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British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race

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British Television's Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race British Television’s Lost New Wave Moment: Single Drama and Race Eleni Liarou Abstract: The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV’s dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain’s black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture. Keywords: TV drama; working-class realism; new wave; representations of race and immigration; TV historiography; ITV history Television scholars have typically seen British television’s late- 1950s/early-1960s single drama, and particularly ITV’s Armchair Theatre strand, as a manifestation of the postwar new wave preoccupation with the English regional working class (Laing 1986; Cooke 2003; Rolinson 2011). This article argues that the working- class realism of this drama strand is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources – including programme listings, reviews, scripts, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors – reveal ITV’s dynamic role in offering a range of representations of Britain’s black population and its relationship to white working-class cultures. More Journal of British Cinema and Television 9.4 (2012): 612–627 DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2012.0108 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/jbctv 612 British Television’s Lost New Wave Moment particularly, the study of ITV’s single drama about black immigration in this period raises important questions which lie at the heart of postwar debates on commercial television’s lack of commitment to its public service remit. John Caughie has argued that ‘serious’ drama, such as the single play, claimed to meet the standards of public service broadcasting, implicating television’s role in wider cultural projects of ‘national improvement’ and patronage in postwar Britain (2000). I suggest that the plays discussed here went further: they attempted to offer socially and ethnically extended representations of British national identity.1 By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, the article also argues for a more inclusive historiography of British television. Recent historical research has uncritically dismissed the role of ITV in representing issues of race and immigration by turning to the BBC ‘as a non-commercial network considered free of the pressures thought to be inherent to commercial advertising and sponsorship, freeing the network to engage in cultural practices of its choosing’ (Newton 2007: 114). And while critics like Jim Pines (1992), Stephen Bourne (2001) and Sarita Malik (2002) have made an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the involvement and experience of black and Asian people in British television, their work tends to be restricted to a few examples that now constitute the canon of ‘race relations’ television single drama for this period. These include A Man from the Sun (BBC, 1956), Hot Summer Night (ABC/ITV, 1959) and The Wednesday Play: Fable (BBC1, 1965). This article will extend the terrain by uncovering a number of television single plays previously overlooked by historians. The purpose of this is twofold: on the one hand, to expand our knowledge in this field of television history; on the other, to offer fresh insights into the hybridity of postwar British culture and society at a particular historical conjuncture. The ‘anthropological narrative’, in James Curran’s overview of media history as a series of competing narratives, has indeed produced some very sophisticated analyses of the role of the media in fostering national or regional identities (2009: 12–14). The discussion, however, of black-themed media representations has often been hampered by uncritically employing the ‘racialisation problematic’ as a catch-all analytical concept.2 I will suggest that more attention needs to be paid to historically informed approaches which do not aim only to uncover racist media practices but are also careful in assessing modes or resistance, cross-cultural influences and interrelationships that complicate notions of ‘national identity’ in British culture.3 613 Eleni Liarou The arrival of ITV in Britain in 1955, and the increasing popularity of television in general, meant that programming and content underwent a process of redefinition. The London-centric and middle- class bias of the BBC was increasingly under the spotlight as the television service expanded to reach first the Midlands and then Northern England. Furthermore, the cultural turn to a new mode of social realism in popular theatre and literature generated an interest in the everyday lives of ‘ordinary people’ and resulted in the increasing production of original contemporary television dramas by new writers. In cinema, this cultural moment of working-class realism gave birth to what is commonly described as the British new wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. If the new wave film classic A Taste of Honey (1961) stands out as one of the earliest and most daring attempts to identify the Northern working class not only as masculine and white but also as homosexual and black, ITV was also quick to embrace the new cultural paradigm of the British working class. The nineteen-year-old author of ATasteof Honey, Shelagh Delaney, was introduced in the Associated Redifussion’s topical magazine series Success Story, on 9 February 1959, one day before the play opened in the West End. And in an article in the TV Times (9 December 1959), presenter Daniel Farson examined the ‘curious quality of success’ for young writers, and asked: ‘How come this young girl from Salford has such astonishing success?’ This edition of Success Story demonstrates ITV’s attempt to participate in the dynamic role literature and theatre played in postwar British society, an attempt that had already begun with the transmission of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger by Granada in 1956. The television adaptation of Ted Willis’ stage play Hot Summer Night for ABC’s Armchair Theatre in 1959 is another oft-quoted example of ITV keeping a close eye on theatre’s bold steps in representing issues of race and class. The play’s domestic theme – a family torn by their daughter’s decision to marry a black man – suited television’s attachment to theatrical naturalism which, in the televised version of the play, was challenged by Ted Kotcheff’s relatively mobile camera and generous use of studio space. Hot Summer Night is retrospectively seen to have existed on the margins of mainstream programming, having little impact on overall institutional thinking (Pines 1992: 10). This may be true, but it is as telling of television’s racial bias as of its ideological adherence to a prestigious theatrical tradition. A survey of Armchair Theatre productions for 1959–60 shows that less than a quarter of the output dealt with the life of ‘ordinary people’ in Britain (Laing 1986: 149). Even so, the relative openness of the television 614 British Television’s Lost New Wave Moment structures in the late 1950s and 1960s and the modern, fluid processes of production created the space in which a new, innovative drama was born. And despite its limitations, ITV’s single drama did capture and reflect on some of the social changes in the lives of ‘ordinary’ people and of the black population of postwar Britain. Rescuing this drama from oblivion takes on additional significance given the scarcity of similarly themed BBC productions before the arrival of The Wednesday Play in 1964 and groundbreaking dramas such as John Hopkins’ Fable (BBC, 1965) and Philip Donnellan’s documentary The Colony (BBC, 1964). Throughout the 1950s, the BBC championed documentaries that largely structured television’s debate on race and immigration. Programmes such as Has Britain a Colour Bar?, Special Enquiry (BBC, 1955) and its follow-up Second Enquiry: A Question of Colour (BBC, 1958), clearly indicate the Corporation’s attempt to engage with the impact of black immigration. Yet these programmes’ anthropological approach and ideological framework represent black immigrants as a ‘social problem’, labelling them as ‘others’, ‘strangers’ and ‘the coloured’. In drama, the BBC’s initial response to the topic seems to have been reluctant; but as working- class realism was taking hold, two dramas dealing with issues of race (both of which are lost) were produced. One is the television play Break in Festivities (BBC, 1959), produced by Terence Dudley, the other the four-part drama Paradise Walk (BBC, 1961), produced, directed and written by Shaun Sutton, who was later to become Head of BBC Drama and one of the key players in what is retrospectively seen as the ‘golden age’ of British drama. What is perhaps more revealing is that scheduling and target audience choices automatically placed these dramas into slots which, in one way or another, underlined their ‘exceptionality’ and implicitly put them on the margins of the mainstream. For example, Break in Festivities, broadcast during the Christmas season in 1959, is a play about two West Indian immigrants, Bill and Susie (played by Harry Baird and Corinne Skinner), who, as the Radio Times (29 December 1959) puts it, ‘have been in England for three months and find the mixture of Christmas festivities and colour prejudice more than just bewildering’. As the title implies, dealing with the issue of racism in drama was seen as a break from the standard flow of television, or an issue that suited an atmosphere of seasonal goodwill and generosity. Paradise Walk, on the other hand, is a children’s adventure telling the story of a West Indian boy, Sammy (Dudley Hunte), who comes to live in England with his uncle and aunt.
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