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, London 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 England, 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 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii Introduction 1 Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey 1 Contexts 16 Tony Garnett Part I Institutions and Technologies Introduction to Part I 33 2 Sydney Newman and the ‘Golden Age’ 40 Shaun Sutton 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 Andrew Davies 6 Brookside: The Technology Backstory 62 Phil Redmond 7 Plot Inflation in Greater Weatherfield: Coronation Street 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 Northern Ireland 172 Edward Braun 16 Moving Waterloo Road from Rochdale to Greenock: 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 ‘Soap opera 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 University of Bristol, 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 Trevor Griffiths. 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 (Manchester 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 Glasgow 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 1960s (2002), Inside the TARDIS: The Worlds of ‘Doctor Who’ – 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 Birmingham, 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 television producer for over 40 years. His credits include Up the Junction (as script editor, BBC 1965), Cathy Come Home (BBC 1966), Kes (1969), Days of Hope (BBC 1974), Law and Order (BBC 1978), Between the Lines (BBC 1992–94), This Life (BBC 1966–67) and The Cops (BBC 1998–2000).