretty much regarded as 'pie in the sky' back in the dark days of 1982. It and Reid's depiction of the double-edged sword of computer-assisted surveillance are just a couple of surprisingly prescient inclusions in Easter 2016, which highlights how easy it can be even for supposedly enlightened men to to justify the use of violence.
"Integrated education was one of those things that people just didn't think was ever going to happen" admits the writer, who still hopes to bring a version of his 2013 stage play Love, Billy to the screen with Kenneth Branagh reprising his titular role.
"I also think using Stormont as the building was risky at the time – although an integrated college of education might have been a better use for it than what it's used for now.
"The Northern Ireland Office wouldn't give us any assistance with that. We weren't even allowed to film in or outside the building – we had to use stock footage.
"But because of what was going on in 1982, I felt that people would be much more willing to accept almost blanket security by 2016 and give up a lot of their freedoms in return for it."
As for what else Reid got right or wrong about Northern Ireland circa 2016, you can find out in a couple of weeks at the Belfast Film Festival.
:: Easter 2016 will be screened on Saturday April 23 at The Black Box at 2pm, tickets £6 via Belfastfilmfestival.org.
