Please note the following is adapted from my dissertation on the television play and its role in the development of the British film industry, from 2006.

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    Drama has always held an important and prestigious place in television schedules, and for nearly forty years this status was exemplified by the single play. This chapter will trace the development of the single play in television, and the new relationship between television and the British film industry. Starting with its origins on ITV and the BBC in the late 1950s, the chapter will examine how the form came to such dominance, culminating in the single play’s ‘golden age’ of the latter 1960s, into the 1970s.

    This politically turbulent decade may have marked the single play’s heyday but it also contained the seeds for the form’s downfall, as the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979 led to pressure for television programmes to achieve increased commercial success and a clampdown on the political radicalism which had long been central to the single play, especially in works from the BBC. The birth of Channel 4 in the early 1980s was the result both of Thatcher’s policies, and also of the recommendations made in the Annan Report of 1979. This report was the product of the Labour government; as a result the implementation of the new channel accommodated both the political concerns that had occupied the left in the 1970s, and also the market concerns that typified Thatcher’s new economic and industrial policies.

   Channel 4 revolutionised the development of the single play, as it became central to a new, stronger bond with the British film industry, a relationship which had previously been characterised by ambivalence and even antagonism. Channel 4’s role as a financing body also helped to develop the independent sector of the film industry, leading to success and popularity in the 1990s, both at home and abroad. This success began in the 1980s, when a handful of films produced for Channel 4, such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), set a precedent for films to succeed both on television and on cinematic release. This success continued into the 1990s with films such as Naked (1993), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) – all of which were produced with financial investment from Channel 4.

    After twenty years of investing in filmmaking, Channel 4 remains at the forefront of British drama. However it is debatable whether this success has been mutually beneficial for television as well as film. To conclude, this chapter will look at the relative condition of television drama and British film in the twenty-first century; has the one-off television drama suffered as a result of the rejuvenation of the British film industry?

The Origins of the Television Play

    The single play was established as an important format in the late 1950s, with the establishment of drama strands such as the BBC’s Sunday Night Theatre and ITV’s Armchair Theatre. Initially, the BBC’s output was overshadowed by ITV, which placed a greater emphasis on the commissioning of plays from new writers. This was directly attributable to the influence of the Canadian producer Sydney Newman, who was invited to join ITV as Drama Supervisor for Armchair Theatre. The BBC’s drama output had largely consisted of stage classics and adaptations of literary works, such as the World Theatre series (1957-’59), which included productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Government Inspector (both 1958).

    However in January 1963, Sydney Newman left ITV to become Head of Drama at the BBC (Cooke, 2003: 60), with the challenge of winning back the very audience he had helped attract to ITV. The BBC was determined to prove that it could cater to a mainstream audience, like ITV, while still maintaining its public service ethos. The new plays were also the start of the BBC’s reputation for experimenting with drama, as illustrated by the six-part Diary of a Young Man (1964), which used extensive narration and montages of still images to engage the viewer. Such techniques gave the drama ‘an almost Brechtian feel’ (Cooke, 2003: 65), and seemed to be following the argument put forward by Troy Kennedy Martin in his Encore article ‘Nats Go Home’ (Cooke, 2003: 64), which attacked the dominance of naturalism in television drama since its inception.

    It was under Newman’s supervision that the single play flourished on the BBC, beginning in earnest with The Wednesday Play (1964-70). This strand included such landmark works as Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966), both of which were directed by Ken Loach, who was to become one of the most influential directors in British television drama; they also exemplified the approach and politics which came to be associated with The Wednesday Play. Such works helped establish the BBC’s reputation for producing single plays which encouraged diversity and debate, whilst also frequently courting controversy. For example, Up the Junction became a frequent reference point for the abortion debate in the mid-1960s, whereas Cathy Come Home is widely credited with raising awareness of the issue of homelessness, leading to the establishment of the homeless charity Shelter, and contributing to changes in council policies affecting homeless families.

    These plays also provide evidence of the new approach that directors would increasingly adopt with regards to the production of their plays, as Loach insisted on producing his films as much as possible away from the restrictive atmosphere of the BBC’s studios. He was meticulous in researching authentic locations for shooting, and pioneered the use of film equipment for television plays – an approach which was adopted by an increasing number of television directors throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Such techniques initially met with much resistance from supervisors at the BBC, as trade unions stipulated that a specific percentage of the films’ footage must be produced in the studio; it was also much more costly for the BBC themselves, having invested large sums of money in their studios.

    

The 1970s: The Golden Age of the Television Play

    Sydney Newman left the BBC in 1969, to be succeeded by Shaun Sutton; The Wednesday Play came to an end in 1970, to be replaced with Play for Today, which would continue in the tradition for single plays established under Newman. This period – and in particular the early 1970s – has been seen by many critics as the ‘golden age’ (Holland, 1997: 112) of the television play, with important works from key directors such as Mike Leigh (Abigail’s Party, Nuts in May), Stephen Frears (Sunset Across the Bay, written by Alan Bennett) and Alan Clarke (Scum was one of the first in a series of films to be banned by the BBC, a measure rarely resorted to since the decision not to screen Peter Watkins’ The War Game in 1965), as well as celebrated writers such as Dennis Potter and David Mercer. By the late 1970s the single play was increasingly subject to commercial pressures in a way it had not been before; however there were some critics who argued that the single play’s privileged position within television had been in decline since as early as the late 1960s (Gardner & Wyver, 1983:117).

     This is an argument that would seem to be contradicted by the sheer mass of plays being produced at this time, and also by the increasingly high production values demonstrated in them. A total of 303 Plays for Today were transmitted between 1970 and 1984, when the strand came off air, an increasing number of which were shot on film, despite the resulting increase in costs (Cooke, 2003: 92).

    Throughout the 1970s, Play for Today continued the example set by The Wednesday Play in providing a mouthpiece for politically alternative and challenging voices, reflective of the views of a disillusioned populace in a decade characterised by economic and industrial turmoil. With the country’s experiences of the miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974, there was a general return to class politics in television drama (Cooke, 2003: 90), reflecting the national atmosphere of unease. This concern, however, was not solely confined to the single play but was also increasingly present in the developing formats of the series and serial (including Ken Loach’s 1975 three-part epic Days of Hope), as writers began to enjoy the scope that these relatively new formats could offer for expressing new and challenging political viewpoints (Cooke, 2003: 98.

    The example of socially-concerned broadcasting was not confined to the BBC. The Annan Committee, set up to reappraise the state of national broadcasting in Britain, observed that there was an increasing pattern of convergence between the main broadcasters; as ITV was becoming more ‘serious’, the BBC was increasingly appealing to a more populist audience, reducing the cultural gap in audience that had previously separated them (Cooke, 2003: 90-91).

    However as the decade progressed, the single play became subject, like the rest of television output, to an increasing pressure for commercial success. The single play had generally been exempt from high commercial expectations in the past, through its status as ‘a privileged and prestigious form’, providing ‘quality’ broadcasting (Cooke, 2003: 91).

The Establishment of Channel 4

    In 1974, Harold Wilson’s new Labour government had set up a Committee on the Future of Broadcasting under Lord Annan, the function of which, according to John Caughie, was to ‘take the pulse of the nation’, and to consider the role broadcasting would be expected to fill in the last decades of the twentieth century (Caughie, 2000: 184). The Committee’s Report, submitted before the general election in 1979, put forward various proposals for the establishment of a fourth channel, the output of which should respond to the nation’s

new mood expressed…in a rhetoric of self-conscious unrest, in exploration rather than explanation, in the politics of perpetual crisis and strain… a rhetoric of anxiety and indignation simultaneously utopian and sardonic (Caughie, 2000: 185)

    The suggestions outlined in the Report would eventually be implemented under the new Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher. This combination of a Labour report and its Conservative implementation would lead to the resulting 1980 Broadcasting Act becoming ‘one of the glorious contradictions of British culture’ (Caughie, 2000: 189).

    The Act, supervised by the Home Secretary Lord Whitelaw, was surprisingly socially liberal for a Conservative government, and especially for one led by Thatcher. Despite the new fourth channel being placed with the Independent Broadcasting Authority – against the recommendations of Annan’s report – Whitelaw included stipulations that the new channel should cater specifically for audiences not represented in the output of ITV. He added that “a suitable proportion” of programmes should be educational, and that the channel should “encourage innovation and experiment” (Caughie, 2000: 190); these stipulations came to be known as ‘the remit’, amounting to ‘a licence to rewrite the orthodoxies of public broadcasting in Britain’ (Caughie, 2000: 190).

    In his initial report, Lord Annan had even looked into the possibility of formal links between the new channel and the film industry in Britain, which would be beneficial to both and would give a boost to the flagging film industry, although he conceded that this might be too ambitious a step to take at that time. He did however insist on the importance of television drama being commissioned from independent production companies (Caughie, 2000: 188).     

     For Jeremy Isaacs, Channel 4’s first Chief Executive, drama had always been a key area of concern for the new channel, as he intended to invest specifically in the production of films, with the view to selling them for cinematic distribution overseas, in addition to their broadcast on domestic television (Isaacs, 1989: 146). At the Channel’s establishment in 1982, Isaacs and Channel 4’s Head of Drama David Rose set aside an initial budget of £6million for the production of such films, proposing to fund or part-fund twenty projects. Each of these would be produced by independent production companies who would compete for commissions, and each project would receive £300,000 from Channel 4; any further funds required would have to be sourced from additional investors. This was a radically different approach to the traditional in-house productions of the BBC and ITV, and was welcomed enthusiastically by filmmakers such as Stephen Poliakoff and Richard Attenborough (Isaacs, 1989: 146-7).

From Plays to the TV Film and Beyond

    The single play had already been showing signs of decline prior to the establishment of Channel 4. Carl Gardner and John Wyver had argued in their 1980 paper, which they presented at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in the same year, that the dominance of the television play had been in decline since as early as the late 1960s, as a result of inflation and other economic factors (Gardner & Wyver, 1980: 117-8) (although they later revised this assertion (Gardner & Wyver, 1983: 128), as the economic restrictions on television in the 1980s became more apparent), and in April 1979 ITV devoted an episode of the South Bank Show to ‘The Rise and Fall of the Single Play’, reflecting the feeling that ‘the charmed life of the single play was threatened and that its heyday was over’ (Self, 1994: 5).

    By the early 1980s, the single play was reaching a crisis point – ITV had all but abandoned the form, and Play for Today was finally taken off air in 1984. The establishment of Channel 4 – and its substantial budget provisions for feature-length television drama – meant that the funds were finally available for a substantial investment in independent drama productions, an investment which would eventually be an important factor in the resurgence of the British film industry in the 1990s.

    Following its establishment in 1982, Channel 4 was quick to make its mark on television drama. Its drama strand Film on Four helped the Channel create a name for itself as the new home for politically challenging filmmaking, with projects including The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983); this was in contrast to the shift Gardner and Wyver noted taking place at the BBC around 1980, ‘away from radical drama engaged with public issues’ (Gardner & Wyver, 1983: 127). Following the demise of Play for Today in 1984, Film on Four went from strength to strength, working with production companies that would later be influential in the booming British film industry of the 1990s. One such company was Working Title, with whom Channel 4 produced Wish You Were Here (1985), and the film regarded by many to be the quintessential Film on Four production, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). Jeremy Isaacs attributed the success of Laundrette – both on television and in its cinematic release – to its ability to capture a very specific moment in British history (Isaacs, 1989: 160), addressing specific circumstances; as the film’s writer Hanif Kureishi put it, “Why make movies about standing around drinking tea while around the corner people are smashing windows?”(Walker, 2005: 73). Alexander Walker argues that, with these films, Channel 4 and Working Title had tapped into a significant audience not always catered for by the main broadcasters, ‘young people who were educated, cheeky and irreverent’ (Walker, 2005: 73).

    This audience was a key factor in the continuing success of the British film industry into the 1990s. Demand for British films was high in foreign markets, where successful films seemed to comply with two broad representations of the British. There was the stereotypical portrayal of Britishness found in the heritage films, which first became popular in the 1980s, largely through the work of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory (including Heat and Dust (1983), A Room With A View (1985), and Howards End (1992)), and other films which, although set in the modern world, offered the same kind of pleasures and identifications. This is particularly notable in Richard Curtis’s films for Working Title, starting with Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and continuing through to the Bridget Jones’s Diary films (Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in 2004).

    Another newer conception of Britishness can be found in what could be seen as portrayals of this new audience – young, educated, urban, and in translation to the screen often portrayed as disaffected, alienated, even nihilistic and self-destructive (Naked (1993), Trainspotting (1996)). In the late 1990s such films moved closer to an atmosphere of knowing cynicism, with a greater comic element, and increasingly moving into genre-based work, for example the gangster comedies of Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Snatch (2000)).

The Future For the Television Play?

    The last two decades have been incredibly fruitful for the British film industry, due largely to the financial support of Channel 4, the example of which has been followed by the BBC, who now also have their own film branch, BBC Films, who have recently been involved in British films as diverse as Bullet Boy (2004) and Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), and also international projects such as Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005).

    Yet despite the undeniable benefits for British cinematic endeavours, the benefits to television have been less clear. Channel 4 itself, initially established as a mouthpiece for minority and marginalised viewpoints, has become consumed by cost-effective populism. Original British drama is largely missing, as the schedules are awash with reality shows such as Big Brother, You Are What You Eat, How Clean Is Your House? and It’s Me Or The Dog, to name but a very few; the prestigious evening slots are now occupied by big-name American imports such as Desperate Housewives, Lost and The OC. Although there are some British series to compete on this territory (notably Shameless), British drama is conspicuously absent from Channel 4, especially in comparison to the BBC, which has recently excelled itself with big budget adaptations of Dickens and other classics (Bleak House,  2005), fresh new series (Hustle, 2004-present, currently on its third series), and even seasons devoted to British drama (such as the 2005 Shakespeare Re-Worked strand, and the recent Stephen Poliakoff season, spread over BBC1 and the new digital channel BBC4).

    The advent of digital television has done little to remedy the situation at Channel 4; the network’s digital channels include E4 (which largely consists of repeats and previews of the channel’s big American imports), numerous Film Four channels (FilmFour, FilmFour+1, FilmFour Weekly, which show mainly foreign films), and the latest addition, More4, which seems to be the destination for exactly the type of programming Channel 4 was originally intended to provide, yet still with the inclusion of even more American imports, albeit more ‘serious’ ones, such as The West Wing and The Sopranos. The majority of Channel 4’s recent drama efforts are intended for cinema release, then to be screened on the digital film channels before reaching the terrestrial audience. Notable recent exceptions such as Michael Winterbottom’s drama-documentary The Road to Guantanamo (2006) or Kenneth Glennan’s Yasmin (2004), have received terrestrial screenings, although often in late-night slots, and repeat screenings on digital channels; they have also received limited cinematic exhibition, often as part of film festivals, although The Road to Guantanamo also enjoyed a limited theatrical release in Britain, Germany and France. It is unfortunate that films seem now to be earmarked either for mainstream cinematic success, or for a limited terrestrial audience increasingly accustomed to a dumbed-down televisual culture.