British Television Drama

Past, Present and Future

J. Bignell, S. Lacey, J. Bignell, S. Lacey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137327581
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Featuring leading scholars of British television drama and noted writers and producers from the television industry, this new edition of British Television Drama evaluates past and present TV fiction since the 1960s, and considers its likely future.

1

Contexts

Tony Garnett

A book like this would have been inconceivable 40 years ago. Richard Hoggart had influenced us all with Uses of Literacy (1957), and Raymond Williams, lonely among the Leavisites, was in Cambridge arguing that there was more to culture than English Literature, which itself had been an upstart academic discipline a couple of generations before. But there was no hint of the imminent explosion of media and cultural studies, accelerating and gathering momentum as it went, hungrily gobbling up related disciplines. Now media studies is as attractive to students and as derided by the cultural establishment as Sociology was in the 1960s; and we know what happened to Sociology. Coming from a generation which was not allowed to study someone’s work unless they had been dead for a decent interval, and who then told stories on a screen for decades before this academic interest began, I observe it all with astonishment.

I made a start in the 1960s when, seemingly out of nowhere, there was an explosion of new TV drama. There had been signs at the BBC, with realists like Gilchrist Calder¹ researching and sympathetically re-imagining life as people lived it. Sydney Newman, who had made an impact producing Armchair Theatre (1956–74) on ITV, was poached by the BBC and original drama flowered under him with The Wednesday Play (1964–70). But nothing comes out of nowhere. What emerged at that time was a response to a new climate. There was optimism in the air, particularly on the left: the privations of the post-war years, and the chilling conformity of the 1950s, were giving way to a new energy and openness. We were the best-fed working-class generation ever; a result, paradoxically, of wartime rationing. We were the Beveridge kids:² Butler’s Education Act³ had selected some of us, and grants had paid for us, to be the first working-class generation to attend universities in any numbers. There was full employment. The BBC was recruiting for BBC2 and ITV was booming. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told us we’d never had it so good. But of all the possibilities, why did so many of us go into TV and insist upon working in mainstream popular TV? Why did we not choose instead to win a seat in Parliament, to remain in academic life, or to work in the theatre? Because TV was the most exciting place to be. There were just two channels, which concentrated the audience. The whole nation, it seemed, was watching and talking about it the next day. Our own families did not go to the theatre and British cinema was dead in the water.

Several of us entered TV, specifically mainstream TV, because we were politically motivated. We wanted to occupy that screen to show the Britain we knew, to incite and to express our anger. We wanted to wrest history from the ruling class and write working-class history. We wanted to represent working people from their point of view, in all their dignity and intelligence and courage. We were ‘angry young men’ (at that stage, very few women, you will notice). There was an element of self-righteousness in our work as we constructed middle-class lives by dramatising working-class experience. There was guilt too, an element of declassed anguish, one’s education causing a rupture with one class and one’s politics refusing the embrace of another. So if the work is to be understood, it must be placed in a wider social and political context. Political radicalism seldom emerges from hard times and defeat, but from prosperity and security.

How did we get from then to now? What has changed and why? The four main changes in TV drama have been structural reorganisation, the move from studio to location, the centralisation of decision-making and the impact of technology. In dealing with them I will describe a shift in the locus of power which has had a profound effect on what is made as well as how it is made. But then, because the present and the possibilities for the future interest me more than the past, I will examine the political and technological realities facing us now.

I learned in Hollywood⁴ the cold reality that every movie has a power centre: often a star, sometimes a director, a producer, or an agent, but always a studio executive. The money may lend the power, but always retains ownership. The same is true in TV drama. We can distinguish historical shifts in how that power has been lent. In the early days, before my time, drama was made on a more or less ad hoc basis. Directors might fancy doing a piece and then talk to the Drama head. They then made it, drawing from BBC resources whatever was needed. Sydney Newman, like Caesar with Gaul, divided BBC Drama Group into three sections: Plays, Serials and Series. He foresaw a need for specialist departmental heads to help him handle the increased output, which an expanding income from colour licences and the start of BBC2 made possible. In those days, although the Controllers had the power of the purse, Group Heads were their equal in the BBC hierarchy. No controller had come up through Drama. Doubtless there was much discussion about individual productions and even more about strands and their scheduling, but all drama went through one man and the controllers could negotiate with no one but him. Lip service was paid to the regions, but in practice the Head of Drama Group in London ruled absolutely and visited the regions like a proconsul. In the feudal BBC of the time, the Controller was King of the Channel but the programme output heads were very powerful barons.

The separation of the roles of producer and director, and the allocation of resources to strands, or runs or ‘blocks’ of airtime (whether of individual dramas in an anthology, or series or serials) created a power shift towards the producer. Having been a producer himself, Newman placed great faith in them, and for the next 20 years or so the broadcasters, with constraints on taste and politics, actually practised as well as preached the gospel of producer power. Of course, the best producers behaved in a collegiate way, not only holding the ring between the writers and directors, but forging an open collaboration between writer, producer and everyone else. So the producer was in the driving seat. Any higher in the formal hierarchy and you were in management, removed from the creative work; any lower and you would wait at the end of a telephone, unable to initiate anything.

The work can always be divided into the ‘What’, the ‘Who’ and the ‘How’ questions. I knew that given the way TV was then organised, as a producer I would have the power to decide the most important question, what we shall make; then who the key people should be. It follows that the answers to those questions also more or less decide how it would be made. We all have an infantile tendency to think that the world revolves around us. I am told that the writer in the theatre is contractually in the ascendant, which may explain why ambitious directors prefer to tamper with the classics where they can be the centre of attention and do whatever they choose. In the cinema, art film directors are encouraged to believe that they are the authors. But in British TV drama it became blurred and everyone complained of being usurped. The move from studio to location film shifted the power from writer to director, or so the writers felt. The producers turned directors into bus drivers, giving them the driving seat, but no say on the route, the passengers, the stops or how long it is to take from Acton to Piccadilly – or so the directors felt. Then came another big shift. The more the controllers and the commissioning editors involved themselves in the creative process, the more producers became marginalised and treated as nuts and bolts operatives – or so the producers felt.

Much depends on the model you carry in your head. One such model may be that all worthwhile work is the voice of the single writer, and everyone involved in a drama is at the service of that voice, working to produce its expression on the screen. If you replace the word ‘writer’ with ‘director’ you have the model for the cinema in the theory of auteurism. It is a struggle for signature rights and possessory credits. Writers like TV drama to be ‘by’ them, just as every film school graduate adores the phrase ‘un film de’. More fundamentally, it all comes down to a struggle for, and an assertion of, power. The ‘one artist with a vision’ model is not the only option, because making dramatic fiction for the screen, unlike painting or writing novels, is a collaborative, social activity. Some of the best work emerges from hammering out a shared vision where the people involved are too immersed in the moment-to-moment creative process to care who it ‘belongs’ to. In my experience, the writers are usually primus inter pares, but are at their best when under scrutiny, in the rough-and-tumble of collaboration. Too many are at their worst when they become so grand that their word is law. The same is true of producers, directors and actors.

With the distance time affords, it is clear that the writer did yield territory when the single studio play was replaced by the single location film, and when the anthology drama almost disappeared. It is also clear that the separation of the roles of producer and director gave more power to the former at the expense of the latter. Finally, it is clear that the recent centralisation of all decision-making, taking it further and further up into the management hierarchy, has eroded the power and creative clout of the producer. I do not see anything which threatens the present balance of power. We may see the rise of the American system of series showrunner, with the lead writer also as lead producer. But the present settlement looks fixed. The interesting question is: what are the underlying forces which caused the change? Only by revealing those will we be able to think productively about the future.

In the wider economy over the last few decades we have seen a general shift from a producer-interest society towards a consumer-interest society: this shift wrong-footed the Left. The organised working class had been considered by its leaders to be ‘have-nots’ who produced goods and services for the ‘haves’. But in the post-war Keynesian boom these producers during the day became consumers during the evening and the weekend, wishing to preserve their restrictive practices and defensive bloody-mindedness at work, but increasingly demanding prompt, customer-sensitive value-for-money in their leisure. In TV, the producers (and I use the word in its widest sense to refer to all creators) have given ground to the consumer, the viewer. This might prove beneficial if it forced producers to strive more humbly to connect, to reach the audience: in Huw Wheldon’s phrase,⁵ to make the good popular and the popular good, to sweep away cultural snobbery, which insists that work must be inaccessible and obscure to be worthwhile. But what if it leads to a stifling of innovation, a coarsened and diminished aspiration, to the narrowing of what is thought possible? Just as the market, that great allocator, is not enough, neither are crude ratings. A balance has to be struck between the inner and the outer, between the rights of the individual imagination and the duty to connect with others. The tension between the two is painful but it is our responsibility as producers to live it: dramatic tension within the drama and dramatic tension between us and the audience. But the structure, the ground rules must first make that possible. The push to commodify our work, to alienate us from it, and to use us for the single purpose of making corporate profits, enriches a few but ultimately impoverishes the rest.

This is a political battle, a battle for an ecology of TV which facilitates, which insists upon, that creative tension between the producer and the consumer. As it is lost then our culture becomes just another branch of manufacturing. Alienated work mocks human capacity. TV drama is not made in isolation and neither is it the result of an artistic impulse pulled from the ether. It lives, breathes and is formed out of the prevailing political and economic settlement. It is not just a matter of what will be allowed on the screen. It is a matter of what it is possible to imagine. Who could doubt that the smashing of the trade unions and management’s assertion of the unconstrained right to manage (the Thatcher settlement) have affected the content of the work, not just working conditions? The generations since the 1980s, with very few exceptions, lack attitude and have not found their voice. They are, of necessity, opportunists, and those who are natural opportunists thrive best. Instead of bursting to express what is inside them they respond to external stimuli, approaching the broadcaster rather like frightened schoolchildren trying to see by the teacher’s face what the correct answer is. The ‘correct’ pitch is everything. Their stance is understandable: power is centralised and used prescriptively, the industry is atomised, a foothold is difficult to find, is easily lost and almost impossible to regain. It has been the urgent task of some of us, who enjoyed luckier times when we were finding our voice, to seek out kindred spirits, to link arms with them, and help them speak.

There are two issues we must brush aside. They are old riffs which keep being played. Up until the mid-1960s, location shooting played a minor role in the making of TV drama; it was used to link scenes (the taxi arrives at the door) and was devoid of dramatic content. The real work was done multi-camera on three-sided sets in the studio. A whole aesthetic had been invented to justify or glorify this way of making drama, but I thought it was dishonest rubbish. Studio drama was a bastard child of two forms, the theatre (continuous performance) and cinema (various camera positions and lenses affording different points of view and size of image). Far from constituting an exciting new form, it seemed to me to have all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of its parents. The criterial attribute of the theatre is immediate physical presence; a group of people occupy the same space to take part in an unrepeatable event. On each occasion, spectators and performers come together in time and space to create something unique. In TV drama, though, the audience is miles away and mediated by the technology. Five or six cameras were deployed around the studio, trying to catch the action, whilst the whole thing was being simultaneously edited. This resulted in a form of crippled cinema on the run. There were some wizards in the game and some amazing work was done, but the underlying aesthetic was a phoney. It was a dishonest rationalisation of a necessity. The performances were continuous because the transmissions were live: and even when recording was invented, efficient editing was impossible. Further, when they finally could do both, they were expensive of equipment and time. The fact that continuous recording of drama, in an electronic studio, was insisted on even after all these technical advances made it unnecessary, showed that the reasons were economic. The management hid behind the phoney aesthetic.

I could not wait to get out of this straitjacket. My attempt to break free has led to the accusation that I killed the traditional studio play in favour of location filming. It is true that I fought a bloody battle with BBC management. In a lifetime of conflict, it was the bloodiest battle of them all. Even the Film Group in Ealing, which had the most to gain, were opposed. My colleagues and I wanted to use the blimped 16mm cameras, cameras which were light enough to carry on the shoulder. The Ealing management were horrified by this. 16mm was for news. 35mm was for drama. Finally, with some reluctance, and possibly just to shut me up, Sydney Newman and Michael Peacock, the Controller, sanctioned a couple of films. Michael was hesitant about our plans because he was afraid that he would be exchanging high-quality studio drama for B movies. I will always be grateful for this example of good management: the capacity to allow.

We wanted to go out into the world where we could capture the physical condition of people’s lives, how people actually lived, and bring that back to the cutting room. I was contemptuous of what passed for serious TV drama at the time, which was patronising and removed from the reality of most people’s lives. Now we had a chance to take our camera to working people where they lived and make our fiction from a basis of fact. The motive was political as much as aesthetic: for me the two have always been in a tight embrace. We were ploughing our own furrow. We had no agenda for TV drama in general. It never occurred to me that others would want to leave the TV studio and follow us out into the world. I was no Pied Piper. My focus was on our films and I only had control of a few hours of screen time. But our trickle soon turned into a tidal wave. It was led by the writers more than the directors. Many old school producers would rather have stuck with their comfortable ways, sitting in the warm overseeing everything. They would rather not have visited a shoot in Scunthorpe where it was cold and lacked restaurants. Management was tearing its hair out, and told me so, threateningly. Expensively equipped studios in White City were waiting and one of their main clients, drama, increasingly would not be seen dead in them. For some years, in fact, people were forced to use them. It was not the management’s fault. Decisions on capital spending, based on the best information about demand, take time to bear fruit. When they do, the artistic needs may have moved on.

Two ideas seem permanently locked together. First, that there was a ‘Golden Age’ of TV drama, and second, the present state of it is dire, bringing sighs of despair: conditions are impossible, prospective good work is hunted down and s...