The renowned television producer Tony Garnett died on 12 January 2020. Tributes and obituaries recognised the huge contribution he made to British film and television drama over five decades. In Birmingham, the city of Garnett’s birth, plans were laid for a tribute to take place at the Midlands Arts Centre, organised by Professor Roger Shannon, […]
I was born in Toronto, 1932. Toward the end of my education at Toronto High School I learned of a college locally that ran a unique course in radio broadcasting within its arts faculty. The Ryerson Institute had been founded after the war to give young people a higher education they’d missed during 1939 – 1945. Of […]
This list of Channel 4 drama was first compiled in 2007 when I was researching a paper on the first ten years of C4’s drama for a conference at BFI Southbank to mark Channel 4’s 25th anniversary. I amended the list in 2019 when I co-curated a season of Forgotten Black Television Drama at BFI […]
As we approach the 40th anniversary of Channel 4 on 2 November 2022 – an anniversary which is being marked by a two-day conference at BFI Southbank on 23-24 September – it seems timely to look again at the early years of Channel 4 in the 1980s when a remarkably diverse array of drama […]
John Finch, who died on 13 February, the day after his 97th birthday, was one of the last survivors of the first generation of Granada Television writers who helped to establish the company as the most progressive of the original ‘Big Four’ ITV companies that launched in 1955-56. While Associated-Rediffusion, ATV and ABC Television were […]
On 18 March 2004 I interviewed Tony Garnett for a book I was researching about the screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin.[1] The interview began with Garnett talking about his debut as a television actor in Kennedy Martin’s first television play, Incident at Echo Six (1958) and his role as a young tearaway in one of Kennedy […]
The Forgotten Television Drama project owes a debt of gratitude to Alan Lovell, the film educationist, writer and practitioner, who died on 6 May 2021, aged 85. In 1969, while working in the Education Department of the British Film Institute, Lovell presented a seminar paper entitled ‘The British Cinema: the Unknown Cinema’, in which he […]
Shortly before he died in December 2020 Brian Parker had started to write his memoirs, encouraged apparently by my suggesting it during the course of several months’ correspondence, coupled with the fact that, because of the Coronavirus pandemic, he was sheltering in the Trossachs with no television! If that was the case I wish I’d […]
Brian Parker, who died on 8 December 2020, had a long and eclectic career in television, initially as an actor and then as director of a wide variety of television drama, including popular series such as the BBC’s Softly Softly (from 1966-71) and The Troubleshooters (1966-68), YorkshireTelevision’s Hadleigh (1969-71), Granada Television’s Crown Court (1973-77) and […]
Of the 298 plays shown as part of Play for Today from 1970-84 just 34 were written by women.[1] 26 women writers, in total, contributed to Play for Today, several writing two plays (Julia Jones wrote four). One of these writers was Paula Milne, whose two Plays for Today were broadcast in 1982. They came […]
Forgotten Television Drama