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Home , Alan Bleasdale, David Edgar (playwright), Grange Hill, Ken Loach, Phil Redmond, Shaun Sutton

British Television Drama British Television Drama Past, Present and Future

2nd edition

Edited by Jonathan Bignell University of Reading, UK and Stephen Lacey University of South Wales, UK Introduction, conclusion, selection and editorial matter © Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 2014 978-1-137-32756-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in , company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–32757–4 paperback ISBN 978-1-137-32757-4 ISBN 978-1-137-32758-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137327581

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Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii

Introduction 1 Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey 1 Contexts 16 Part I Institutions and Technologies Introduction to Part I 33 2 and the ‘Golden Age’ 40 3 Television Drama Series: A Producer’s View 45 Irene Shubik 4 TV Drama: Then and Now 52 John McGrath 5 Writing Television Drama: Then and Now 58 6 : The Technology Backstory 62 7 Plot Inflation in Greater Weatherfield: in the 1990s 70 Billy Smart 8 Persuaded? The Impact of Changing Production Contexts on Three Adaptations of Persuasion 84 Sarah Cardwell Part II Formats and Genres Introduction to Part II 101 9 ‘The Age of Innocence’ 107 Alan Plater

v vi Contents

10 Playing Shops, Shopping Plays: The Effect of the Internal Market on Television Drama 112 David Edgar 11 ‘A Hero Mumsy’: Parenting, Power and Production Changes in The Sarah Jane Adventures 118 Victoria Byard 12 Downton Abbey: Reinventing the British Costume Drama 131 James Chapman 13 What Do Actors Do When They Act? 143 John Caughie Coda: Timothy West discusses ‘Acting on Stage: Acting on Screen’ 151 Part III Representations Introduction to Part III 159 14 The 1970s: Regional Variations 166 Barry Hanson 15 ‘What Truth is There in this Story?’: The Dramatisation of 172 Edward Braun 16 Moving Waterloo Road from Rochdale to : Exploring a Sense of Place in Drama Series 184 Cameron Roach 17 Too Secret for Words: Coded Dissent in Female-authored Wednesday Plays 191 Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh 18 ‘Ah! Our very own Juliet Bravo, or is it Jill Gascoine?’ Ashes to Ashes and Representations of Gender 203 Ben Lamb 19 Power Plays: Gender, Genre and Lynda La Plante 214 Julia Hallam Conclusion 224

Select Bibliography 231 Index 239 Acknowledgements

We thank all of the contributors to the first edition of this book in 2000 and this current edition. Some of the chapters that appeared in the first edition and are reprinted here were originally presented orally at the conference ‘“On the Boundary”: Turning Points in Television Drama, 1965–2000’ which we organised with Madeleine Macmurraugh- Kavanagh at the University of Reading in April 1998. Particular thanks are due to Tony Garnett, whose advice and support for the conference was invaluable. The event was part of a three-year research project funded by the British Academy and the Humanities Research Board, titled ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’. We were then able to bring that work to a wider audience in written form. We are also grateful to David Edgar for allowing us to reprint his chapter in this book. Although it was presented at the Reading conference, it first appeared as ‘ is our salvation’ in the New Statesman, 17 April 1998, pp. 40–1. For the second edition of this book, we are grateful to the new contributors Phil Redmond and Cameron Roach who publish insights from their professional experience in the television industry, and to Sarah Cardwell for the new academic research in her chapter. We acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded the research project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’ (2010–15) on which the two of us, and also Victoria Byard, James Chapman, Ben Lamb and Billy Smart, have worked together, leading to our contributions to this book.

Jonathan Bignell Stephen Lacey

vii Notes on the Contributors

Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading. He has written three editions of An Introduction to Television Studies (2004, 2008, 2013), Postmodern Media Culture (2000) and Beckett on Screen (2009), and co- edited Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives (2005) and A European Television History (2008). He led the collaborative AHRC-funded research project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, and worked with Stephen Lacey on the earlier project ‘The BBC Wednesday Play and Post-War British Drama’ which gave rise to the first edition of this book. Edward Braun is Professor Emeritus of Drama at the , and has published The Director and the Stage (1987), Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (1995) and numerous articles on television drama, especially on the work of . He also edited Griffiths’s Collected Plays for Television (1989). Victoria Byard is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art & Film at the University of Leicester. Her doctoral work is part of the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’. Focusing on British children’s fantasy television between 1955 and 1994, her research attempts to map the history of children’s telefantasy across the ‘regulated duopoly’ and beyond. Her thesis traces the development of production practices, institutional policies and textual forms as they relate to the fantastic within children’s television drama. Sarah Cardwell is Honorary Fellow in the School of Arts, University of Kent, and also holds research posts at the University of South Wales and Canterbury Christ Church University. She is the author of Adaptation Revisited (2002) and Andrew Davies (2005), as well as numerous arti- cles and papers on film and television aesthetics, literary adaptation, and British cinema and television, and is founding co-editor of The Television Series ( University Press). She is Reviews Editor for Critical Studies in Television. John Caughie is Emeritus Professor and an Honorary Research Professor of Film & Television Studies at University. He researches and publishes extensively in the field of film and television studies, and

viii Notes on the Contributors ix publications include Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (2000). He is one of the editors of Screen, the leading interna- tional journal in film and television studies. From October 2012, he is Principal Investigator on a three-year project, ‘Early Scottish Cinema, 1896–1927’, funded by an AHRC Research Grant. James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester. His books include Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (1999; 2nd edition 2007), Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the (2002), Inside the TARDIS: The Worlds of ‘’ – A Cultural History (2006; 2nd edition 2013), War and Film (2008) and British Comics: A Cultural History (2011). He is a Council member of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) and in 2010 became editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Andrew Davies is a writer with an extensive career in television, from the 1960s to the present day. His original work includes A Very Peculiar Practice (BBC 1986–88) and A Rather English Marriage (BBC 1998), but he is better known as an adaptor of literary classics, including House of Cards (BBC 1990, Netflix 2013), Pride and Prejudice (BBC 1995), Middlemarch (BBC 1994), Bleak House (BBC 2005), The Line of Beauty (BBC 2006) and Mr Selfridge (ITV 2013). David Edgar has worked as an academic at the University of , where he established and led the highly successful MA in Playwriting, and is a distinguished playwright, whose works for the stage include Destiny (1976), The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1978), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1980), Maydays (1983), Entertaining Strangers (1985) and, in 2011, Written on the Heart. Tony Garnett has been a film and for over 40 years. His credits include Up the Junction (as script editor, BBC 1965), (BBC 1966), Kes (1969), (BBC 1974), Law and Order (BBC 1978), Between the Lines (BBC 1992–94), This Life (BBC 1966–67) and The Cops (BBC 1998–2000). Garnett was a long-term col- laborator with the director . He was the first head of , and, since stepping back from programme-making in recent years, has published three novels. Julia Hallam is Reader in Film and Media at the University of . She has written widely on various aspects of film and television drama including a monograph on the writer/producer Lynda La Plante (2005) and articles exploring issues of gender and equality in the television x Notes on the Contributors industry. She is currently exploring the relationship between space, place and production practices in regionally located film and televi- sion drama texts; an edited collection Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place is forthcoming (2014). Barry Hanson began his career with BBC Birmingham, and became involved with numerous television dramas of the 1970s and 1980s in the Second City Firsts and Thirty Minute Theatre anthology series, com- missioning drama from writers including Alan Bleasdale, , Willy Russell and Ted Whitehead. Stephen Lacey is Emeritus Professor of Drama, Film and Television in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales. He has published widely on post-war British theatre and television drama, including British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context 1956–65 (1995), Tony Garnett (2006) and Cathy Come Home (2010). He is also co- editor of several books including Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York (2011). He is co-investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, and was co-researcher on ‘Screening the Nation: Landmark Television in Wales’ for the BBC Trust and Audience Council Wales (2009–10). He is a founding editor and Board member of Critical Studies in Television. Ben Lamb is a PhD researcher at the University of South Wales, whose thesis examines the developing aesthetics of British television studio drama, focusing on how video technologies impacted upon perfor- mance styles. The thesis explores the production context of studio drama and uses an examination of key police series, placed in their cul- tural and social contexts, to chart how expectations and evaluations of fictional space changed over time. The thesis is part of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’. Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (Davies) is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading, and was the Institutional Fellow researching on the Arts & Humanities Research Board project ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’ at the University of Reading. She has published articles on British television drama and on literature, and is the author of Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (1998). She also researches and publishes about women’s writing and feminism, including articles on Margaret Atwood. John McGrath (d. 2002) was the founder of the 7:84 Theatre Company in 1971, and his plays for the company include The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) and Border Warfare (1989). He worked Notes on the Contributors xi extensively in film and television, where his output included a TV version of The Cheviot (BBC 1974) and the three-part Blood Red Roses ( 1985). He also ran film company Freeway Films. A prolific writer about theatre and television, McGrath pub- lished the influential book A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre, Class and Form (1981). Alan Plater (d. 2010) had a writing career that spanned nearly 50 years, and included work in a wide range of genres and formats, including single plays, serials and series, for both the studio and on film. His work included Z Cars (BBC 1962–78), several contributions to and , The Beiderbecke Affair (BBC 1985), Fortunes of War (BBC 1987), A Very British Coup (BBC 1988) and several episodes of the police drama Lewis (ITV 2006–13). Phil Redmond, producer and screenwriter, is responsible for some of the most popular and acclaimed UK television series of the past 40 years, including: (BBC 1978–2008), Brookside (Channel 4 1982–2003) and (Channel 4 1995–). He was the founder and Managing Director of Mersey Television in the early 1980s, with whom he had a long association until it was sold in 2005. He was also Creative Director of Liverpool City of Culture in 2007. Cameron Roach became Senior Commissioning Editor for Drama at BSkyB in 2013. He worked at the BBC as a script editor and series edi- tor on Casualty (1986–) before becoming producer of the prison drama Bad Girls (ITV) in 2002 for Shed Productions. He produced two series of Footballers’ Wives for ITV, then moved to Kudos Productions to produce series two of Life on Mars in 2007. Work for BBC included the series Moses Jones (2009) and Silk (2011). He was head of drama at Shed Productions where, as executive producer, he supervised the move of the BBC school drama Waterloo Road from Rochdale to Glasgow in 2013. Irene Shubik worked with Sydney Newman on ABC’s groundbreaking drama anthology series before producing television dramas in the Wednesday Play and Play for Today series for the BBC, from where she moved to . She has written about her experiences in her book Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama, republished in 2001. Billy Smart was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC-funded ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’ project at the University of Reading (2010–13), and from 2013 he works as Research Officer on the ‘Forgotten British Television Drama, 1946–82’ AHRC-funded project at xii Notes on the Contributors

Royal Holloway. Work has included studies of the role of the director, changing visual conventions of soap opera and how the theatrical con- ventions of Brecht, Chekhov and J. B. Priestley were altered by studio practice when adapted for television. Shaun Sutton (d. 2004) was the BBC’s Head of Serials under Sydney Newman, succeeding him in 1969 as Group Head of BBC Drama. He became a drama producer in 1981 where he produced many of the BBC television Shakespeare plays after taking over The Complete Dramatic Works of from Cedric Messina, and many produc- tions in the anthology series. His later work included Merlin of the Crystal Cave (BBC 1991). Timothy West is a distinguished stage, film and television actor, who has appeared in the television series Brass (ITV 1983–90) and Bleak House (BBC 2005), as in Churchill and the Generals (BBC 1981), as Lear in (on three occasions), and in many other film, television and stage roles. He is the founder of Snipe Productions Ltd, and has worked for many years in the actors’ union Equity.