James MacTaggart

by OLIVER WAKE

As a producer, director and writer of British television drama, James MacTaggart (1928-1974) was responsible for numerous stylistic experiments and technical innovations in the medium from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s. In a 17 year television career, he was responsible for over 130 television plays or episodes, a number that would have been much greater had it not been for his premature death. This counts drama only, but he was also prolific in non-fiction programming for both radio and television.

James MacTaggart was born in Glasgow in 1928 and after completing his schooling there joined the Royal Army Service Corps in September 1946, rising to the rank of Captain by the time of his discharge in 1949. For at least some of this period he was seconded to the Forces Broadcasting Service and worked as a producer, with a year spent broadcasting from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He later joined the Territorial Army parachute regiment. After his army service, MacTaggart enrolled at Glasgow university, studying Political Economy and Social Economics, graduating in 1954 with a Masters degree. During his period as a student he also taught as a language assistant in France.1

While studying in Glasgow, MacTaggart had simultaneously turned to acting and producing with the University Dramatic Society. He also acted for the BBC at this time and this continued after his graduation, when he made acting and writing his full-time occupation. He worked extensively for the BBC in radio and, occasionally, television, acting and reading his own short stories, as well as publishing stories and articles. This continued until he joined the staff of the BBC radio service in Glasgow in 1956. This was initially a short-term contract of six months but was subsequently extended, and this would be the pattern for much of his BBC career. As a general programme producer, MacTaggart had responsibility for a great variety of programming, including drama and various of non-fiction formats. MacTaggart founded the contemporary affairs magazine programme Scope and researched, wrote and produced a well-regarded feature about Cyprus. His first appraisal was positive about his early contribution to the service, prophetically noting that he had “the ability to go far.”2

Following a brief secondment to London to work on Tonight (1957-65) at its beginning, MacTaggart was successful in making a permanent move into television from July 1957, initially as a production assistant back in Glasgow. As in radio, he worked on a wide variety of programming. He covered a local by-election, directed editions of magazine programme Compass, and contributed to televised news and sport.3 By early 1959, he had taken a further secondment in London, spending three months with all the departments there. Despite not technically being a producer or director, he was able to tackle both roles in drama productions, stepping in to produce the play Meeting at Night (1959) and directing parts of Para Handy – Master Mariner (1959-60) to cover colleagues’ absences.4 MacTaggart was then promoted to ‘general purposes’ television producer in early 1960 and was promptly attached to the documentary section of the drama department. This resulted in him directing an episode of Scotland Yard (1960) from London.5 In view of the later direction of his career, it’s interesting to note that immediately on being made a general producer, MacTaggart had applied for the role of current affairs producer, and later applied to be the BBC’s Representative in the US.6 Both were unsuccessful.

As full producer, MacTaggart’s drama productions from Scotland included Mr Gillie and A Family Occasion (both 1960), for the anthologies Twentieth Century Theatre (1960) and Saturday Playhouse (1958-61) respectively.7 It should be noted that when producing a play, MacTaggart directed also, as was the practice at the time, with only series and serials usually having separate producers and directors. It seems by this time MacTaggart was firing on all cylinders and impressing his superiors with his ability. His 1960 annual report stated: “in my opinion he’s a producer who will reach the top of the tree in television production.”8

In late 1960 MacTaggart produced Jack Gerson’s Three Ring Circus, the winning entry into a Scottish television play competition, for transmission in early 1961.9 It was about a man who, having lost his memory, and therefore his identity, finds himself in an absurd European police state where he is claimed by a number of parties in place of their own missing persons. Veering from hallucinatory fantasy to blunt satire, the play was “a parable of the individual lost in the nightmare of the modern world”, as The Times put it.10 Gerson’s script demanded a highly stylised production, which MacTaggart gave it, using a variety of non-naturalistic tricks, such as montage and extended sequences of still images, and often minimalistic sets, to realise the unusual premise. The Listener noted that “in an always interesting and often grippingly exciting way, [it] explored the darkening maze of the world and man’s ever-increasing sense of alienation.”11 Between its recording and broadcast, MacTaggart had told his superiors that he wanted the opportunity to experiment and the success of Three Ring Circus soon made this a reality.12

When BBC staff writer Troy Kennedy Martin proposed a series of non-naturalist plays, Elwyn Jones, one of the drama department bosses, “jumped at it” and on the back of the success of Three Ring Circus invited MacTaggart to relocate to London to produce it.13 “We were going to destroy naturalism,” Kennedy Martin later recalled, “if possible, before Christmas”.14 The series was Storyboard (1961), a drama anthology which aimed to “tell a story in visual terms”, something which television, with its modest resources, was still learning to do.15 These plays used non-naturalistic techniques including narration and the mixing of shots to music rather than to dialogue, all produced live under MacTaggart’s direction.16 One instalment had 21 characters and 130 scenes across its half-hour duration, and required six cameras, more than was usually used for a 90 minute piece. One montage sequence used 20 shots, five sets, various extreme close-ups and no dialogue.17 It was the opposite of the still relatively static, dialogue-led conventional form of most television drama.

MacTaggart returned to Glasgow for only a matter of days before being seconded back to London to work on a follow-up series to Storyboard called Studio 4 (1964), which carried the same remit and, for its first series, was produced between him and Alan Bridges.18 It was named after the studio it used in the BBC’s Television Centre, then one of the most modern in the world.19 MacTaggart’s production of The Second Curtain found favour in The Times, which noted that “the whole production was a small masterpiece of compression and precision”.20 This compression was a characteristic of the non-naturalistic drama MacTaggart worked on, which tried to eliminate the longueurs of much television storytelling, often with a jumping, non-linear timeline. Following the conclusion of the first series of Studio 4 in mid-1964, MacTaggart left his position with BBC Scotland to remain in London, accepting a two year contract with the drama department with a specially enhanced salary in recognition of his “immediate merit”.21

In 1963, the BBC’s new head of drama, Sydney Newman, divided the roles of producer and director on plays and henceforth MacTaggart only performed one of these roles on each of his productions, primarily that of producer. In 1963-64, he produced the anthology series Teletale, an experimental testing ground for new directors. The series was relegated to the smaller studios of the BBC’s provincial bases, but this didn’t blunt the production team’s ambition. In an internal BBC memo, series writers Roger Smith and Christopher Williams explained that:

The stories will be told with the maximum economy and condensation. The juxtaposition of scenes and the cutting between them will be crucial to the narrative. The style of narration will be fluid, using and exploring the resources of framing, camera mobility and studio space … We hope that this method will allow us to liberate the action from the accepted necessities of naturalism, while not detracting from the interest of the story.22

An example of the unconventional style of Teletale was Ken Loach’s ‘Catherine’, which used rapid shot changes, montage, narration and had no sets, signalling a change of scene with changes of lighting.23 Speaking of the impetus behind Teletale, MacTaggart bemoaned the acceptance by writers of television’s limitations:

If only it could be regarded for a while as being a director’s medium, so that stories could be allowed to drift madly off somewhere…What we need are people who are excited by the possibilities and say ‘the hell with the limitations, we’ll break the rules’. I think we’ve got far too many damn rules. My attitude to the whole thing is that the studio is as big as your imagination and somewhere to tell a story, and you must be frank about the fact that there is a studio and you are telling a story… The time has come to write in terms of the pictures … I believe passionately that a picture can say so much emotionally. If only people would conceive stories in terms of the emotions … even if it means writing down the pictures. I’m not one of those directors who resents seeing Cut to Close Up written in a script.24

He thought Teletale had ‘pushed the studio walls back’ and saw his role on the series as creating ‘the kind of atmosphere in which these people [the directors] could respond and get excited and enthusiastic. Instead of saying to them ‘No, you can’t do that’ I’ve said ‘Yes, have a bash, that sounds exciting’’.25

Between these experimental anthologies, MacTaggart directed instalments of Z Cars (1962-78) and Second World War series Moonstrike (1963), and produced the Joseph Conrad dramatisation Freya of the Seven Isles (1963).26 He had directed Alun Owen’s You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1962) and subsequently handled Corrigan Blake (1963), its comedy-adventure serial sequel.27 Overlapping with the end of Teletale, MacTaggart was appointed producer of First Night (1963-64) with effect from mid-February 1964, when its regular producer, John Elliot, took leave.28 John R. Cook reports that Newman made the appointment after being impressed by MacTaggart’s direction of Flight Into Danger for Studio 4, a script Newman himself had previously produced in Canada.29

First Night was an anthology of “popular” contemporary television plays which had been drawing criticism for its sex and “sleaziness” and was on the verge of cancellation.30 Newman championed MacTaggart as the person to reverse the series’ flagging fortunes but his appointment wasn’t greeted with universal enthusiasm. Donald Baverstock, Controller of Television, pointed out that MacTaggart’s earlier anthology series did not attract good ratings, nor “reveal all that much showmanship or the perfect sense of his audience.”31 In the end, First Night was dropped before MacTaggart could fully make his mark, with only a handful of editions being recorded under his producership.

In March 1964, Kennedy Martin published ‘Nats Go Home’, an impassioned attack on television drama’s prevailing naturalistic style. He proposed ‘a working philosophy’ for a new television drama, involving ‘a new idea of form, with new language, new punctuation and new style’.32 His manifesto’s originality is often overstated and it should be noted that others at the BBC had been experimenting on these lines, albeit with less impact, and Newman himself had championed less naturalistic drama at roughly the same time.33 This was, of course, also what MacTaggart had been doing on his three experimental anthologies.

Putting all his theories into practice, Kennedy Martin wrote, in conjunction with John McGrath, the six-part serial Diary of a Young Man (1964).34 MacTaggart produced, with Loach and Peter Duguid, both graduates of Teletale, directing. MacTaggart explained to Newman that it was ‘taut, condensed and utterly devoid of flabby realistic fill in stuff’.35 For viewers, he introduced it as ‘a new kind of writing for television, exploring the possibilities of the medium in a rather more extreme way than we’ve tried before.’36

The serial used voice-over, sequences of still images, tricks with chronology, surreal and absurd sequences and, at times, archetypes in place of characters. Newman was impressed, calling the serial ‘a major breakthrough in television story telling … this is television of the first order’.37 Diary of a Young Man was, however, generally unpopular with its viewers and its sexual content concerned some, with a vicar complaining loudly in the press about its ‘filth and depravity’.38 One critic noted that it seemed ‘to have been written and directed as an illustration of a thesis rather than as an independent work’, which isn’t far from the truth.39

The axing of First Night led, in part, to the creation of the BBC’s new flagship drama anthology, The Wednesday Play (1964-70), which had much the same remit.40 After a run of plays ‘orphaned’ from another cancelled series, Festival, Newman made MacTaggart producer for The Wednesday Play’s first proper series, in 1965, to get the series back on track. Newman later recalled that MacTaggart was reluctant to accept the position, preferring directing to producing: “He only accepted when I agreed that he could go back to directing after two years as producer.”41 Although he would only manage around one year, MacTaggart rapidly reinvigorated the series into a showcase for new and often controversial contemporary drama, employing innovative young writers and directors. Dennis Potter had his first television production on MacTaggart’s series of The Wednesday Play, as did James O’Connor, who was a particularly brave choice given that he held a murder conviction.

As an anthology, the series had room for all styles of production but it’s noticeable that non-naturalistic devices, such as narration and montage sequences, were common during MacTaggart’s year as producer. Ken Loach directed some of the most famous instalments of The Wednesday Play, though his work rapidly moved towards realism rather than the less naturalistic work he had previously done with MacTaggart. Another director employed was Don Taylor, who shared MacTaggart’s interest in non-naturalism and used a variety of established and new techniques in directing Dan, Dan, the Charity Man (1965), including mock-silent film sequences, captions, speeded-up chase scenes, slow motion and characters addressing the audience while the rest of the action is paused.42 He also directed David Mercer’s And Did Those Feet? (1965), which was satirical, cartoonish and beautifully lyrical.43

Given a remit for what Newman would later, famously, call ‘agitational contemporaneity’, MacTaggart was unafraid of producing plays about some of the taboos of the 1960s.44 Amongst many other subjects, MacTaggart’s Wednesday Plays tackled class, race relations, capital punishment, homosexuality and abortion (the latter two still illegal at that time). The controversy that invariably followed each transmission was such that the production of the plays themselves constituted a wilful intervention into public (and parliamentary) debate on the subjects.45 It is for these plays which The Wednesday Play became famous, though MacTaggart’s year in charge also included traditional comedy, mystery and suspense plays, plus biography, science fiction and a musical.

Tony Garnett, who had been a story editor on The Wednesday Play (and, later, would produce it), recalled that such provocative programming was possible only because MacTaggart was ‘a BBC Establishment-stamped, trusted person. The hierarchy could feel comfortable with these wild lads [directors and story editors] around provided Jim was there to handle them. At the same time, he was extremely innovative, open-minded and, again, allowing. He was also a very fine human being and an underestimated man’.46 In July 1965, MacTaggart’s annual review attributed the success of The Wednesday Play to him and concluded: “To my mind, in the course of the year he has done a great deal to give the whole conception of the single play in television a considerable face lift.”47

Although a number of Wednesday Plays used non-naturalistic techniques to greater or lesser degrees, the series as a whole ultimately became known for its productions which strove for realism. Although this shift can be attributed largely to those who came later, its origins lie in MacTaggart’s year in charge, with an increased use of location filming, most notably with Ken Loach’s Up the Junction (1965).48 This play made extensive use of 16mm filming and included montage sequences to create a documentary effect. Even so, Garnett reports that the play’s inception came about while MacTaggart was away on holiday.49

Under MacTaggart’s tenure, The Wednesday Play became a popular and critical success. MacTaggart concluded his producership at the end of 1965, with 34 new plays behind him. Cook reports that at this time MacTaggart was “tired of the pressures involved in finding and bringing so many new TV plays to the screen and wish[ed] to return to freelance directing.”50 He chose at this point to resign from the staff of the BBC to work on a freelance basis and was immediately contracted by the BBC as a guest director. He worked for the BBC extensively over the next few years and directed a number of dramas for The Wednesday Play, including The Boneyard (1966), the first of his successor’s plays, a legal-themed trilogy by barrister Nemone Lethbridge and Charles Wood’s colourful satire of racial integration, Drums Along the Avon (1967).51

In 1968 MacTaggart was recruited, along with David Mercer, by his Wednesday Play colleagues Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd to be a partner in Kestrel Productions, Britain’s first independent television drama production company.52 This necessitated all involved taking their leave of the BBC, though this was not problematic for MacTaggart, who for the past six years had worked for the Corporation on a series of short-term contracts and on a freelance basis.53 MacTaggart took on an executive producer role, shared with Garnett, and also directed plays, including Dennis Potter’s compelling psychological portrait Moonlight on the Highway (1969).54

As well as a producer and director, MacTaggart was also a talented writer. He often wrote adaptations of novels or short stories for his own productions and contributed scripts to BBC series such as Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67) and Detective (1964-68). Following his stint with Kestrel, he returned to the BBC as a freelance writer and director in late 1969. The following year he gained his one feature film credit, directing All the Way Up, a comedy of social advancement based on David Turner’s stage play Semi-detached. At least one previous foray into the world of films had been frustrated. In 1968, Taggart’s old BBC boss Sydney Newman was the executive producer for film company Associated British Productions. Newman later recalled that MacTaggart “came to me with a good idea about a decadent, Scottish laird and his two-timing wife, which he wanted to write and direct.”55 Newman gave him the go-ahead but, with the script nearly complete, a takeover of the company early the next year forced the cancellation of the project.

In the early-1970s MacTaggart directed a number of instalments of The Wednesday Play’s successor, Play for Today (1970-1984). Perhaps most notable of these were the eerie and unsettling Robin Redbreast (1970), and Orkney (1971), a trio of short plays set and filmed on the eponymous Scottish islands, where the hauntingly bleak scenery matched the lives depicted in the drama.56 MacTaggart’s continuing interest in Scotland was evident throughout his career. In 1968 he addressed a television seminar run by Scottish TV and in 1970 filmed sequences for an episode of Menace (1970-73) on the streets of his native Glasgow.57

Scotch on the Rocks (1973) was a BBC Scotland serial adapted by MacTaggart from the novel by Andrew Osmond and future Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.58 Set in the near future, the serial depicted Scottish nationalism, fuelled by North Sea oil wealth, lead to political unrest and insurrection. It was an incendiary subject and the Scottish National Party complained that they were portrayed as being involved in extreme left-wing agitation and political violence, which amounted to damaging propaganda against them. The BBC Programme Complaints Commission upheld the complaint, specifically criticising a scene of MacTaggart’s own invention.59

The advancement of electronic effects in the early 1970s, notably the development of the Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) superimposition effect, allowed MacTaggart to expand his range of non-naturalistic techniques. This was apparent on his Candide (1973), which he had adapted from Voltaire’s satirical novella.60 His production was entirely studio-bound, with his protagonist’s globe-trotting adventures being largely realised by superimposing his characters against a variety of cartoon backdrops, and having Frank Finlay as Voltaire wander in front of them to narrate, and through the use of models and voiceover. Although the results are impressive, it was a challenging production to stage, with the use of artificial backdrops placing limitations on the shots and camera movements that could be used. It also limited the movement of the performers to a degree MacTaggart had not anticipated until he reached the studio recording itself. Designer Eileen Diss recalled: “Jim hadn’t really thought about that before. It was a hard lesson, because they’d all been three or four weeks in rehearsal, and then found they were riveted to the spot when they were in the studio”.61

Rather than being deterred by it, MacTaggart learned from this experience and later that year made further good use of CSO for Alice Through the Looking Glass (1973), basing his artificial backdrops on the book’s original illustrations and using three cameras to achieve some of the composite shots.62 The Stage and Television Today’s critic praised MacTaggart’s ‘imagination, understanding, technical skill’ and noted that ‘esoteric settings and productions techniques were employed not for their own sake, but to create an atmosphere of dreamlike fantasy’, enabling Alice to interact with a variety of imaginary characters.63 The production was nominated for the Society of Film and Television Arts’ single play award and was entered for the Prix Italia.64

MacTaggart died suddenly in May 1974, having just returned from Tobago where he was filming Robinson Crusoe for the BBC.65 Aged 46, he was at the peak of his career, switching happily between writing, producing and directing. In a tribute broadcast by the BBC, his colleagues praised the easy affinity he had with his audience, his calm, unhurried temperament, and his technical brilliance.66 Just two months before his death he had been awarded the Society of Film and Television Arts’ Desmond Davis Award for outstanding creative contribution to television, and in February 1975 was posthumously a co-recipient of the Press Guild’s equivalent in recognition of his ‘technical adventure’.67 Shaun Sutton, then the BBC’s head of drama, wrote that MacTaggart:

was astonishingly good at everything. As a producer he had authority and taste; as a director he was a joy for he combined a marvellous technical knowledge with the ability to understand actors … As a writer he was pure professional, sure and uncomplicated … I and hundreds of others will miss his cheerfulness, his shrewd humour, his honesty. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is to think of the host of major projects he left undone … We are the poorer and drama is the poorer. We have lost one of our best friends.68

In 1976, a retrospective of MacTaggart’s work was organised by the BBC in association with Granada Television and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. As part of this, John McGrath delivered a ‘James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture’ entitled ‘TV Drama: Case Against Naturalism’.69 The following year, the Edinburgh International Television Festival began and the MacTaggart Lecture became an annual fixture, being given by leading figures in the industry, including Dennis Potter, Michael Grade, Verity Lambert and Greg Dyke. Although the lecture now has no connection with MacTaggart’s work, covering instead a broad canvas of television-related subjects, it has become the regular highlight of the festival and attracts much attention with the media industry.

MacTaggart’s experimental work in the first half of the 1960s broke new ground in the presentation of television drama. His year of The Wednesday Play made drama into headline news and the spark of public debate. His further non-naturalistic work tested the bounds of television staging. Beyond his experimental work, MacTaggart was also the producer or director of numerous more conventional but polished and popular dramas. MacTaggart’s career proved the scope of what television drama could achieve and originated some outstanding examples of the medium.

(C) Oliver Wake 2013, 2018

With thanks to the BBC’s Written Archives Centre for access to research materials.

Originally posted: 19 February 2010.
Updates:
15 January 2014: major revisions including BBC documentation; new and revised paragraphs; also minor revisions.
31 July 2018: added material on Newman memoir; added accompanying endnotes; minor amendments and deletions in main text and endnotes.
16 March 2022: amendment to paragraph beginning “In late 1960”, two new Cook-related sentences at different points, split one paragraph into two to accommodate one of those, new sentences at end of “The advancement” paragraph relating to backdrops, deleted sentence on fortunes and sentence on resignation, new start to sentence that used to start “MacTaggart rapidly”, four minor amendments (two of those typographical corrections), added strand information to Moonlight endnote, added new endnotes relating to new material.

Oliver Wake has also written a different biographical piece on James MacTaggart for Screenonline.




  1. Details from this and the following two paragraphs are drawn from a variety of papers (applications, career summaries, etc) in MacTaggart’s personal file held at the BBC Written Archive centre, file L1/1311/1. 

  2. Gordon Gildard, ‘Preliminary Report’, 14 August 1956, from BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  3. Further details of Compass are not known. He directed instalments transmitted on 2 and 30 April 1958 but he is believed to have started his association with it well before these dates. 

  4. Meeting at Night, BBC, tx. 2 April 1959; Para Handy – Master Mariner: ‘The Prize Canary’, BBC, tx. 8 January 1960. For the latter, MacTaggart directed only the studio action, with the film sequences having already been recorded. It’s possible he contributed to other episodes in this series but details aren’t known. 

  5. Scotland Yard: ‘Complaints Against the Police’, BBC, tx. 10 May 1960. 

  6. These, and many other applications, successful and unsuccessful, can be found in BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  7. Twentieth Century Theatre: ‘Mr Gillie’, BBC, tx. 12 June 1960; Saturday Playhouse: ‘A Family Occasion’, BBC, tx. 8 October 1960.  

  8. Gordon Gildard in MacTaggart’s 1960 ‘Annual Confidential Report’, 18 December 1960, BBC WAC L1/1311/1 

  9. Three Ring Circus, BBC, tx. 2 February 1961 

  10. Anonymous, ‘Imagination Unleashed’, The Times, 3 February 1961, p. 13. 

  11. Anthony Cookman, Jr, ‘The Critic on the Hearth’, The Listener, 9 February 1961, pp. 280-281. 

  12. See MacTaggart’s 1961 ‘Annual Confidential Report’, BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  13. Kennedy Martin quoted in Lez Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin (Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 61. 

  14. Troy Kennedy Martin in his 1986 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, entitled ‘‘Opening up the Fourth Front’: Micro Drama and the Rejection of Naturalism’, as reproduced in Bob Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 105-112. The quote is from p.106. 

  15. Elwyn Jones, ‘Storyboard’, Radio Times, 20 July 1961, p. 51. 

  16. Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2003), p. 54. 

  17. Ibid. Storyboard: ‘The Middle Men’, BBC, tx. 11 August 1961. 

  18. There’s a useful, though anonymous and undated, ‘Seconded Television Producer’ guide to MacTaggart’s transition between working from Glasgow and London in the early-1960s in his personal file, BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  19. Anonymous, ‘The Cross and the Arrow’, Radio Times, 20 January 1962, p. 19. 

  20. Anonymous, ‘Graham Greene Hero in Kafka World’, The Times, 30 January 1962, p. 13. Studio 4: ‘The Second Curtain’, BBC, tx. 29 January 1962. 

  21. Memo: C. S. Mortimer to S.A.O. II re ‘Short Term Contract: James MacTaggart’, 1 June 1962, BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  22. Memo quoted in John Hill, ‘A “new drama for television”?: Diary of a Young Man’, in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton (eds), Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.50. 

  23. Hill, pp. 50-51. Teletale: ‘Catherine’, BBC, tx. 24 January 1964. 

  24. MacTaggart interviewed by Marjorie Bilbow for ‘Writers are afraid of medium’s limitations’, The Stage and Television Today, 9 January 1964, p. 10. Italics as per the original. 

  25. Ibid. 

  26. The Sunday Night Play: ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’, BBC, tx. 20 January 1963. 

  27. You Can’t Win Em All, BBC, tx. 2 February 1962. Corrigan Blake, BBC, six episodes, 1 May to 5 June 1963. 

  28. Memo: Sydney Newman to numerous parties, ‘First Night’, 14 January 1964, BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  29. John R Cook, ‘‘A View from North of the Border’: Scotland’s ‘Forgotten’ Contribution to the History of the Prime-Time BBC1 Contemporary Single TV Play Slot, Visual Culture in Britain’, Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 18 No. 3 (2017), p. 5. 

  30. “Popular” was Sydney Newman, writing in 1963, quoted in MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of ‘The Wednesday Play’, 1962-66: institutional containment versus ‘agitational contemporaneity’’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1997, pp. 367-381. “Sleaziness” from Milton Shulman, ‘Behind the Scenes, Two Men Battle to Boss BBC Drama’, Evening Standard, 29 July 1964, p. 4. Fore more contemporary comments on First Night, see Hill, p. 51. 

  31. Baverstock quoted in Gaeme Burk, ‘From the Saturday Serial, to the Wednesday Play, to the October Crisis, and Beyond’, in Sydney Newman, Head of Drama: The Memoirs of Sydney Newman (Toronto: ECW Press, 2017), p. 468. 

  32. Kennedy Martin, quoted in Hill, p. 48. 

  33. Hill, p. 51. 

  34. Diary of a Young Man, BBC, six episodes, 8 August to 12 September 1964. 

  35. MacTaggart quoted in Hill, p. 58. 

  36. MacTaggart in the Radio Times, quoted in Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin, p. 96, note 40. 

  37. Memo from Newman to MacTaggart, quoted in Hill, pp. 60-61. 

  38. Hill, p. 61. 

  39. John Russell Taylor in The Listener, quoted in Hill, p. 55. 

  40. For a good account of the genesis of The Wednesday Play, see MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play

  41. Newman, Head of Drama, p. 374. 

  42. The Wednesday Play: ‘Dan, Dan the Charity Man’, BBC1, tx. 3 February 1965. 

  43. The Wednesday Play: ‘And Did Those Feet?’, BBC1, tx. 2 June 1965. 

  44. Newman in 1966, quoted in, amongst many others, MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘The BBC and the Birth of The Wednesday Play, p. 374. 

  45. For more on The Wednesday Play as an intervention in public debate, see MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘’Drama into ‘news’: strategies of intervention in The Wednesday Play‘, Screen, 38:3 Autumn 1997, pp. 247-259. 

  46. Garnett interviewed by MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, February 1997: www.world-productions.com/wp/content/reference/tony/tlectures_04.htm [accessed 3 February 2009]. 

  47. Michael Bakewell in ‘Annual Confidential Report’, 6 July 1965, BBC WAC L1/1311/1. 

  48. The Wednesday Play: ‘Up the Junction’, tx. 3 November 1965. 

  49. Garnett interviewed by MK MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, February 1997. 

  50. Cook, ‘‘A View from North of the Border’’, p. 5. 

  51. The Wednesday Play: ‘The Boneyard’, BBC1, tx. 5 January 1966; ‘The Portsmouth Defence’, BBC1, tx. 30 March 1966; ‘Little Master Mind’, BBC1, tx. 14 December 1966; ‘An Officer of the Court’, BBC1, tx. 20 December 1967; ‘Drums Along the Avon’, BBC1, tx. 24 May 1967. 

  52. For an account of Kestrel Productions’ short history, see John R Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen Second edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 62-64. 

  53. JDS Haworth, ‘Young independents jealous of their own standards’, The Stage and Television Today, 1 February 1968, p. 10. 

  54. Saturday Night Theatre: ‘Moonlight On The Highway’, ITV, tx. 12 April 1969. 

  55. Newman, Head of Drama, p. 400. 

  56. Play for Today: ‘Robin Redbreast’, BBC, tx. 10 December 1970; ‘Orkney’, BBC, tx. 13 May 1971. 

  57. Anonymous, ‘STV seminar a big success’, The Stage and Television Today, 18 January 1968, p.10. Anon, ‘Filming for thriller in new series’, The Stage and Television Today, 2 July 1970, p. 14. Menace: ‘Good Morning, Yesterday’, BBC1, tx. 6 October 1970. 

  58. Scotch on the Rocks, BBC1, five episodes, 11 May to 8 June 1973. 

  59. John Kerr, ‘TV serial ruled unfair to SNP’, The Guardian, 4 October 1973, p. 9. 

  60. Play of the Month: ‘Candide’, BBC1, tx. 16 February 1972. 

  61. Eileen Diss quoted in Leah Panos, ‘Stylised Worlds: Colour Separation Overlay in BBC Television Plays of the 1970s’, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn 2013), p. 6. 

  62. Alice Through the Looking Glass, BBC2, tx. 25 December 1973. 

  63. Patrick Campbell, ‘The monster Christmas lucky dip’, The Stage and Television Today, 3 January 1974, p.10. 

  64. Anonymous, ‘BBC names two for Florence’, The Stage and Television Today, 22 August 1975, p. 13. 

  65. Play of the Month: ‘Robinson Crusoe’, BBC1, tx. 29 December 1974. 

  66. In Vision: ‘A Tribute to James MacTaggart’, BBC2, tx. 7 June 1974. Details on content of the tribute drawn from the summary of the programme on the BBC’s Infax database [accessed 27 October 2007, at which time a trial version was available for public access online]. 

  67. Anonymous, ‘Princess presents film awards’, The Times, 7 March 1974, p.4 and Peter Fiddick, ‘Does Humphrey Burton […]’, The Guardian, 3 March 1975, p. 8.
     

  68. Shaun Sutton in Anon, ‘James MacTaggart’, The Stage and Television Today, 6 June 1974, p.13. 

  69. This lecture is reproduced in Franklin, Television Policy: The MacTaggart Lectures, pp.35-44.