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BBC television drama

The British Broadcasting Corporation has been a producer and broadcaster of television drama since even before it had an officially-established television broadcasting network in the United Kingdom. As with any major broadcast network, drama forms an important part of its schedule, with many of the BBC's top-rated programmes being from this genre. Several BBC productions have also been exported to and screened in other countries, particularly in the United States PBS network's Masterpiece Theatre strand and latterly on the BBC's own BBC America cable channel.

Contents

Experimental broadcasting and the 1930s

Already an established national radio broadcaster, the BBC began test transmissions with the new technology of television as early as 1929, working with John Logie Baird and using his primitive early apparatus. The following year, as part of one of these test transmissions, the BBC produced what is believed to be the first piece of television drama ever to have been screened, an adaptation of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s short play The Man With the Flower in His Mouth.

Broadcast live on the evening of July 14 1930, the play was produced from a small studio in the Baird Company headquarters at 133 Long Acre, London. The play was chosen because of its confined setting, small cast and short length, and was directed by Val Gielgud, who was at the time the BBC’s senior producer of radio drama, a pioneer in that field and a hugely respected broadcaster. Because of the primitive 30-line camera technology, only one figure could be shown on screen at a time and the field of vision of the cameras was extremely restricted. Nonetheless, the production was regarded as a success, and even the Prime Minister of the day, Ramsay MacDonald, watched the production with his family on the Baird Televisor Baird had previously installed at their 10 Downing Street home.

The BBC’s test broadcasts continued throughout the early part of the decade as the quality of the medium improved, until in 1936 they launched the world’s first regular high-definition television channel, the BBC Television Service, from studios in a specially-converted wing of Alexandra Palace in London. At the time of the network’s debut on November 2 that year, there were only five television producers responsible for the entire output: the producer selected to oversee drama productions was George More O’Ferrall, a former assistant director of feature films who at least had some experience with producing in a visual medium, unlike many of his colleagues who came across from the BBC’s radio services.

Initial drama productions were small in scope: productions of selected dramatised ‘scenes’ or excerpts from popular novels and adaptations of stage plays, and a programme entitled Theatre Parade would regularly take the BBC’s Outside Broadcast cameras to a London theatre and simply relay the live performance of a play there. However, as the theatres began to fear that such practice would take away their audiences, an increasing number of full-length dramatised productions began to take place in the Alexandra Palace studios. Plays of as long as ninety minutes became regular features of the schedule, with full-length adaptations of novels and stage plays, although original plays written for television were still very rare at this stage. There was also what could be deemed the first regular television drama series – entitled Telecrime, the series of half-hour plays presented various dramatised crimes, which the viewers were invited to write in their ideas of solutions for given the evidence presented to them on screen.

By 1939, the drama department had grown to such an extent that there were now fifteen producers working in it, as opposed to nine covering production in all of the other genres of the television service. The number of people with the capability to view the broadcasts – still technically restricted to the London area but in practice viewable a good distance further away – had also grown, to an estimated 25,000-40,000 sets in use by the outbreak of the Second World War in September that year. Production methods had become increasingly advanced, with Outside Broadcast cameras often being employed to, for instance, show thirty territorial army troops with two howitzers in the Alexandra Palace grounds for added effect in The White Chateau, and boats on the Palace lake for scenes depicting the battle of Zeebrugge in another war-set play. Alfred Hitchcock once stated that he had been so impressed with a 1939 BBC production of Rope he had watched that he had incorporated ideas from its depiction on screen into his later, more famous, film version.

As with every other television programme of the era, live broadcast meant that no record of the drama productions, barring photographs, scripts and press reviews, were kept, and there is no record of how they looked. BBC producer Cecil Madden later claimed that they had experimented with an early telerecording of a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but were ordered by film director Alexander Korda to destroy the print as he felt it infringed his film rights. However, there is no official record either of any 1930s telerecording experiments, or a BBC production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during the pre-war era.

BBC television broadcasting ceased on September 1 1939, and the station remained off-air for the duration of the war, with the technicians and engineers needed for war efforts such as the RADAR programme, and the government afraid that the VHF transmission signals would act as a guiding beacon for German bombers targeting central London.

The return of television and the 1950s

BBC Television resumed broadcasting in June 1946, and the service began in much the same way it had ceased in 1939. However, the following year there was a major development in drama when Val Gielgud was installed as the new Head of Drama, a position he had previously and highly successfully occupied at BBC Radio. Since producing the first television play in 1930, Gielgud had worked in television again, serving on attachment to the service at Alexandra Palace in 1939 and directing a half-hour adaptation of his own short story Ending It, starring John Robinson and Joan Marion and broadcast on August 25 1939, less than a week before the service was placed on hiatus.

Now he returned to control the genre on television, and was determined to bring his own very firm ideas about how dramatic stories should be told from radio into the new medium. Gielgud was not a particular fan of television and tolerated the medium rather than embracing it, making him unpopular with several of the producers working under him, many of whom felt that he would have been happier simply televising the recordings of radio plays than making out-and-out television productions. Gielgud eventually returned to radio, being replaced as Head of Drama by experienced producer Michael Barry in 1952.

One important move that had occurred under Gielgud was the establishment in 1950 of the Script Department, and the hiring of the television service’s first in-house staff drama writers, Nigel Kneale and Philip Mackie . Barry later expanded the Script Department, and installed the experienced film producer Donald Wilson as its head in 1955. Television was now developing beyond simply adapting stories from other media into creating its own originally-written productions. It was also becoming a high-profile medium, with national coverage and viewing figures now running into the millions, helped by the explosion of interest due to the live televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the summer of 1953.

That same year, Barry invested the majority of his original scripting budget into a six-part science-fiction serial written by Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian-born director who was establishing a reputation as the television service’s most inventive practicioner. Entitled The Quatermass Experiment, the serial (miniseries in American terminology) was a huge success and went a long way towards popularising the form, where one story is told over a short number of episodes, on British television: it is still one of the most popular drama formats in the medium to this day. Kneale and Cartier went on to be responsible for two sequel serials and many other highly successful and popular productions over the course of the decade, drawing many viewers to their programmes with their characteristic blend of horror and allegorical science-fiction.

It was they who were responsible for the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the second performance of which drew the largest television audience since the coronation, some seven million viewers, and is one of the earliest surviving dramas in the archive. The telerecording process had by now been perfected for capturing live broadcasts for repeat and overseas sales, although it was not until the early 1960s that the majority of BBC dramas were pre-recorded on the new technology of videotape. The BBC, unlike American broadcasters and their commercial British rivals, did not produce dramas entirely on film stock on any regular basis until the 1980s, preferring their traditional electronic studio methods, which gave much of the drama produced by the Corporation a somewhat unique – although some argue cheaper-looking – feel. Film would, however, be used to mount scenes unachievable in a live television environment or on location, which would be pre-shot and inserted into live productions at relevant points, later being inserted into videotaped shows at the editing stage.

The BBC suffered during the second half of the 1950s from the rise of the ITV network, which had debuted in 1955 and rapidly begun to take away audience share from the Corporation as its coverage spread nationally. Despite popular hits such as the police drama series Dixon of Dock Green and soap opera The Grove Family, the BBC was seen as being more high-brow, lacking the popular common touch of the commercial network. One of the major figures in commercial television drama of the late 1950s and early 1960s was Canadian producer Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama at ABC Television responsible for such programmes as Armchair Theatre and The Avengers. In December 1962, keen to turn around the fortunes of their own drama department, the BBC invited Newman to replace the retiring Barry as Head of Drama, and he accepted, keen on the idea of transforming what he saw as the staid, docile image of BBC drama.

The ‘golden age’ of BBC drama

Even before Newman’s arrival, some BBC producers were attempting to break the mould, with Troy Kennedy Martin’s landmark police drama series Z-Cars shaking up the image of television police dramas and becoming an enormous popular success from 1962 onwards. Newman, however, restructured the entire department: he divided the unwieldy drama group into three separate divisions: Series, for on-going continuing dramas with self-contained episodes; Serials, for stories told over multi-episode runs, or programmes which were made up of a series of serials; and Plays, for any kind of drama one-offs, an area Newman was especially keen on following the success of Armchair Theatre at ABC.

Newman followed BBC Managing Director of Television Sir Huw Wheldon ’s famous edict to “make the good popular and the popular good,” once stating: “damn the upper classes! They don’t even own televisions!” While he did personally create populist family entertainment-based dramas such as Adam Adamant Lives! and the incredibly long-running science-fiction series Doctor Who, he also attempted to create drama that was socially relevant to those who were watching, initiating The Wednesday Play anthology strand to present contemporary dramas with a social background the resonance.

The Wednesday Play proved to be a breeding ground for acclaimed and sometimes controversial writers such as Dennis Potter and directors such as Ken Loach, but sometimes Newman’s desire to create biting, cutting drama could land the Corporation in trouble. This was particularly the case with 1965’s The War Game by Peter Watkins, which depicted a fictional nuclear attack on the UK and the consequences of such, and was banned by the BBC under pressure from the government. It was not eventually screened on television until the 1980s.

Newman’s reign saw a large number of popular and critically-acclaimed dramas go out on the BBC, with Doctor Who, Z-Cars, Doctor Finlay's Casebook and the epic The Forsyte Saga picking up viewers while the likes of The Wednesday Play and Theatre 625 presented challenging ideas to the audience. Newman left the staff of the BBC once his five-year contract expired in 1967, departing for an unsuccessful attempt to break into the film industry. He was replaced by Head of Serials Shaun Sutton , initially on an acting basis combined with his existing role, but permanently from 1969.

Sutton became the BBC’s longest-serving Head of Drama, serving as such until 1981 and presiding over the BBC’s move from black and white into colour broadcasting. His era took in the whole of the 1970s, a time when the BBC enjoyed large viewing figures, positive audience reaction and generally high production values across a range of programmes, with drama enjoying a particularly well-received spell. The Wednesday Play transformed into the equally famous and long-running Play for Today in 1970; later in the decade the BBC began a run of producing every single Shakespeare play, a run which Sutton himself would later take over the producer’s role on following his departure from the Head of Drama position in the early 1980s. Popular dramas such as Doctor Who and Z-Cars continued into the new decade, and were joined by costume dramas such as The Pallisers, The Onedin Line and Poldark, carrying on from the successes of The Forsyte Saga, which had been set in the past and been a major success in the late 1960s.

There were also failures, however. The epic Churchill's People, twenty-six fifty-minute episodes based around Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, was deemed unbroadcastable by Sutton after he had viewed the initial episodes, but so much time and money had been invested in huge pre-transmission publicity that the BBC had no choice but to show the plays, to critical derision and tiny viewing figures. Never again would a fifty-minute series be given a run as long as twenty-six episodes, for fear of being too committed to a project: runs of thirteen became the norm, although in later years even this began to be considered quite long. Plays such as Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle and Roy Minton 's Scum were not broadcast at all due to fears over their content at the highest levels of the BBC, although despite this Potter continued to write landmark drama serials and one-offs for the Corporation throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1980s.

Whenever writers and media analysts criticise the current state of British and particularly BBC television drama, it is frequently the 1960s and 1970s period which they cite as being the most important and influential, with a vast variety of genres (science-fiction, crime, historical, family-based) and types of programme (series, serials, one-offs, anthologies) being produced.

Changing attitudes in the 1980s and beyond

Following Sutton’s departure from the Head of Drama role in 1981 and his return to front-line producing duties in Shakespeare plays, his place as Head of Drama was taken by Graeme MacDonald . MacDonald had been Head of Serials and later Head of Series & Serials under Sutton, with the two departments having been merged in 1980, remaining so for most of the decade before separating again at the end of it. MacDonald maintained the status quo, and was only Head of Drama for a short time before he was promoted again to run a channel as Controller of BBC Two. He was succeeded in turn by his own Head of Series & Serials, Jonathan Powell.

Powell had been a producer of high-quality all-film drama serials such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and its sequel Smiley's People (1982), and he very much favoured this form of short-run self-contained filmed serial over longer-running videotaped drama series. It was under his aegis, therefore, that the BBC produced some of its highest-quality examples of this type of drama, of particular note being 1985’s Edge of Darkness by Troy Kennedy Martin, and the following year’s Dennis Potter piece The Singing Detective, both regarded as seminal BBC drama productions.

Powell also oversaw the rise of more populist continuing drama series, however, encouraged by the ratings-chasing strategy of the then Controller of BBC One, his friend Michael Grade. It was during Powell’s tenure that the BBC launched the twice-weekly soap opera EastEnders (1985-present) and the medical drama Casualty (1986-present) both of which remain lynchpins of the BBC One schedule to this day, and the highest-rated drama productions on BBC television. Aside from these continuing dramas, based in one major location and shot entirely on videotape and thus comparatively cheap to make, longer runs of drama series became rare, with short series of six or eight episodes becoming the norm.

The single play, in its original studio-based form, also began to disappear from the schedules, with the finals series of Play for Today airing in 1984. The BBC was envious of the success of its rival Channel 4’s newly-formed film arm, which had seen made-for-television one-offs such as Stephen FrearsMy Beautiful Laundrette gain cinematic releases to considerable success. New strands such as Screen One and Screen Two concentrated on short runs of all-film, cinematic-style one-off dramas, with the most successful of these being Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply (Screen One, 1990) which became a successful film released to cinemas. The Plays department eventually disappeared altogether, being replaced latterly with a ‘Head of Film & Single Drama’ position with autonomous powers for investing in feature film production, co-commissioning television one-offs with the Head of Drama. This interest in film production is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that both of Powell’s successors as Head of Drama, Mark Shivas (1988-93) and Charles Denton (1993-96) went on to work in the film industry after leaving the position.

Another major change to BBC production methods in all areas, but particularly affecting drama, occurred in 1990 with the passing of the new Broadcasting Act , which amongst other things obliged the BBC to commission 25% of its output from independent production companies. Many BBC drama productions were subsequently out-sourced to and commissioned from independent companies, although the BBC’s in-house production arm continued to contribute heavily, with the separate Drama Series and Serials departments remaining intact. Production arms such as costumes, make-up and special effects have all been closed in the past decade, however, with these services now being bought-in from outside even for in-house programmes.

The 1990s saw a rise in the popularity of costume drama adaptations of literary classics, mostly adapted by the acclaimed screenwriter Andrew Davies. Contemporary social drama, a BBC signature style since the 1960s, remained in the form of landmark productions such as Our Friends in the North (1996), but it was notable that this was transmitted on the more niche BBC Two channel, rather than the mainstream BBC One as might well have been the case in previous decades.

The modern era

As of April 2005, the current Head of Drama at the BBC is Jane Tranter, who has occupied the position since 2000, before then having been Head of Serials for three years. Working under her are: Head of Series & Serials Laura Mackie and Controller of Continuing (i.e. year-round) Drama Series & Joint Head of Independent Drama John Yorke , with David Thompson of Film & Single Drama overseeing one-offs. Productions from independent companies are overseen jointly by Yorke and Lucy Richer , the other Joint Head of Independent Drama.

Tranter’s era has seen a return to longer run episode series, with programmes such as Spooks being given longer second runs following successful debut seasons. Recent years have also seen a huge increase in continuing drama output, with EastEnders gaining a fourth weekly episode to add to the third added during the mid-1990s, and Casualty and its spin-off series Holby City (1999-present) turning from regular seasonal shows to year-round soap opera-style productions. These moves have been criticised in some quarters for filling the market with insubstantial populist dramas at the expense of ‘quality’ prestige pieces, although there have been several notable drama serial successes, such as Paul Abbott’s State of Play (2003) and the historical drama (2004).

Another move of recent years has been the regionalisation of BBC drama, in response to criticisms that the majority of programmes were made and set in and around London and the surrounding areas, with the BBC’s central drama department currently being based at Centre House in London, near to BBC Television Centre. As far back at 1962, the makers of Z-Cars had deliberately set their programme near Liverpool in the North of England to break away from the perceived London bias, and in 1976 an English Regions Drama Department had been established at BBC Birmingham with a remit for making ‘regional drama’, gaining a major success with Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982. In the modern era, however, the seperate BBC branches in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own drama departments with Heads of Drama who have autonomous commissioning powers, both for in-house production and co-production with or commissioning from independents.

Although some of these shows are purely for regional consumption, such as BBC Scotland's River City and BBC Wales' Belonging, many programmes networked nationally on BBC One and Two are made in ‘the nations’, with perhaps the highest-profile being the current BBC Wales revival of Doctor Who. The larger English regions also produce drama productions of their own, with BBC Birmingham providing the detective drama Dalziel and Pascoe, daytime soap opera Doctors and anthology series The Afternoon Play for national consumption, for example.

See also

References

Books:

  • Jacobs, Jason (2000). The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-874233-9.
  • Caughie, John (2000). Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-874218-5.
  • Sutton, Shaun (1982). The Largest Theatre in the World: Thirty Years of Television Drama (1st ed.). London: BBC Books. ISBN 0-563-20011-1.
  • Briggs, Asa (1995). History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom - Volume Two: The Golden Age of Wireless (reprint edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-212930-9.
  • Gielgud, Val (1948). The Right Way to Radio Playwriting (1st ed.). Kingswood: Right Way Books. Pre-dates ISBN.

External links

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