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. 

Creative Writing

My writing is going well at the moment. I'm not sure whether I mentioned on here that I'd done a one-day creative writing course at Milton Keynes Art Centre one Saturday at the beginning of November and as a result of that I have got a good deal more confident as regards sharing my work with other people. From that course I'm signed up for a further 10-week evening  creative writing course, again at Milton Keynes Art Centre, and again lead by Deborah Fielding. I'm really looking forward to this and I'm absolutely sure that it will inspire me to write new material and also help with my writing in general.

I've been watching the series 'Moving On' which is a BBC 1 early afternoon drama series which must by now be in it's fourth or fifth series. It's shown each day for a week. I remember the BBC doing what are termed 'single dramas' when I was growing up in the 1960's, series of plays such as 'The Wednesday Play' which eventually became  'Play For Today. ' This series is very much in the same mold, and the plays feature subject-matter which is far more socially-aware than a lot of current, prime-time television drama. Writers such as  Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, John Mortimer and Mike Leigh and wrote plays for these drama 'slots'. Mention of John Mortimer reminds me that he wrote ' A Voyage Round My Father' which I worked on at Greenwich Theatre in the early 1970's and started life as a Play For Today. 'Moving On' is produced and developed by Jimmy McGovern, a writer whose work I very much admire. My own writing is an attempt to produce more current material,  and has, hopefully a sort of depth to it. My current 'multi-strand' project was inspired by 'EastEnders.' I'm not actually a lover of this 'soap' and I wanted to attempt to create my own project much in the style of a soap in that it's set in a single location. I used Bedford as the location so that I could tie the various elements of the stories together (although it isn't actually set there.)  Some of the characters are based on people I observed while I lived there, not necessarily their real stories, but from making observations and visiting various places which I was familiar with was able to develop some of the characters and stories. Much as in the style of a soap, but I hope I am able to get away from the somewhat stifling restrictions which the average television soap has, such as the same old recycled story lines and the fact that the stock characters only live within such a restricted setting (i.e. a street, square or village such as Coronation Street, EastEnders and Emmerdale.) Some of the stories over-lap and characters cross between the various story elements. I had intended to have a single day as the time-frame, but having got so far with the project it seems that this will be too restricting and it now seems to cover a far longer time frame. As it has developed I am really surprised how the characters individual stories have grown and extended far beyond what I had at first envisioned and I'm more than pleased by how it has gone.