Tag: Lindsay Anderson

John Osborne

OLIVER WAKE

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With his 1956 play Look Back in Anger, John Osborne (1929-1994) famously kick-started the theatrical trend for “Angry Young Men” and drama which explored the grimmer side of contemporary life, putting society’s discontents centre-stage. Amongst a body of further stage plays, Osborne also produced a clutch of screenplays for cinema and, more pertinently for us, television.

Television had played a modest part in the success of Look Back in Anger. The play was at break-even point when an extract was broadcast from the Royal Court theatre by the BBC close to the end of its run.1 Following this exposure, the rest of the run sold out and the play was transferred to the Lyric theatre to meet excess demand.2 Six weeks after the excerpt was televised, the full play was broadcast by Granada, directed by its theatre director Tony Richardson. Writing in The Manchester Guardian, Bernard Levin found that the play made “tremendous television.”3 Look Back in Anger was produced for television in Britain again twice, by the BBC in 1976, to mark the play’s twentieth anniversary, and as an ITV/Channel 4 co-production of Judi Dench’s stage version in 1989.4 Extracts were also performed in two episodes of The Present Stage, ABC’s 1966 series exploring modern drama.5

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  1. Look Back in Anger, BBC, tx. 16 October 1956. ↩

  2. The effect of the televised extract is detailed in John Russell Taylor, Anger and after: A Guide to the New British Drama, Revised edition (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 35, amongst many other sources. For further information, including how the impact of the televised extract has been exaggerated, see John Wyver’s fascinating post ‘From the ’50s: Look Back in Anger (BBC and ITV, 1956)’ on the Screenplays blog (posted 30 June 2013), available here. ↩

  3. Bernard Levin, ‘Truth Duller Than Fiction’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1956, p. 5. ↩

  4. Play of the Month: ‘Look Back in Anger’, BBC1, tx. 21 November 1976; Look Back in Anger, ITV, tx. 10 August 1989. ↩

  5. The Present Stage: ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1 & 2), ITV, tx. 17 and 24 April 1966. ↩

Beyond the reach of the cartographer: Dennis Potter the reviewing writer and writing reviewer

DAVID ROLINSON

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Dennis Potter’s non-fiction writing is a tremendous body of work – reviews, radio talks and newspaper features on television, radio, books, society, politics and more.1 I was going to just run through some of his television reviews, but Potter wouldn’t let me get off that lightly. His non-fiction work interweaves with his fiction work in characteristically multi-layered, provocative and entertaining ways. He never lets us forget that words matter. So the word “reviewing” becomes unreliable, which is annoying if you’ve put it in your title. He’s not just a writer who wrote some reviews – his writing reviews, and re-views, his own plays and much more besides. There are lots of traps to fall into, as we can tell from the start of Follow the Yellow Brick Road…

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  1. This essay is an earlier – longer – draft version of a talk I gave at the Dennis Potter Day held at Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean on 29 June 2013. The full schedule of the day’s events can be found here. Some of this essay has been rewritten for reading rather than speaking, but most of the new or unused material is restricted to these endnotes. Detailed coverage of the event will appear on the Potter Matters blog, which we will link to when the event’s coverage is uploaded. ↩