Watching TV Drama

As you may have realized if you read my posts on here regularly, I am somewhat passionate about good drama, literature and storytelling in general. I think it was born out of watching television adaptations of such writers as Charles Dickens in the 1960s. BBC television was always doing these multi-episode adaptations of his novels, which were shown at teatime on a Sunday. I remember being scared witless by the opening scenes of a teatime version of 'Great Expectations' when Pip encounters the escaped convict Magwitch on the Kent marshes. I suppose I would have been the same age as the character Pip, where I was far more scared than he was. But it just goes to show how effective a television, or, come to that, a film version of a novel can be. In those far-gone days, we had a wide range of television drama output, including the 'Wednesday Play' which later became, 'Play For Today', which had plays written by an amazing list of writers such as Alan Plater, Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh, Jeremy Sandford and Colin Welland. These were one-off productions, usually about social problems, probably the best known being 'Kathy Come Home,' about a couple who have to cope with homelessness and which had such an effect that it was responsible for the setting up of the charity 'Shelter.' Other plays which have a life away from the television screen would be 'Abigails Party' by Mike Leigh and starring his then wife, Alison Steadman.  The John Mortimer play 'A Voyage Round My Father,' which I worked on as an A.S.M. at Greenwich Theatre in the early 1970s, started life as a 'Wednesday Play', and with the same director and some of the actors in it.

We seem to have lost a lot in the mad dash to have a multichannel landscape in the digital age in which we live. You can have 24-hour television viewing, with channels specializing in virtually any subject, from DIY, antiques, cookery, natural history, sport and more subjects than you can possibly think of. But what I am attempting to get at is that the content is watered down. In the sixties and seventies we only had three television channels here in Britain, BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. Channel 4 came on the air in 1982 and it wasn't until cable came along in possibly the 1990s and then Sky in the 1980s that things began to go somewhat crazy.

It was what drew me towards a possible career in television production.