Category: Oliver Wake

Stalingrad (1963)

OLIVER WAKE

This piece was substantially revised in December 2014.

Festival Writer: Rudolph Cartier; Adapted and translated from: Theodore Plievier (novel), Claus Hubalek (play from novel); Director: Rudolph Cartier

The early 1960s was a transitional period for BBC television drama. New techniques, notably a move away from live transmissions in favour of pre-recording, enabled more ambitious and polished productions. Subject matter was changing too, with specially written television plays and series overcoming the BBC’s previous reliance on material drawn from the theatre or popular novels. Of course, these changes didn’t happen overnight, and a number of programmes of the period provide a snapshot of television drama in transition, containing elements of both the old and the new, sometimes uneasily colliding in the one production. One such drama is Stalingrad, from late 1963, which has roots in both a novel and its stage adaptation, but also attempts to make the material ‘televisual’, achieving mixed results.1 Here, we’ll examine the play, to see how it came to be made in a mix of styles and how critics and audiences reacted to it.

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  1. Festival: ‘Stalingrad’, BBC2, tx. 4 December 1964. ↩

The Creature (1955)

OLIVER WAKE

Writer: Nigel Kneale; Director: Rudolph Cartier

This piece was substantially revised and updated in 2014.

The creative partnership of television dramatist Nigel Kneale and producer/director Rudolph Cartier is best known for originating the three Quatermass serials of the 1950s and 1954’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it achieved much more besides.1 One of their lesser-known productions was The Creature from early 1955.2 The primary reason for the play’s neglect is that no recording exists so, unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four and most of the episodes of the Quatermass serials, it is no longer available to view. This article aims to challenge The Creature’s obscurity, using surviving scripts, production anecdotes and contemporaneous audience research data to present an account of the play, its innovations and the reactions it elicited from viewers and critics.

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  1. Nineteen Eighty-Four, tx. 12 and 16 December 1954. The three Quatermass serials of the 1950s were: The Quatermass Experiment, six episodes, tx. 18 July to 22 August 1953; Quatermass II, six episodes, tx. 22 October to 26 November 1955; and Quatermass and the Pit, six episodes, tx. 22 December 1958 to 26 January 1959. All programmes referenced in this article were broadcast on the BBC’s sole television channel, unless indicated otherwise. ↩

  2. The Creature, tx. 30 January and 3 February 1955. ↩

The Falklands Factor (1983)

OLIVER WAKE

Play for Today Writer: Don Shaw; Director: Colin Bucksey; Producer: Louis Marks

“I hope no-one ever needs to go to war over the Falklands, or for that matter, any writer write about them.”

The short but bloody Falklands war between Britain and Argentina played out over two and a half months in 1982. Television drama responded with a handful of plays about the conflict, most of which seemed to excite almost as much controversy as the war itself. (See Disputed Territory: Drama and the Falklands.) The earliest of these was Don Shaw’s The Falklands Factor, which was broadcast in April 1983, just ten months after hostilities in the South Atlantic had concluded.

Specialising in contemporary drama, the BBC’s Play for Today anthology was the natural home for such a recent subject, however The Falklands Factor is actually a historical drama, Shaw having chosen to dramatise a little known incident from the eighteenth century to put the more recent conflict into historic context and draw parallels between the two crises. The reader must excuse the passages which follow detailing brief parts of the Falkland islands’ convoluted history, without which the meaning of the play and this essay will be impossible to convey.

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Philip Saville: Play for Today Biography

OLIVER WAKE

Philip Saville is a director whose work on Play for Today cannot be easily categorised. The variety of his eight contributions is testament to the scope of both strand and director. Saville was an iconoclastic, innovative director, whose credits include many pioneering productions and notable television firsts.

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Don Taylor

OLIVER WAKE

Dead of Night: The Exorcism

The BBC’s appointment of Sydney Newman as their head of drama in 1962 was the opening act of what some perceive as a “golden age” of British television drama. However, this is not how it appeared to everybody at the time, and the alienating effect of Newman’s “new broom” should be remembered. Perhaps the most outspoken casualty of Newman’s arrival was Don Taylor, a highly successful producer/director who found himself stifled and, he alleged, blacklisted by Newman.

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