Wear a Very Big Hat (1965)

Posted on 15 February, 2012 by admin

by OLIVER WAKE

The Wednesday Play; Writer: Eric Coltart; Producer: James MacTaggart; Director: Ken Loach

The Wednesday Play (1964-70) is often cited in discussions of 1960s television drama, but normally with reference to only a handful of its most well-known plays. This misrepresents the series as a whole, which comprised over 160 plays. Even some of the dramas from the series’ most acclaimed practitioners, such as Ken Loach and Dennis Potter, are overlooked in favour of their bolder, more controversial plays, with preference given to those that still exist. The neglect of plays erased from the archive is understandable, but a lack of primary evidence is no reason to disregard them entirely. Their particular attributes and secondary evidence demonstrate that many of them are well worth our attention. For example, 1965’s Wear a Very Big Hat is fascinating both as an example of The Wednesday Play’s early attempts at youthful contemporaneity and as director Ken Loach’s first entry in the series.

‘You Dirty Old Man!’: Masculinity and Class in Steptoe and Son (1962-74)

Posted on 5 January, 2012 by admin

by DAVID ROLINSON

BTVD_Steptoe_The Offer 1

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son (1962-74): on 5 January 1962, the BBC broadcast ‘The Offer’, the Comedy Playhouse one-off that led to the series that started later the same year.¹ It’s a landmark series, and it’s a shame that, like Z Cars earlier this week (2 January), its fiftieth anniversary hasn’t seen an official BBC commemoration, especially since repeats continue to do decent business for BBC Two.² It’s not that the BBC entirely resist anniversary celebrations – it’s just that those usually commemorate, and play a part in branding, currently ongoing programmes – and they have shown awareness that Galton and Simpson are among the greats of British television writing, including a profile by Arena.³ However, the anniversary does provide a welcome prod to revisit the series. In that spirit, this site presents an essay celebrating some of the series’ ideas and themes, trying to do some justice to the quality and depth of the writing.

Transmission date verified at BFI database. ↩
‘The Desperate Hours’ was repeated on BBC Two on 7 January as part of a tribute to John Howard Davies. ↩
Arena: ‘Galton and Simpson’, tx. BBC2, 25 December 2005. ↩

The Singing Detective 25th Anniversary Event (2011)

Posted on 20 December, 2011 by admin

by DAVID ROLINSON

“in keeping with the modernist sensibility and self-reflexivity of Hide and Seek and Only Make Believe, the decision to root a view of the past in the experiences and imagination of a writer protagonist, emphasises the fact that, far from being an objective assessment, any perspective on history can only ever be subjective” – John R. Cook.¹

This one-day symposium, staged by Royal Holloway University of London on 10 December 2011, celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Singing Detective (1986).² It paid tribute to the serial’s “narrative complexity, generic hybridity and formal experimentation” and placed writer Dennis Potter’s contribution alongside the contributions made by his collaborators, several of whom were present: producer Kenith Trodd, choreographer Quinny Sacks and actors Patrick Malahide and Bill Paterson.³ Other guests included Peter Bowker (as a modern television writer inspired by Potter), plus academic speakers and, mixing practitioner and academic perspectives, Professor Jonathan Powell, who was Head of Drama at the BBC when The Singing Detective was made. This mixture of academic and practitioner perspectives has been a welcome and often rewarding feature of British television drama conferences in recent years: see, for instance, the conference proceedings published as part of British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future.⁴

John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 217. Second edition. Play for Today: Only Make Believe, tx. BBC1, 12 February 1973. ↩
The Singing Detective, tx. BBC1, 16 November 1986-21 December 1986. ↩
Quotation from the conference blurb, which is still available, with the day’s running order, at http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2011/SingingDetective/ ↩
Jonathan Bignell, Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Stephen Lacey (editors), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). ↩

Rumpole of the Bailey (1975)

Posted on 19 November, 2011 by admin

by JOHN WHEATCROFT

Play for Today; Writer: John Mortimer; Producer: Irene Shubik; Director: John Gorrie

“There is a golden thread running through British justice…”¹

Rumpole_image

Horace Rumpole is one of those great fictional characters who emerged fully formed, with the potential to run and run. Like Sherlock Holmes, William Brown and Bertie Wooster, he burst on the scene with virtually all his key character traits established. The barrister whom we meet in the first Rumpole of the Bailey is fundamentally the same man readers and viewers were to follow through numerous television series and radio plays, many volumes of short stores, and a handful of novels. You can even read Rumpole in posh Folio Society editions.

Within a few minutes of the original Play for Today, first broadcast on 16 December 1975, we were introduced to some trademark Rumpole quirks and foibles. He quotes at length his favourite poet, Wordsworth, from Quiller-Couch’s Book of English Verse, refers to his wife, Hilda (Joyce Heron), as “She Who Must Be Obeyed” and wistfully recalls, as he will do so often in the years to come, his triumph as a young barrister in the Penge Bungalow Murders case.

Rumpole, unlike John Mortimer who was a QC, never took silk. He never prosecutes and often takes on (and wins) apparently lost causes, when everything is against him from overwhelming evidence favouring the prosecution to quixotic judges who take a dim view of the barrister’s irreverent and down-at-heel charm.

Horace Rumpole. ↩

Scene vs. Scene #1: Assassins vs. Gangsters

Posted on 9 September, 2011 by admin

by DAVID ROLINSON

Doctor Who: ‘The Deadly Assassin’ Part 3 vs. Play for Today: ‘Gangsters’

‘Scene v. Scene’ is a series of articles aiming to shed new light on key scenes from television dramas by comparing them with scenes from other programmes or films. This isn’t just about pointing out ‘influences’ or comparing styles or tagging intertextuality (although those things might happen sometimes), and also is a more bloggy, less academic approach than usual on this site – however, the case studies will be chosen to also raise wider issues about television drama. This is true of the case studies in this first article, two-aquatic punch-ups: the Doctor’s fight with Goth in part 3 of Doctor Who’s ‘The Deadly Assassin’ (BBC1, 13 November 1976) and Kline’s showdown with Rawlinson in the Play for Today (in effect series pilot) Gangsters (BBC1, 9 January 1975). They have a lot in common, both on- and off-screen.

Before we start, we should place the scenes in context: Kline is fighting a crime boss in the river Tame in Birmingham, near the end of a hard-hitting single play about multiculturalism, drugs, illegal immigration and, well, hard-hitting. The Doctor’s fight takes place in a wilderness contained within the virtual reality of ‘The Matrix’, a dreamscape accessed by linking brains to computers (yes, it would be too easy to compare it with The Matrix (1999)!) on Gallifrey. Both scenes are shot on film: Gangsters was all-film, Assassin typically for 1970s Doctor Who mixes studio video (here depicting Gallifrey) with filmed exteriors (here restricted to the scenes set in the Matrix), though part 3 has an unusually high number of filmed scenes. We’re not here to compare the styles of mid-1970s TV dramas, though that can be a rewarding and surprising process, especially given that directors and film cameramen (directors of photography) on contracts could be asked to move between very different types of drama. There are all sorts of reasons for similarities in the approaches of these two dramas, including the fact that the writers of both pieces – Robert Holmes (Assassin) and Philip Martin (Gangsters) – often riffed on Westerns and other genres: therefore, Doctor Who assimilated The Manchurian Candidate (1962) into teatime SF-horror while Gangsters took The French Connection (1971) into Birmingham clubland. We could compare these punch-ups with equivalents in various Westerns for instance – but the amount that these two scenes have in common says a lot about Doctor Who in 1976 and some of the pressures facing BBC drama.