Television dramaA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWdon’t want to kick and elbow their way on to it
must be disowning something in themselves.’
While the pilkington committee report on
broadcasting (uk), 1962 found that the chief
‘crime’ of TV was triviality, much of TV drama
(from the very fi rst drama production on experi-
mental TV, the BBC’s Th e Man with a Flower in
his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello on 14 July 1930)
has been a striking exception to that judgment.
In fact, few might argue with the claim that
TV’s most substantial achievement has been
to encourage generations of quality dramatists
working specially for the medium, and a canon
of plays and drama series, from the BBC and
commercial TV companies, and, particularly
in the US, the cable company HBO (Home Box
Offi ce), to rival anything produced in the live
theatre during the same post-Second World War
period.
In the early days of TV drama, plays were
stage-bound, or more accurately, studio-bound,
both in concept and execution, taking for their
model the theatre rather than the cinema; but
the ideas of young directors making their mark
during the 1960s, excited by the possibilities of
fi lming on location, prevailed. Nell Dunn’s Up
the Junction (BBC, 1965) marked the fi rst occa-
sion when virtually the whole story was told on
fi lm. Th e camera was seen to be as important
as the pen; indeed the camera in many ways
became the pen. The social and sometimes
political themes favoured by many writers and
directors took the cameras more and more out
of the studio and into ‘real life’, and many plays
looked like, and had the impact of, documentary.
Produced by Tony Garnett, written by Jeremy
Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, Cathy
Come Home (BBC, 1966) detailed the decline
into tragedy of a homeless family in affluent
Britain. Th e sense of reality was almost unbear-
able: the camera was often hand-held, the scenes
staged so realistically that the audience was
tempted to forget it was watching something
constructed, not something happening before
their very eyes.
The intimacy, the close scrutiny of humans
under stress at which fi lm and TV can excel, has
rarely been used to more disturbing eff ect than
with John Hopkins’ quartet of plays Talking to
a Stranger (BBC, 1966), described as the fi rst
authentic masterpiece of television. Th e imme-
diacy of the medium was stunningly demon-
strated in Colin Welland’s epic Leeds United!
(BBC, 1974) about Leeds clothing workers who
struck spontaneously in 1970 for an extra ten
pence an hour: the camera became part of theprompting answers are legion: does TV and its
blizzard of images confuse rather than clarify?
Does it distract rather than aid attention? Does
it fulfi l the fears of those who (subscribing to the
notion of a so-termed three-minute culture) rob
viewers of the ability to concentrate for more
than a few moments at a time? Does its constant
plethora of images of violence desensitize audi-
ences to examples of violence in the real world?
Will the onward march of online rivals for the
attention of people to TV fragment audiences,
with implications for culture and community?
Most important of all, in an age of multimedia
provision, what future lies in store for public
service broadcasting (psb)? See: catch-
up tv; dab: digital audio broadcasting;
demotic turn; displacement effect; face-
book; mediapolis; mobilization; network-
ing: social networking; podcast; web 2.0;
youtube.
▶Anthony Smith, ed., and Richard Patterson, associ-
ate ed., Television: An International History (Oxford
University Press, 1998); Asa Briggs and Peter Burke,
A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the
Internet (Polity, 2002); John Fiske, Reading Television
(Routledge, 2004); Toby Miller, Television Studies
(Routledge, 2009); John Fiske, Television Culture (Rout-
ledge, 2011); Michael Kackman et al, Flow TV: Televi-
sion in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2011).
Television: catch-up TV Th e majority of broad-
casting services in the UK, Europe and the US
provide a catch-up TV service enabling viewers
to retrieve programmes that have been missed,
usually in the last seven days. For the most part
internet-based, catch-up facilities generally
only allow viewers to watch content created by
the specific broadcaster. BBC TV and radio
shows, for example, can be tuned into free of
charge via the BBC’s iPlayer on Windows, Mac
or Linux; content from ITV shows via the ITV
Player; from Channel 4 via 4 on Demand; from
Channel Five via Demand Five; and from Sky
programmes via the Sky Player.
Catch-up is also available on the TV set using
Digitial TV Services: BT Vision off ers BBC, ITV,
40D and Demand 5 via the TV Replay service.
Other services such as Virgin Media, Sky,
TalkTalk TV, Top Up TV and Fetch TV offer
selective access. Currently no catch-up is off ered
via Freeview.
Television drama In an interview printed in
The New Priesthood: British Television To d a y
(Allen Lane, 1970), edited by Joan Bakewell
and Nicholas Garnham, TV playwright Dennis
Potter (1935–95) said of TV, ‘It’s the biggest
platform in the world’s history and writers who